OBJECTIVES In this paper we focus on governance and the added value of regionalization in the context of health policy implementation. What are regional boards' patterns of action in the governance process?How do these patterns favour policy implementation? ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK: To enhance our understanding of the role of regional boards in governance processes, we relied on four conceptual con...

African Centre for DNA Barcoding, University of Johannesburg, APK Campus, PO Box 524, Auckland Park, 2006 Johannesburg, South Africa, Department of Plant Science, University of Pretoria, Private Bag X20, Hatfield 0028, South Africa, Department of Environmental Sciences, University of South Africa, Florida Campus, Florida 1710, South Africa, Technische Universit€at M€ unchen, Plant Biodiversity ...

This study examined the role of information, efficacy, and 3 stressors in predicting adjustment to organizational change. Participants were 589 government employees undergoing an 18-month process of regionalization. To examine if the predictor variables had long-term effects on adjustment, the authors assessed psychological well-being, client engagement, and job satisfaction again at a 2-year f...

Does It Work? The Case of Britain’s 1991 National Health Service Reforms,” Rudolf Klein described health reform as one of the worldwide epidemics of the 1990s. Klein’s description of the new National Health Service model as a self-inventing institution, coupled with the powerful images on Canadian television in October 1998 of the Calgary General Hospital’s implosion, make his article an apt st...

While politicians have known for years that the essence ofleadership is embodied in a keen awareness of what the followers want, that news hasn't yet percolated sufficiently deeply into the medical care field. This is an excellent book-a model of thoughtful, academic analysis and insights, with a dash of historical relevance to give it the appearance of utility. Regionali7ation is good, necessa...

Purpose Regionalization of complex surgery to high-volume hospitals has been advocated based on cross-sectional volume-outcome studies. In April 2007, the agency overseeing cancer care in Ontario, Canada, implemented a policy to regionalize lung cancer surgery at 14 designated hospitals, enforced by economic incentives and penalties. We studied the effects of implementation of this policy. Meth...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown that for the treatment of subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), outcomes are improved but costs are higher at hospitals with a high volume of admissions for SAH. Whether regionalization of care for SAH is cost-effective is unknown. METHODS AND RESULTS In a cost-utility analysis, health outcomes for patients with SAH were modeled for 2 scenarios: 1 representing ...

Otic neuronal precursors are the first cells to be specified and do so in the anterior domain of the otic placode, the proneural domain. In the present study, we have explored the early events of otic proneural regionalization in relation to the activity of the Notch signaling pathway. The proneural domain was characterized by the expression of Sox3, Fgf10 and members of the Notch pathway such ...

The events of the 2009 influenza pandemic sparked discussion regarding the need to optimize delivery of care to those most severely ill. We propose in this conceptual study that a tiered regionalization care system be instituted for patients with severe acute respiratory distress syndrome. Such system would be a component of national pandemic plans and could also be used in day-to-day operations.

Naturally, deformed rocks commonly contain crack arrays (joints) forming patterns with systematic relationships to the large-scale deformation. Kinematically, joints can be mode-1, -2 or -3 or combinations of these, but there is no overarching theory for the development of the patterns. We develop a model motivated by dislocation pattern formation in metals. The problem is formulated in one dim...