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This study explores the role of procedural and distributive justice in influencing supervisory trust, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Past work in U.S. settings has shown the differential effects of procedural and distributive justice on job attitudes while other work supports the relationship between both procedural and distributive justice with trust. This study attempts to replicate the US findings and extend them to samples from India, Germany, and China (Hong Kong). A theoretical model was tested via structural equation analysis. Organizational justice was found to be an important predictor of trust in all the samples, indicating the importance of these concepts in organizational life in different cultures. The implications of these results for future research are discussed.

A fundamental assumption by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) is that evidence-based medicine (EBM) improves the effectiveness of medical diagnosis and treatment and, thus, the safety of patients. However, EBM remains controversial, especially its links to patient safety. This chapter addresses three research questions: (1) How does EBM contribute to patient safety? (2) How and why is EBM limited in improving patient safety? and (3) How can patient safety be maximized, given the limitations of EBM? Currently, EMB contributes to patient safety both by educating clinicians on the value and use of empirical evidence for medical practice and via large-scale initiatives to improve care processes. Attempts to apply EBM to individual patient care are limited, in part, because EMB relies on biostatisical and epidemiological reasoning to assess whether a screening, diagnostic, or treatment process produces desired health outcomes for a general population. Health care processes that are most amenable to EBM are those that can be standardized or routinized; non-routine processes, such as diagnosing and treating a person with both acute and chronic co-morbidities, are cases where EBM has limited applicability. To improve patient safety, health care organizations should not rely solely on EBM, but also recognize the need to foster mindfulness within the medical professions and develop patient-centric organizational systems and cultures.

The physician–patient relationship is the cornerstone of care quality. Unfortunately, it may be adversely affected by physician burnout, which is becoming more prevalent according to the literature. We present a model, based on the burnout and physician–patient communication literatures, which delineates the impact of physician burnout on the physician–patient interaction and ultimately on patient outcomes. In short, when physicians use depersonalization to cope with emotional exhaustion, their communication style becomes more biomedically oriented. Faced with this communication style when interacting with their physician, patients are less satisfied, trusting, and adherent. The implications of this model and directions for future research are presented.

Health care organizations may incur high costs due to a stressed, dissatisfied physician workforce. This study proposes and tests a model relating job stress to four intentions to withdraw from practice mediated by job satisfaction and perceptions of physical and mental health. The test used a sample of 1735 physicians and generally supported the model. Given the movement of physicians into increasingly bureaucratic structures, the clinical work environment must be effectively managed.

With the growth in multiple on‐line search systems providing access to bibliographic data bases, exclusive availability of data bases is quickly disappearing. The searcher equally familiar with more than one system providing access to the same data base needs to apply some objective criteria in choosing a particular search system. Comparing three major search systems, we emphasize system differences in file structure, data fields and search features, and discuss how these differences influence search strategy and results. Results obtained from the CACondensates, ERIC, INFORM and NTIS data bases serve as examples for discussing the differences among the three search systems. Differences in postings among the systems are most often explained in terms of expected differences due to file structures, data fields and search features. Some unexpected differences between the systems are described and are assumed to be attributable to problems encountered during the preprocessing of the tape.