This paper reports on our experiences of being involved in requirements capture for a HealthGrid project. Large scale, collaborative projects with multiple partners tend to experience numerous problems in the requirements capture phase (and often beyond) and HealthGrid projects are no exception. Projects with highly innovative objectives often have additional sets of problematics, however. In c...

UNLABELLED The past decade has seen an increase in the application of human factors and ergonomics (HFE) techniques to healthcare delivery in a broad range of contexts (domains, locations and environments). This paper provides a state of science commentary using four examples of HFE in healthcare to review and discuss analytical and implementation challenges and to identify future issues for HF...

Background Systemic and structural issues of rapid response system (RRS) models can hinder implementation. This study sought to understand the ways in which acute care clinicians (physicians and nurses) experience and negotiate care for deteriorating patients within the RRS.   Methods Physicians and nurses working within an Australian academic health centre within a jurisdictional-based model o...

OF RESEARCH. No more than 200 words covering the following topics: aims of project; research subject group; sample size, type and location; methods of working. Aims: We aim to conduct a: • Formative evaluation of the national implementation of the National Health Service’s Care Record Service (NHS CRS) in secondary care and to use the findings to inform the continued roll-out of the NHS CRS • S...

Background. Evidence-based practices (EBPs) have been promoted to enhance the delivery of patient care, reduce cost, increase patient and family satisfaction and contribute to professional development. Individual and organisational barriers can hamper the implementation of EBP, which can be detrimental to healthcare delivery. Objective. To determine the individual and organisational implementat...

OBJECTIVES To examine the causes of adverse events (AEs) and potential prevention strategies to minimise the occurrence of AEs in hospitalised patients. METHODS For the 744 AEs identified in the patient record review study in 21 Dutch hospitals, trained reviewers were asked to select all causal factors that contributed to the AE. The results were analysed together with data on preventability ...

A number of assumptions in the past have been made about how business process improvement and re-engineering, and organisational learning should take place in organisations. Although a number of these assumptions have been framed on theoretical models, few have been based on the empirical analysis of the nature of actual business processes. This paper tries to fill this gap with an analysis of ...

The paper analyses the effect of organisational design elements on the level of achieved performance and speed of performance improvement in multiple criteria decison making setups. The analysis is based on an agent based simulation approach. Especially, we model multi criteria decision making as adaptive walk on multiple NK fitness landscapes with different levels of complexity. The results in...

Professional bodies have long overseen the maintenance of standards of training and practice within the different healthcare professions. Organisational regulation of healthcare in England comprises two main elements: regulation of the quality and safety of care offered by healthcare providers, currently undertaken by the Care Quality Commission (CQC); and regulation of the market in healthcare...

BACKGROUND Improving the quality of health care requires a range of evidence-based activities. Audit and feedback is commonly used as a quality improvement tool in the UK National Health Service [NHS]. We set out to assess whether current guidance and systematic review evidence can sufficiently inform practical decisions about how to use audit and feedback to improve quality of care. METHODS ...