In an effort to improve operational efficiency, healthcare services around the world have adopted process improvement methodologies from the manufacturing sector, such as Lean Production. In this paper we report on four multi-level case studies of the implementation of Lean in the English NHS. Our results show that this generally involves the application of specific Lean 'tools', such as 'kaize...

VCE is an ethylene, vinyl acetate, vinyl alcohol elastomer used to bind high volumes of microparticles. Surveillance data for this material is both scarce and scattered, complicating the assessment of any aging trends in systems. In addition, most of the initial surveillance efforts focused on mechanical properties such as hardness and tensile strength, and chemical information is therefore lac...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Filling a prescription is the important first step in medication adherence, but has not been studied in pediatric primary care. The objective of this study was to use claims data to determine the rate of unfilled prescriptions in pediatric primary care and examine factors associated with prescription filling. METHODS This retrospective observational study of pediatri...

This study investigated memory from interrupted visual searches. Participants conducted a change detection search task on polygons overlaid on scenes. Search was interrupted by various disruptions, including unfilled delay, passive viewing of other scenes, and additional search on new displays. Results showed that performance was unaffected by short intervals of unfilled delay or passive viewin...

in order to study the effect of different nitrogen fertilizer rates and source-sink limitation treatments on yield and yield component of contrast rice (oryza sativa l.) cultivars, a field experiment was carried out in the rice research institute of iran-deputy of mazandaran (amol) during 2006. a split split experiment in the basis of randomized complete block design with 3 replications and 3 f...

capital asset pricing model (capm) has been among the common models to estimate expected returns rate. since the linearity assumption is considered in the standard version of the capital asset pricing model, estimating beta in nonlinear setting will be inconsistent and bias-oriented. therefore, this study tries to evaluate predictive power of nonlinear capital asset pricing model as well as sta...

in this study 18 corn hybrids consist of 15 new early and mid mature foreign hybrids and three commercial iranian corn hybrids (ksc704, ksc647 and dc370) as controls were evaluated at two rcbd with three replications at the khorasan razavi agricultural research and natural resources center, during 2008 -2010. results showed that hybrid exp1 and dc370 with 16.5 and 12.1 t.ha-1 were the best and ...

the genetic diversity among 56 almond (prunus dulcis) genotypes was analysed using 35 microsatellite markers and 14 morphological traits. analysis of morphological traits revealed a wide range of variation among the studied genotypes. out of 35 simple sequence repeats (ssrs) markers, 25 were polymorphic, producing 215 alleles that varied from 2 to 16 with an average of 8.76 alleles per locus. r...

physical characteristics of agricultural products are the most needed parameters in the design of grading, handling, processing and packing systems. among physical characteristics; dimensions, mass, volume, projected area as well as surface area are the important factors in sizing systems. for an assessment of morphological and physical characters in walnut, four genotypes of sizable kernels, l...