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The purpose of this paper is to investigate healthcare customer complaints concerning interpersonal matters in cancer care.

Complaints from cancer patients and their relatives (n=116) that dealt with interpersonal matters registered between 2009 and 2011 at four local Patients’ Advisory Committees in Western Sweden were sampled and analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

Complaints concerned lack of information and consideration from healthcare providers. Lack of empathy and civility also caused dissatisfaction, the latter particularly for women. Relatives complained that they did not feel included in the care process or were not offered proper support. Most complaints by relatives were filed by a female relative and concerned a male patient.

Information about patient demographics other than gender could not be investigated due to database limitations. Hence, factors such as age, country of birth, and geographical residence were not included for analysis. In addition, neither the type nor stage of cancer among the sampled patients was able to be addressed.

Patient complaints should not only be viewed as a post-consumption judgment, but also as a service interaction activity. This may require healthcare providers to enhance their interpersonal skills, allowing patients and relatives to provide feedback during service interaction to satisfactorily address dissatisfaction. Visualizing gender disparities may help healthcare providers prevent stereotypical encounters. In addition, the provider should be invited to participate in the customer’s value creating network, which may also include knowledge and skills from other sources, such as relatives.

Value co-creation offers a different view on patient complaints. Incorporating social construction into value co-creation may reveal socially constructed disparities. The paper provides aggregated information on cancer patients’ and relatives’ complaints concerning interpersonal issues, which can increase knowledge about patient healthcare service perceptions.

This paper aims to identify human rights violations of patients during the early periods of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana by investigating the experiences of people on how health-care professionals discharged their responsibilities during the time in question.

Explanatory design of the mixed methods approach was adopted, with the intention of collecting both quantitative and qualitative data sequentially, and then integrating the results at the interpretation stage. The approach enriched the quality of data collected as it offered the advantage of shedding light on the primary motivations and reasons for attitudes and behaviours and helped to provide an in-depth understanding of how individuals interpret the happenings around them and their experiences. Thus, although some amount of quantitative method was used in the data collection, the core of this paper is based on the qualitative interpretations.

The study reveals that health-care professionals, especially those in the Tema Metropolis, undermined certain fundamental human rights of patients during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes failure to provide information to patients about treatment options and potential risks of medications; failure to seek the informed consent of patients before performing medical procedures; denial of access to medical files of patients for transfer; and inability or failure to provide medical ambulances services to patients on time.

Although many publications on human rights dimensions and health protective issues on COVID-19 pandemic are available on a global scale, still little information pertaining to experiences of individuals with health-care professionals during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in Ghana through the lens of patient’s rights exists. This paper, therefore, fills an important gap in health-care management information, critical for policy decision-making processes regarding patient’s rights in times of pandemic control.

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the lived experiences of nurses involved in rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients in special institutions in Zimbabwe.

The study used the grounded theory approach utilising a mixed sequential dominant status design (QUAL/Quant). Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual canon of field, habitus and capital was used as a theoretical point of departure by the research study. Confirmatory retrospective document review of 119 patients’ files was also done to substantiate the nurses’ experiences. Theoretical sampling of relatives was also done.

Findings and results revealed that nurses seemed to experience infrahumanisation, a subtler form of dehumanisation. The infrahumanisation was embodied in the unpleasant context in which nurses were expected to perform their mandate of championing rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients. The guards who represented the prison system seemed to possess all forms of capital in the prison system (where special institutions are housed): the prison cultural capital, social capital and economic capital. This capital seemed to represent symbolic power over the disillusioned and voiceless nurses. Guards attended to and discussed patients and relatives issues instead of nurses. This form of misrecognition of the nurses culminated in dominance and reproduction of the interests of the prison system which underlined the established order of realities in the rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients in special institutions at the time of the study. The nurses’ lived experience was confirmed by theoretically sampled by relatives of forensic psychiatric patients who also participated in the research study. Nurses’ powerlessness was also reflected in the patients’ files in which in which care was largely not documented.

