Biomedical subjects

I W Saunders

Publications and source records attributed to I W Saunders.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1997

Hospital leadership for quality: theory and practice: II. Quality performance evaluation.

Hospitals need excellent leadership to be efficient in the use of scarce stakeholder resources and to be effective in the competitive provision of services to multiple customers. This paper is the second report on a study conducted with cooperation of the executive team at a large government-funded hospital in Brisbane, Australia. The overall study focused on linking the leadership concepts and attributes of the members of the executive with an overall evaluation of quality practice in the hospital. The first paper reported the leadership results. This paper reports the quality practice and its links with leadership. The study revealed use of data, understanding of processes and the formation of supplier partnerships as the areas of hospital activity most limiting the ability to improve. Little impact of leadership attributes was found, contrary to studies conducted elsewhere. This may be due to the strong influence of different professional groups within the hospital, since domains of leadership influence largely coincided with these groups.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

PubMed1995

Effective hospital leadership for quality: theory and practice.

Hospitals need excellent leadership to be efficient in the use of scarce stakeholder resources and to be effective in the competitive provision of services to multiple customers. This study was conducted with the cooperation of the executive team at a large government-funded hospital in Brisbane. It focused on understanding the conceptual models of leadership held by members of the executive and comparing this model with an externally derived model of leadership. Performance on the local model was estimated by cross-linking performance assessment on the external model. Members of the executive espoused, and were also rated by others in the hospital as practising, to a moderate degree, a transformational style of leadership. An overall evaluation of quality practice in the hospital revealed the use of data, the understanding of processes and the formation of supplier partnerships as the areas of hospital activity most limiting the ability to improve. The implications of the conceptual model and performance levels are discussed in relation to the introduction of quality management practice in the hospital, and in terms of management development. A complementary paper focusing on quality implementation as perceived at different staff levels in the hospital is in preparation.

Australia↗

PubMed1981

Epidemics in competition.

When two or more epidemic agents are simultaneously present in a population, they may interact to increase or decrease each other's effectiveness. One form of interaction is "competition" where each agent confers immunity to the others. Such competition occurs, for example, between different strains of myxomatosis in rabbit populations. We consider some consequences of introducing competition into mathematical epidemic models. Both deterministic and stochastic simple epidemic models are examined. In either case the conclusions are similar: the faster spreading epidemic has a considerable advantage.

Animal Diseases↗

PubMed1977

Fitting a model to the growth of yeast colonies.

When yeast cells reproduce, scars are left on the parent cell where the offspring has budded. Using a branching process model, it is possible to obtain the expectations of numbers of cells with 0, 1, 2, ... offspring. In this paper, theoretical results are tested against empirical data for three types of yeast cells. We examine the hypothesis that birth and death rates of cells with no previus offspring may differ from those of cells with one or more offspring. It is suggested that the oscillatory empricial results for the proportions of cells with 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 offspring may be due to different mean budding times for these cells.

Models, Biological↗