OBJECTIVES Racial differences in self-rated health at older ages are well documented. African Americans consistently report poorer health, even when education, income, and other health status indicators are controlled. The extent to which neighborhood-level characteristics mediate this association remains largely unexplored. We ask whether neighborhood social and economic resources help to expl...

The development of environmental performance policy indicators for public services, and in particular for the defence sector, is an e. Despite a number of recent initiatives there has been little work done in this area, since the other sectors usually focused on are agriculture, transport, industry, tourism and energy. This type of tool can be an important component for environmental performanc...

OBJECTIVE Health care quality improvement (QI) efforts commonly use self-assessment to measure compliance with quality standards. This study investigates the validity of self-assessment of quality indicators. DESIGN Cross sectional. SETTING A maternal and newborn care improvement collaborative intervention conducted in health facilities in Ecuador in 2005. PARTICIPANTS Four external evalu...

• BACKGROUND Little research has been done on pain assessment in critical care, especially in patients who cannot communicate verbally. • OBJECTIVES To describe (1) pain indicators used by nurses and physicians for pain assessment, (2) pain management (pharmacological and nonpharmacological interventions) undertaken by nurses to relieve pain, and (3) pain indicators used for pain reassessment b...

[Drought indicators are proliferating, but with little consideration of which are most meaningful for describing drought impacts. A number of recent reviews compare different drought indicators, but none assess which indicators are actually used in the many operational drought monitoring and early warning efforts, why they were selected, or whether they have been ‘ground-truthed’, i.e., compare...

The problem of evaluation of agricultural land suitability is consid­ ered as a fuzzy modeling task. For assessment of land suitability, it is proposed to use fuzzy indicators. Application of individual fuzzy indicators gives oppor­ tunity for assessment of suitability of lands as degree or grade of performance when the lands are used for agricultural purposes. Using composite fuzzy indi­ cator...