Bmc Health Serv Res
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Bmc Health Serv Res · Jan 2012
The association between nurse staffing and hospital outcomes in injured patients.
The enormous fiscal pressures facing trauma centers may lead trauma centers to reduce nurse staffing and to make increased use of less expensive and less skilled personnel. The impact of nurse staffing and skill mix on trauma outcomes has not been previously reported. The goal of this study was to examine whether nurse staffing levels and nursing skill mix are associated with trauma patient outcomes. ⋯ Higher hospital LPN staffing levels are independently associated with slightly higher rates of mortality and sepsis in trauma patients admitted to Level I or Level II trauma centers.
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Bmc Health Serv Res · Jan 2012
Barriers and facilitators to the implementation of clinical practice guidelines: a cross-sectional survey among physicians in Estonia.
In an era when an increasing amount of clinical information is available to health care professionals, the effective implementation of clinical practice guidelines requires the development of strategies to facilitate the use of these guidelines. The objective of this study was to assess attitudes towards clinical practice guidelines, as well as the barriers and facilitators to their use, among Estonian physicians. The study was conducted to inform the revision of the clinical practice guideline development process and can provide inspiration to other countries considering the increasing use of evidence-based medicine. ⋯ Use of updated evidence-based guidelines is a prerequisite for the high-quality management of diseases, and recognizing the factors that affect guideline compliance makes it possible to work towards improving guideline adherence in clinical practice. In our study, physicians with long-term clinical experience and doctors in outpatient settings perceived more barriers, which should be taken into account when planning strategies in improving the use of guidelines. Informed by the results of the survey, leading health authorities are making an effort to develop specially designed interventions to implement clinical practice guidelines, including an easily accessible online database.
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Bmc Health Serv Res · Jan 2012
Assessment of nursing home residents in Europe: the Services and Health for Elderly in Long TERm care (SHELTER) study.
Aims of the present study are the following: 1. to describe the rationale and methodology of the Services and Health for Elderly in Long TERm care (SHELTER) study, a project funded by the European Union, aimed at implementing the interRAI instrument for Long Term Care Facilities (interRAI LTCF) as a tool to assess and gather uniform information about nursing home (NH) residents across different health systems in European countries; 2. to present the results about the test-retest and inter-rater reliability of the interRAI LTCF instrument translated into the languages of participating countries; 3 to illustrate the characteristics of NH residents at study entry. ⋯ The interRAI LTCF appears to be a reliable instrument. It enables the creation of databases that can be used to govern the provision of long-term care across different health systems in Europe, to answer relevant research and policy questions and to compare characteristics of NH residents across countries, languages and cultures.
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Bmc Health Serv Res · Jan 2012
Association between value-based purchasing score and hospital characteristics.
Medicare hospital Value-based purchasing (VBP) program that links Medicare payments to quality of care will become effective from 2013. It is unclear whether specific hospital characteristics are associated with a hospital's VBP score, and consequently incentive payments.The objective of the study was to assess the association of hospital characteristics with (i) the mean VBP score, and (ii) specific percentiles of the VBP score distribution. The secondary objective was to quantify the associations of hospital characteristics with the VBP score components: clinical process of care (CPC) score and patient satisfaction score. ⋯ Although hospitals serving the poor and the elderly are more likely to score lower under the VBP program, the correlation appears small. Profit status, geographic regions, number and type of CPC measures reported explain the most variation among scores.
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Bmc Health Serv Res · Jan 2012
Incentive payments are not related to expected health gain in the pay for performance scheme for UK primary care: cross-sectional analysis.
The General Medical Services primary care contract for the United Kingdom financially rewards performance in 19 clinical areas, through the Quality and Outcomes Framework. Little is known about how best to determine the size of financial incentives in pay for performance schemes. Our aim was to test the hypothesis that performance indicators with larger population health benefits receive larger financial incentives. ⋯ In this subgroup of indicators the financial incentives were not aligned to maximise health gain. This disconnection between incentive and expected health gain risks supporting clinical activities that are only marginally effective, at the expense of more effective activities receiving lower incentives. When designing pay for performance programmes decisions about the size of the financial incentive attached to an indicator should be informed by information on the health gain to be expected from that indicator.