The study focused on the nurses experiences related to rehabilitation of male forensic psychiatric patients and not on female forensic psychiatric patients because there were important variables in the two groups that were not homogenous. For the little documentation that was done, there was also a tendency nurses to document negative rather than positive events and trends. The documents/files of patients had therefore a negative bias which was a major limitation to this study.

There is a need for major revision of the revision of the role of the nurse in the forensic psychiatric setting. Collaboration as academia, practice, professional organisations and regulatory bodies would foster a nurse led therapeutic jurisprudence in the future of rehabilitation of forensic psychiatric patients in Zimbabwe.

There is a need for major revision of the revision of the role of the nurse in the forensic psychiatric setting.

This is the first description of the position of nurses’ seconded to special institutions in Zimbabwe and will go a long way in realigning conflictual policy documents guiding care of forensic psychiatric patients in special institutions.

This study aims to develop a framework for the management of medical records in support of health-care service delivery in the hospitals in the Limpopo province of South Africa.

The study was predominantly quantitative and has used the questionnaires, system analysis, document analysis and observation to collect data in 40 hospitals of Limpopo province. The sample of 49 per cent (306) records management officials were drawn out of 622 (100 per cent) total population. The response rate was 71 per cent (217) out of the entire sample.

The study discovered that a framework for management of medical records in the public hospitals is not in place because of several reasons and further demonstrates that public health-care institutions need an integrative framework for the proper management of medical records of all forms and in all media.

The study develops and suggests a framework to embed medical records management into the health-care service delivery workflow for effective records management and ease of access. It is hoped that such a framework will help hospitals in South Africa and elsewhere to improve their medical records management to support health-care service provision.

Literature on trauma and post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has neglected the needs of people with intellectual disability, particularly those in forensic settings. The National Centre for High Secure Learning Disability Services at Rampton Hospital conducted a service evaluation on aspects of trauma experience and post‐trauma symptoms in the current population. File information and self‐reports indicated that most individuals had experienced a great deal of lifetime trauma, typically multiple types of abuse. A high rate of potentially trauma‐related symptoms was noted in files. However, file records of potentially traumatic events, including abuse, were often lacking in detail. There was limited information about the events themselves, and there was no information to suggest that any trauma‐specific assessments had been used to measure trauma exposure or symptoms. PTSD as a diagnosis was rarely considered, and there was little consideration of trauma‐specific interventions. While some individuals said that their experiences had resulted in a lot of distress, others could not talk about the past at all. This paper discusses the problem of assessing past trauma and response in a forensic intellectual disability population, and future directions for practice in forensic services. The service under study plans to address the needs of patients who have experienced trauma and abuse by conducting routine structured assessments, offering adapted evidence‐based psychological interventions where appropriate, and providing trauma‐specific education for staff to promote a compassionate approach.

Inpatient violence can have a major impact in terms of traumatic experiences for victims and witnesses, an unsafe treatment climate, and high-financial costs. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to gain more insight into patterns of violent behavior, so that adequate preventive measures can be taken.

Data on inpatient violence in a Dutch forensic psychiatric hospital between 2008 and 2014 were extracted from hospital files on 503 patients.

More than half of all the patients (n=276, 54.9 percent) displayed verbal aggression on at least one occasion, whereas 27.2 percent of all patients (n=137) exhibited one or more incidents of physical violence. Female patients were responsible for more physically violent episodes than male patients. Patients admitted with a civil court order exhibited more violent behavior than patients with a criminal court order. Violent patients with a civil commitment had a significantly longer length of stay than non-violent patients with a civil commitment. More violence was found to take place on the earlier days of the week.

This study points at important differences between groups of forensic inpatients in frequency and type of inpatient violent behavior and in temporal factors. Interventions aimed at reducing the number of violent incidents should take these differences into account. Further research is necessary to gain more insight into the background of inpatient violence.

