Search results

The purpose of this paper is to identify ways for organizationally complex, community‐based health improvement initiatives to avoid “failures” with regard to client outcomes.

Organizational research on errors, failures and high reliability organizations led Weick and Sutcliffe to articulate five strategies for organizational mindfulness: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise. Using this framework, one US federally funded health initiative to reduce infant mortality and pre‐term birth and a corresponding locally implemented program are analyzed. Experience with both over a five year period is the basis for this case study.

Mindlessness actions were found to occur at both the federal and local levels, despite the possibility of enacting mindfulness strategies at federal and local levels.

To create health care initiatives and programs in ways that prevent disastrous outcomes, such as infant death and preterm births, can be achieved through application of the mindfulness strategies.

The evidence‐based approach of organizational mindfulness previously has not been applied to health programs. Yet, this analysis demonstrates its usefulness in identifying ways in which these semi‐autonomous organizations could avoid “failures” for their program clients.

To introduce the articles in this special issue, discussing emotion in the in health‐care organisations.

Discusses such topics as what makes health care different, editorial perspectives, how health care has explored emotion so far, and the impact of emotion on patients and the consequences for staff.

Health care provides a setting that juxtaposes emotion and rationality, the individual and the body corporate, the formal and the deeply personal, the public and the private, all of which must be understood better if changes in expectations and delivery are to remain coherent.

The papers indicate a shared international desire to understand meaning in emotion that is now spreading across organizational process and into all professional roles within health care.

The incipient HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chile poses challenges for responsiveness of the Chilean national health care system, Fondo Nacional de Salud (FONASA) (National Health Funds), especially given the sociocultural forces for inertia in FONASA. Thus, the issue is what is the nature of the forces for change. A grounded theory approach was applied to interview data from two qualitative studies, one with HIV/AIDS advocates and activists as interviewees and the other with Chilean low-income women. The stories of their experiences with and perceptions of FONASA revealed major issues facing FONASA, including quality of care and ethics. Ways in which these issues are being addressed by the activists result in constructed environmental dynamism. A conceptual model of the forces for change was developed including actors, strategies, and targets of change that constitutes organizational environmental dynamism. The construct of environmental dynamism has international applicability, particularly to governmental health systems, which are influenced by strong sociocultural forces.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a ferromagnetic needle adaptable for a novel ablation cancer therapy; the heat generation ability of the mild steel rod embedded into the Ti‐tube having a different thickness was investigated in a high‐frequency output at 300 kHz.

The outer diameter and length of the Ti‐tubes were 1.8 and 20 mm, respectively, while the inner diameter was varied from 1.6 to 0 mm. The mild steel rod was embedded in a Ti‐tube for preparing the needle‐type specimen. Their heat generation ability was examined by changing the inclination angle to the magnetic flux direction in a high‐frequency coil.

When the thickness of the Ti surrounding the mild steel rod was as low as 0.1 mm, the heat generation ability was drastically different among the three inclination angles (θ=0°, 45°, and 90°) to the magnetic flux direction due to the effect of the shape‐induced magnetic anisotropy. However, the effect of the inclination angle was almost eliminated in the specimen surrounded by the 0.4 mm thick Ti, suggesting that the non‐oriented heat generation property is achieved for the needle‐type mild steel rod coated with Ti having the optimum thickness.

The prototype ablation needle having a complete non‐oriented heat generation ability was fabricated to use in subsequent animal experiments. It is considered that the newly designed Ti‐coated device is useful in ablation treatments using a high‐frequency induction heating.