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The purpose of this study was to examine the overall quality of care being delivered, and to determine if gender, race, age, and education level affected the quality of care being delivered in inpatient mental health programmes. To accomplish this objective, the study utilised patient survey data collected in 2006. Measures were selected from the survey that best matched the Institute of Medicine's (IOM) six dimensions of quality framework: safe, effective, timely, efficient, equitable and patient‐centred. This study may be a useful tool to guide the assessment of clinical programmes and the role of leadership in this process.

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) has been recognized as a “gold standard” set of “practical standardized measures” for assessing hospital service quality. Beginning with the HCAHPS, the purpose of this paper is to extend efforts to assess patient-centered communication (PCC) and the quality of healthcare and presents a scale for measuring patient perceptions and expectations of service quality in an emerging economy context.

A self-administered survey of patients in private hospitals (N = 171) was conducted to test the proposed framework. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to establish the measurement model. Multiple regression analysis was used to explain the scale's predictive ability. ANOVA was used to analyze service quality gaps and rank patients' priorities.

Five components of PCC are identified. Among these, nurse affective communication has a significant positive effect on patient satisfaction. The gap analysis shows that patients have high expectations for doctors' affective communication, while they perceive a low level of service performance in the realm of nurse affective communication. The study highlights a new means of measuring “reliability” in healthcare. Important findings on patients' priorities are evaluated and discussed.

Healthcare organizations and practitioners can improve patient-centered care by stressing the dimensions of PCC, including clinicians' affective and instrumental communication.

The study expands the understanding of HCAHPS instruments in an emerging economy context and opens avenues for more widespread use of the measures. The research contributes to the literature on patient-centered care and healthcare service quality by proposing a scale for managing specific practices and interactions in healthcare.

The Institute of Medicine's seminal report, To err is human: Building a safer health system, established the national patient safety framework and initiated interest in changing the traditionally punitive healthcare culture. This paper reviews a multidisciplinary literature and offers an attribution framework to explicate the organizational processes that contribute to an industry-wide culture where clinicians are routinely blamed for adverse patient events. Attribution theory is concerned with the manner in which people explain the behaviors of others or themselves by assigning causality for events. To date, attribution theory, though well established in the management literature, has yet to be translated to healthcare. In this paper, we first describe the historical evolution of attribution theory in relation to human behavior in clinical practice and healthcare management and then discuss the work environments in contemporary healthcare organizations. Next, we demonstrate the applicability of attribution theory to healthcare by providing two adverse event exemplar cases. Then, the Healthcare Attribution Error Model is offered to demonstrate how concepts from attribution theory serve as antecedents to the employee cynicism, learned helplessness, organizational inertia, and the emerging Just Culture perspective. We conclude by suggesting attribution theory offers an important theoretical framework that warrants further conceptual development and empirical research. In the quest to produce exceptional healthcare environments where safety and quality are fundamental employee concerns, healthcare managers and clinical professionals need theoretically supported knowledge and evidence-based insights.

This paper examines how “quality” was framed in the design and implementation of a policy to reform hospital funding and associated care delivery. The aims of the study were: (1) To describe how government policy-makers who designed the policy and managers and clinicians who implemented the policy framed the concept of “quality” and (2) To explore how frames of quality and the framing process may have influenced policy implementation.

The authors conducted a secondary analysis of data from a qualitative case study involving semi-structured interviews with 45 purposefully selected key informants involved in the design and implementation of the quality-based procedures policy in Ontario, Canada. The authors used framing theory to inform coding and analysis.

The authors found that policy designers perpetuated a broader frame of quality than implementers who held more narrow frames of quality. Frame divergence was further characterized by how informants framed the relationship between clinical and financial domains of quality. Several environmental and organizational factors influenced how quality was framed by implementers.

As health systems around the world increasingly implement new models of governance and financing to strengthen quality of care, there is a need to consider how “quality” is framed in the context of these policies and with what effect. This is the first framing analysis of “quality” in health policy.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a selected bibliography of recent resources on library instruction and information literacy.

The paper introduces and annotates periodical articles, monographs, and audiovisual material examining library instruction and information literacy.

Information is provided about each source, and the paper discusses the characteristics of current scholarship, and describes sources that contain unique scholarly contributions and quality reproductions.

The information may be used by librarians and interested parties as a quick reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy.

