Available online 5 October 2012

We collect data on management practices for operations, targets and human resources in 2,000 hospitals in Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Sweden, UK and the US. These management practices are strongly associated with better clinical outcomes, such as heart attack survival rates, and financial outcomes like profits. We show that hospitals with more clinically trained managers, tha...

Despite efforts targeted at physicians for improving the way in which they manage pain, discrepancies still abound in how they treat certain patients for this condition. Special populations of patients such as racial minorities, women, and substance abusers are victims of deficiencies in pain management and suffer needlessly. Healthcare providers need to be aware of disparities that may not be ...

Primary tasks for clinical directors are to disseminate information to colleagues, provide feedback to senior professional managers, and to play key roles in strategic planning and resource allocation in health services. These tasks are seen to reduce barriers between clinicians and management. The application of clinical directorates across healthcare organisations is inconsistent and ambiguou...

reducing wastes in the healthcare processes is crucial for developing a high performance health system. adopted from the toyota production system (tps), the lean concept has emerged in recent years as a way of introducing innovative ideas to improve industrial processes. in the context of health care, lean is considered as a continuous improvement model, which provides healthcare organization t...

Healthcare portals are becoming increasingly popular with Internet users since they play an important role in supporting interaction between individuals and healthcare organizations with a web presence. Additionally, many of these organizations make use of knowledge management mechanisms on their healthcare portals to manage the abundance of health related information, exchange and share inform...

a recent editorial by naoki ikegami has proposed three key lessons from japan’s experience of achieving virtually universal coverage with primary healthcare services: the need to integrate the existing providers of primary healthcare services into the organised health system; the need to limit government commitments to finance hospital services and the need to empower providers of primary healt...

Background and Objectives: There is a growing tendency in Iran’s health sector for adoption of standard excellence models for improving quality in healthcare organizations. The European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM) model is a widely used framework for continuous quality management within healthcare facilities. The purpose of this article is to extend the view of current status of qua...

Most children in hospital have pain. Seeing your child in pain or discomfort is incredibly difficult. Pain in children is a public health concern of major significance in most parts of the world. We have learned that unrelieved pain causes the body to release certain chemicals that may actually delay healing, so it's important to work with child's nurses and doctors to help children for control...