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The assessment and management of prisoners on hunger strikes in a custodial setting is complex. There is limited clinical guidance available for psychiatrists to draw upon in such cases. The purpose of this paper is to develop a management algorithm through expert elicitation to inform the psychiatric care of prisoners on a hunger strike.

A Delphi method was used to elicit views from Irish forensic psychiatrists, a legal expert and an expert in ethics using a structured questionnaire. Themes were extracted from the results of the questionnaire to propose a management algorithm. A consensus was reached on management considerations.

Five consultant forensic psychiatrists, a legal expert and an expert on psychiatric ethics (n=7) consented to participation, with a subsequent response rate of 71.4 per cent. Consensus was achieved on a proposed management algorithm. Assessment for mental disorder, capacity to refuse food and motivation for food refusal are seen as key psychiatric tasks. The need to work closely with the prison general practitioner and the value of multidisciplinary working and legal advice are described. Relevant aspects of law included mental health, criminal law (insanity) and capacity legislation.

This study outlines a management algorithm for the psychiatric assessment and management of prisoners on a hunger strike, a subject about which there is limited guidance to date. Although written from an Irish perspective, this study outlines key considerations for psychiatrists in keeping with international guidance and therefore may be generalisable to other jurisdictions.

This preliminary study aims to examine the use of a co-designed immersive virtual reality intervention programme in improving access to health care for people with intellectual disability.

A co-production approach was used to design a virtual reality intervention in collaboration with people with intellectual disability, their families and carers. A mixed-method single sample pre-test-post-test design examined using a virtual reality intervention simulating health-care environments to improve access of attending health-care appointments. Qualitative feedback was used to understand participants’ experience and opinions of using the digital technology.

The study found that the intervention did help people access health-care appointment and reduced their fear. Improvements were also found in quality-of-life post intervention. Positive feedback was provided from participants on using digital technologies indicating the novelty of the approach and potential further applications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which has used virtual reality to support people with intellectual disability access health care.

The main purpose of this study is to define healthcare quality to encompass healthcare stakeholder needs and expectations because healthcare quality has varying definitions for clients, professionals, managers, policy makers and payers.

This study represents an exploratory effort to understand healthcare quality in an Iranian context. In‐depth individual and focus group interviews were conducted with key healthcare stakeholders.

Quality healthcare is defined as “consistently delighting the patient by providing efficacious, effective and efficient healthcare services according to the latest clinical guidelines and standards, which meet the patient's needs and satisfies providers”. Healthcare quality definitions common to all stakeholders involve offering effective care that contributes to the patient well‐being and satisfaction.

This study helps us to understand quality healthcare, highlighting its complex nature, which has direct implications for healthcare providers who are encouraged to regularly monitor healthcare quality using the attributes identified in this study. Accordingly, they can initiate continuous quality improvement programmes to maintain high patient‐satisfaction levels.

This is the first time a comprehensive healthcare quality definition has been developed using various healthcare stakeholder perceptions and expectations.

Stemming from substantial criticism during the late twentieth and early twenty‐first century, the UK government and HM Prison Service developed a number of policies and protocols aimed at improving the state of prison mental healthcare. While it is difficult to fault the purpose of the government's intentions, criticism has continued relating to problems with the implementation of government led change within the prison system. Existing research leads people to question whether policies are being implemented as intended; and if not, why not? The only clear way to answer these questions is to ask those involved in the actual implementation of these recommendations within the prison service. This paper aims to answer these questions.

This paper documents findings from a national survey of senior mental healthcare staff working in prisons in England and Wales. Staff were surveyed about their views on the implementation of recommendations from recent key government documents, their perceptions of prison mental healthcare versus community mental healthcare, and their views on the relationship between HM Prison Service and the National Health Service.

While many staff report improvements in prison mental healthcare, many have struggled with the implementation of new ways of working and the findings here suggest there is still some way to go towards providing offenders in prison with effective and appropriate care. Where effective ways of implementing change were identified, these are discussed.

Listening to the experiences of the staff involved in prison healthcare has helped identify where implementation of changes could be improved and thus highlights where support might best be targeted in future.

Despite the prevalent use of professional status and service feedback in online healthcare markets, the potential interaction relationship between two types of information is still unknown. This study used the signaling theory to examine the substitute relationship between professional status and service feedback in patients' doctor choice, as well as the moderating effect of illness severity.

To test the paper's hypotheses, we constructed a panel data model using 418 doctors' data collected over a period of six months from an online healthcare market in China. Then, according to the results of the Hausman test, we estimated a fixed-effects model of patients' choice in online healthcare markets.

The empirical results showed that the effect of a doctor's professional status and service feedback on a patient's doctor choice was substitutable. Moreover, patients' illness severity played a moderating role, in that the influence of professional status on a patient with high-severity illness was higher than that on a patient with low-severity illness, whereas the influence of service feedback on a patient with low-severity illness was higher than that of a patient with high-severity illness. In addition, we found that illness severity negatively moderated the substitute relationship between professional status and service feedback on a patient's choice.

These findings not only contribute to signaling theory and research on online healthcare markets, but also help us understand the importance of professional status and service feedback on a patient's choice when seeking a doctor online.

The purpose of this study is to capture patients' and employees' perception of quality of care in the Indian private hospitals and to find the possible perceptual gaps between both the groups.

Authors have referred to the Victorian patient satisfaction monitoring (VPSM) scale and studied the responses of 327 patients and 327 employees collected from six private Indian tertiary care hospitals. SPSS v26 software was used to conduct the data reliability test, descriptive analysis and Mann–Whitney U test.

Authors have found significant differences in perceptions of quality of care between the patients and employees in the Indian hospitals. Employees have high positive perceptions towards the provided medical care whereas the patients have less favourable perceptions for many quality indicators.

This study findings help the healthcare managers, practitioners and healthcare workers of the Indian hospitals to understand the perceptions of both the employees and the patients towards healthcare quality elements and help to reduce the existing perceptual gap in the process of providing quality healthcare services.

To the best of authors knowledge, this is one of the pioneering studies conducted in Indian healthcare industry to capture and compare the perceptions of both the employees' and the patients' perceptions of various quality of care elements. This study highlighted the existing perceptual gap between the employees and the patients on various healthcare quality elements and indicated the critical areas for improvement to provide high quality healthcare services.

This paper aims to describe the state-of-the-art in ISO 9001 research in healthcare service sector and propose the future research agenda.

A comprehensive literature review of the ISO 9001 studies in healthcare service sector was carried out.

The effectiveness of ISO 9001 implementation in healthcare service sector is still not clear. Previous researches show common stages for implementing ISO 9001 in a healthcare service organization. However, there is no previous research that reveals the content of the system implemented. In addition, there is no previous research that reveals the interpretation of ISO 9001 based on the practice of ISO 9001 implementation in an organization. Based on the review, eight future research agendas were proposed.

The paper is believed to be the first to discuss the state-of-the-art of ISO 9001 researches in healthcare service sector.