This paper studies electoral competition in a model of redistributive politics with deterministic voting and heterogeneous voter loyalties to political parties. We construct a natural measure of "party strength" based on the sizes and intensities of a party's loyal voter segments and demonstrate how party behavior varies with the two parties' strengths. In equilibrium, parties target or "poach"...

UNLABELLED BACKGROUND Increasing demands for podiatry combined with workforce shortages due to attrition, part-time working practices and rural healthcare shortages means that in some geographic areas in Australia there are insufficient professionals to meet service demand. Although podiatry assistants have been introduced to help relieve workforce shortages there has been little evaluation ...

BACKGROUND Clinical governance (CG) is an approach to quality improvement in healthcare aimed at achieving a patient-centered health care system. The main objective of this study was to highlight human centered healthcare latent factors underlying the results of a CG assessment performed in the teaching hospital "A. Gemelli" of Rome, Italy. MATERIALS AND METHODS CG implementation levels were ...

BACKGROUND Health care systems should assign quality improvement as their main mission. Clinical governance (CG) is a key strategy to improve quality of health care services. The Iranian Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MOHME) has promoted CG as a framework for safeguarding quality and safety in all hospitals since 2009. The purpose of this study was to explore perceived facilitators a...

BACKGROUND Clinical governance (CG) is among the different frameworks proposed to improve the quality of healthcare. Iran, like many other countries, has put healthcare quality improvement in its top health policy priorities. In November 2009, implementation of CG became a task for all hospitals across the country. However, it has been a challenge to clarify the notion of CG and the way to impl...

BACKGROUND The improvement of patient safety conditions in the framework of clinical service governance is one of the most important concerns worldwide. The importance of this issue and its effects on the health of patients encouraged the researcher to conduct this study to evaluate patient safety management in the framework of clinical governance according to the nurses working in the intensiv...

In this study, we assessed value-based decision making in individuals diagnosed with mental illness. Two metaanalyses were conducted of studies that used the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) to assess value-based decision making. In the first meta-analysis (63 studies, combined N = 4,978), we compared IGT performance in healthy populations and populations with mental illness. In the second meta-analysi...

W ithin the United Kingdom, 2 as well as in many other European countries, it is now accepted that neonatal intensive care should no longer be left to local initiatives, but has to be commissioned on a regional basis. Regionalisation of high risk perinatal health care by establishing and commissioning managed clinical networks aims to maintain equality of access whilst maximising the level of e...

BACKGROUND In the United Kingdom, non-medical prescribing (NMP) has been identified as one way to improve healthcare quality and efficiency. Healthcare organisations are charged with overseeing the clinical governance of NMP and guidance recommends the identification of a lead director to be responsible for its implementation. While over twelve million items are prescribed each year by the 50,0...

Significant steps have occurred in Australia towards devolving responsibilities for natural resource management (NRM) to community-based regional bodies, especially in motivating farmers to adopt priority conservation practices. A challenge remains in effectively engaging the large populations covered by these bodies. Following previous research indicating the value of nested multi-level (i.e.,...