The voluntary hospital trustee has traditionally seen issues of medical care, including those of patient safety, as falling within the delegated sphere of the medical staff. This customary distancing of the trustee from direct involvement in patient safety issues is now challenged by unprecedented scrutiny of hospital safety results through voluntary disclosure or mandatory public reporting. This new climate, fostered by the Institute of Medicine's To Err is Human and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement's 100,000 Lives campaign, has complicated the role of the trustee in satisfying the traditional “prudent person” test for meeting fiduciary obligation as the trustee's breadth of involvement expands. Viewed theoretically, Mintzberg models the hospital as a case of a professional bureaucracy, in which the professional staff is responsible for standard setting and regulation. This traditional role of the professional staff is potentially assumed by others lacking technical background. Trustees are now asked to examine reports identifying physician compliance in attaining safety standards without education in the practice supporting those standards. Physician board members, whose numbers have increased in the past decade, are often sought to take the lead on interpretation of patient safety standards and results. The very public nature of patient safety reporting and its reflection on the reputation of the organization for which the trustee is ultimately accountable create a new level of tension and workload that challenges the dominant voluntary model of trusteeship in the United States health system.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the opportunities and challenges in the healthcare sector for learning and transferring from other sectors the concepts, best practices, and tools for improving quality, safety, and productivity. Design/methodology/approach – In this paper, the various approaches for improving quality, safety, and productivity are considered. How these approaches are being used in healthcare are analyzed. The obstacles to their successful implementation in healthcare are discussed. Findings – The paper finds that there are many approaches, best practices, tools, and technologies for improving quality and safety – which have proved their worth in other industries – that are relevant for the healthcare sector. There are some characteristics of the healthcare industry that distinguish it from other industries. Although the managerial processes in the healthcare industry are similar to those of other industries, the prevalent norms, culture, practices, and the regulatory framework can promote or hinder efforts to improve performance. These characteristics influence the extent to which the best practices in other industries are relevant and transferable to the healthcare sector. Originality/value – In this paper, prospects for utilizing the opportunities are assessed. The paper identifies a number of obstacles to the transfer of best practices to the healthcare sector. Insights are provided into factors that are critical to addressing those obstacles. These are of value to the practitioners in healthcare and to the academics, who want to pursue further research on this topic.

In an effort to build a useful conceptual framework that enhances understanding and permits practical application of ethics, this paper aims to understand the relationship and impact of Islamic marketing ethics on brand credibility. Nowadays, recognizing the ethical dilemmas associated with business is an important aspect of marketing strategy (Murphy et al. 2012). As known, the pharmaceutical industry has access to a deep pool of resources with the potential to maintain an esteemed reputation for offering innovative products that improve the public’s health and well-being (Kim and Ball, 2013). However, recent years have yielded several high-profile safety issues associated with particular medications along with a growing perception that pharmaceutical companies are unethical and drive up healthcare costs by prioritizing profits over consumer needs (USA Today/KFF/Harvard SPH, 2008). Therefore, the reputation of the pharmaceutical industry has been damaged with only 11 per cent of individuals considering pharmaceutical companies to be trustworthy (Harris Interactive Poll, 2010). Thus, the pharmaceutical industry in Yemen is the target of this paper and the relationship between its brands’ credibility and Islamic marketing ethics has been highlighted.

In a study of 106 respondents, exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis were conducted to understand the relationship, between brand credibility and Islamic marketing ethics. Correlation and regression analyses were performed to evaluate the hypothesized relationships between the variables.

Significant and positive relationships were confirmed between brand credibility and Islamic marketing ethics, namely, Annasihah, Al-Istiqamah, Al-E’etedal, Al-Ihsan, As-Sidq, Attaqwa and Al-Amanah. The eighth Islamic marketing ethic, Attasamoh, has been rejected.

The paper evaluates brand credibility in relation to Islamic marketing ethics in the pharmaceutical industry in Yemen. Islamic marketing ethics have been confirmed as a new variable that correlates with brand credibility and helps in boosting the level of credibility.

The sequence of stress, distress and somatization has occupied much of the late twentieth-century psychological research. The anatomy of stress can be viewed from interactional and hybrid theories that suggest that the individual relates with the surroundings by buffering the harmful effects of stressors. These acts or reactions are called coping strategies and are designed as protection from the stressors and adaptation to them. Failure to successfully adapt to stressors results in psychological distress. In some individuals, elevated levels of distress and failed coping are expressed in physical symptoms, rather than through feelings, words, or actions. Such “somatization” defends against the awareness of the psychological distress, as demonstrated in the psychosocial literature. The progression of behavior resulting from somatic distress moves from a private domain into the public arena, involving an elaborate medicalization process, is however less clear in sociological discourse. The invocation of a medical diagnosis to communicate physical discomfort by way of repeated use of health care services poses a major medical, social and economic problem. The goal of this paper is to clarify this connection by investigating the relevant literature in the area of women with breast cancer. This manuscript focuses on the relationship of psychological stress, the stress response of distress, and the preoccupation with one’s body, and proposes a new theoretical construct.

This article explores professional self‐regulation in the context of clinical governance. It begins by explaining clinical governance’s origins before setting out a framework in which the Department of Health expects managers and practitioners to work. Description, analysis and synthesis of professional self‐regulation issues, operating within a clinical governance framework, are greatly enhanced by comment drawn from the theoretical and empirical literature.