Two major computerized systems, ECG and Clinical Chemistry, have been meshed on an 1BM‐1800/System/7 tandem combination. The System/7 computer serves as (1) an analog‐to‐digital device acquiring both ECG data from 3‐channel data acquisition carts over telephone lines, and laboratory data from autoanalyzers over direct cabling; and (2) a communications concentrator controlling a network of interactive video display units and printers in both the Clinical Chemistry and the ECG Laboratories via asynchronous and synchronous multiplexers. An operating system has been written for the System/7 which handles all I/O from external devices and communicates to the 1BM‐1800 over a direct memory access channel at the rate of 105 words per second. The meshing of the systems has a synergistic effect which makes the system extremely powerful at an economic price level.

This paper aims to demonstrate how lean tools were applied to some unique issues of providing healthcare in a developing country where many patients face challenges not found in developed countries. The challenges provide insight into how lean tools can be utilized to provide similar results across the world.

This paper is based on a qualitative case study carried out by a master’s student implementing lean at a hospital in India.

This paper finds that lean tools such as value-stream mapping and root cause analysis can lead to dramatic reductions in waste and improvements in productivity. The problems of the majority of patients paying for their own healthcare and lacking transportation created scheduling problems that required patients to receive their diagnosis and pay for treatment within a single day. Many additional wastes were identified that were significantly impacting the hospital’s ability to provide care. As a result of this project, average outpatient wait times were reduced from 1 hour to 15 minutes along with a significant increase in labor productivity.

The results demonstrate how lean tools can increase value to the patients. It also provides are framework that can be utilized for healthcare providers in developed and developing countries to analyze their value streams to reduce waste.

This paper is one of the first to address the unique issues of implementing lean to a healthcare setting in a developing country.

Clearly defined information is essential for rational decision‐making, planning and control, at all management levels. The current climate in the UK National Health Service dictates that clinicians should be more actively involved in management. However, no relevant and accurate information is routinely available on either the workload or work patterns of individual hospital departments. If clinicians were supplied with this they would then be in a better position to manage their own services. This paper provides a synopsis of the philosophy behind the design of management information systems and presents the results of a pilot study, which was undertaken in a hospital neurology department. The general guidance which emerges is that analysts must always concentrate on ivhat information is needed and the uses to which it will be put. A systems approach to design helps to: (i) define the information required; (ii) establish processes for data capture and analysis; and (iii) establish standards with which actual service performance can be compared (feedback control feature). The pilot study provided information on all stages of development. The systems approach employed could be applied within any clinical department, but doctors must be actively involved. Information derived from running the prototype provided insight into many aspects of work activity, organisation and use of resources within a neurology specialty. A comparison between actual service performance and standards of service as perceived by the consultant neurologists involved, was also undertaken.

Health service quality is an important determinant for health service satisfaction and behavioral intentions. The purpose of this paper is to investigate requirements of e‐health services and to develop a measurement model to analyze the construct of “perceived e‐health service quality.”

The paper adapts the C‐OAR‐SE procedure for scale development by Rossiter. The focal aspect is the “physician‐patient relationship” which forms the core dyad in the healthcare service provision. Several in‐depth interviews were conducted in Switzerland; first with six patients (as raters), followed by two experts of the healthcare system (as judges). Based on the results and an extensive literature research, the classification of object and attributes is developed for this model.

The construct e‐health service quality can be described as an abstract formative object and is operationalized with 13 items: accessibility, competence, information, usability/user friendliness, security, system integration, trust, individualization, empathy, ethical conduct, degree of performance, reliability, and ability to respond.

Limitations include the number of interviews with patients and experts as well as critical issues associated with C‐OAR‐SE. More empirical research is needed to confirm the quality indicators of e‐health services.

Health care providers can utilize the results for the evaluation of their service quality. Practitioners can use the hierarchical structure to measure service quality at different levels. The model provides a diagnostic tool to identify poor and/or excellent performance with regard to the e‐service delivery.

The paper contributes to knowledge with regard to the measurement of e‐health quality and improves the understanding of how customers evaluate the quality of e‐health services.