BACKGROUND Communities of Practice (CoPs) are promoted in the healthcare sector as a means of generating and sharing knowledge and improving organisational performance. However CoPs vary considerably in the way they are structured and operate in the sector. If CoPs are to be cultivated to benefit healthcare organisations, there is a need to examine and understand their application to date. To t...

INTRODUCTION Private sector healthcare delivery in low- and middle-income countries is sometimes argued to be more efficient, accountable, and sustainable than public sector delivery. Conversely, the public sector is often regarded as providing more equitable and evidence-based care. We performed a systematic review of research studies investigating the performance of private and public sector ...

BACKGROUND During the past decade, the concept of Lean has spread rapidly within the healthcare sector, but there is a lack of instruments that can measure staff's perceptions of Lean adoption. Thus, the aim of the present study was to develop a questionnaire measuring Lean in healthcare, based on Liker's description of Lean, by adapting an existing instrument developed for the service sector. ...

The aim of the study is to describe the perceptions on the future of professionals in the social services and healthcare sector in Finland. The study examines on what the sector will be like, what kind of competence will be required and how this will be obtained in 2025 and onwards. The sector will encounter major changes over the next decade and therefore more research is needed to identify ho...

BACKGROUND Effective infectious disease control requires early diagnosis and treatment initiation. Point-of-care testing offers rapid turn-around-times, facilitating same day clinical management decisions. To maximize the benefits of such POC testing programs, we need to understand how rapid tests are used in everyday clinical practice. METHODS In this cross-sectional survey study, 400 primar...

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This article considers the early period of development of IVF in Ecuador, focusing on factors that shaped the decade after the nation's first successful IVF birth (1992–2002). It describes how a poorly resourced public healthcare sector compelled Ecuadorians towards private-sector medicine, which included assisted reproduction treatment, and how IVF clinics drew patients through the pervasive r...

Self-selection into healthcare options biases estimates of the effects of healthcare on health outcomes. We exploit exogenous variation in the cost of formal-sector care to show that the use of such care improves short-term health outcomes for acutely ill children in Tanzania. Better treatment-specific information, rather than greater access to medicines, appears to be the primary mechanism for...