SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “Interinstitutional Relations”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 721 records · Page 40Linked to original sources

PubMed2004

Causal chain analysis and root causes: the GIWA approach.

The Global International Waters Assessment (GIWA) was created to help develop a priority setting mechanism for actions in international waters. Apart from assessing the severity of environmental problems in ecosystems, the GIWA's task is to analyze potential policy actions that could solve or mitigate these problems. Given the complex nature of the problems, understanding their root causes is essential to develop effective solutions. The GIWA provides a framework to analyze these causes, which is based on identifying the factors that shape human behavior in relation to the use (direct or indirect) of aquatic resources. Two sets of factors are analyzed. The first one consists of social coordination mechanisms (institutions). Faults in these mechanisms lead to wasteful use of resources. The second consists of factors that do not cause wasteful use of resources per se (poverty, trade, demographic growth, technology), but expose and magnify the faults of the first group of factors. The picture that comes out is that diagnosing simple generic causes, e.g. poverty or trade, without analyzing the case specific ways in which the root causes act and interact to degrade the environment, will likely ignore important links that may put the effectiveness of the recommended policies at risk. A summary of the causal chain analysis for the Colorado River Delta is provided as an example.

Commerce↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Disaster coordination and management: summary and action plans.

INTRODUCTION: Disaster is a collective responsibility requiring coordinated response from all parts of society. This theme focused on coordination and management issues in a diverse range of scenarios. METHODS: Details of the methods used are provided in the preceding paper. The chairs moderated all presentations and produced a summary that was presented to an assembly of all of the delegates. Although the main points developed in Themes 1 and 4 were different from each other (as reported in the Results section), their implementation was similar. Therefore, the chairs of both groups presided over one workshop that resulted in the generation of a set of Action Plans that then were reported to the collective group of all delegates. RESULTS: The main points developed during the presentations and discussions included: (1) the need for evidence-based assessments and planning, (2) the need for a shift in focus to health-sector readiness, (3) empowerment of survivors, (4) provision of relief for the caregivers, (5) address the incentives and disincentives to attain readiness, (6) engage in joint preparation, response, and training, (7) focus on prevention and mitigation of the damage from events, and (8) improve media relations. There exists a need for institutionalization of processes for learning from experiences obtained from disasters. DISCUSSION: Action plans presented include: (1) creation of an Information and Data Clearinghouse on Disaster Management, (2) identification of incentives and disincentives for readiness and develop strategies and interventions, and (3) act on lessons learned from evidence-based research and practical experience. CONCLUSIONS: There is an urgent need to proactively establish coordination and management procedures in advance of any crisis. A number of important insights for improvement in coordination and management during disasters emerged.

Continuity of Patient Care↗

PubMed2006

The Spanish Protocol for radiological surveillance of metal recycling: a collaboration of government and industry.

The presence of radioactive materials in scrap metal has been detected relatively often in recent years. As a result of an accidental melting of a 137Cs source in a Spanish steel mill (Acerinox) in 1998, the national authorities, the involved private companies, and the main trade unions drafted a protocol for prevention of and responding to such events ("Spanish Protocol"). The Protocol was signed in 1999. The number of subscribing companies is 90. The Protocol is a voluntary agreement defining the radiological surveillance of scrap metal and its products and the duties and rights of the signatories. From the effective date of the Protocol to December 2004, 461 pieces of ferric scrap were detected including sources of radiation and contaminated metal. Four melting incidents have happened in different companies.

Cooperative Behavior↗

PubMedDate not supplied

A win-win model for an academic nursing center: community partnership faculty practice.

A number of schools of nursing have established community nursing centers to provide faculty practice sites, student learning experiences, and a service to the community, most often to a poor underserved population. The current literature concludes that these centers provide a quality clinical service and improve access to health care, and they also provide an avenue for research, training, and faculty practice. Acquiring necessary financial support and the ability to achieve financial independence appear to be the most common difficulties for these centers. Most of the current literature includes an examination of issues relating to funding. The model presented in this article focuses on organizational variables that include both the center and its placement in relationship to other functions and programs in the school and a broadening of the meaning of fiscal responsibility to include an awareness of the broad spectrum of benefits that the community nursing center brings to the entire school. Efforts to coordinate and integrate the needs and functions of several groups are described. Establishing goals and priorities that simultaneously meet the needs of all or most of these groups has been an important outcome. The activities of the center have become an integral part of the everyday life of the school. Achieving financial independence and being fiscally aware and responsible is not the same thing.

Community Health Centers↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Critical care education: experience with a community-based consortium approach.

A continuous cycle of new orientees, cost-containment issues related to orientation, and conflicting job priorities prove to be challenging adversaries for critical care educators. The San Diego Chapter of the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN) has met some of these educational challenges by providing a community-wide, consortium-based Critical Care Nursing Internship Program (CCIP) for novice critical care nurses. Over the last 15 years this CCIP has been instrumental in providing comprehensive education for more than 2,200 novice critical care nurses in San Diego County. This article discusses the background, rewards, and current challenges of the program. It also addresses a comparison between consortium-based education and the National AACN Essentials of Critical Care Orientation (ECCO) Program.

California↗

PubMed2005

Medicaid insurance policy for youths involved in the criminal justice system.

Juvenile justice and Medicaid agencies share an interest in serving delinquent youths, many of whom have a relatively poor health status. However, many state and local Medicaid policies result in these youths having no insurance coverage, making access to needed services difficult. A nationally representative survey of state and community juvenile justice and Medicaid agencies was conducted to assess Medicaid policies. Evidence from the survey suggests that in some areas delinquent youths are actively disenrolled from Medicaid benefits, and in others little effort is made to connect them to Medicaid coverage. Discrepancies between justice agency and Medicaid agency responses point to poor communication and coordination. Overall, the survey identified several opportunities for policy intervention to enhance access to services for justice-involved youths.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

Managing Sure Start in partnership.

In March 2006, Sure Start programmes were mainstreamed, becoming 'Children's Centres' for which local authorities have assumed strategic responsibility. This paper describes an evaluation of a Sure Start local programme Management Board which was conducted in preparation for this transition. Focusing on practices relating to partnership working and community involvement, a distinctive trident evaluation model was used to explore outcomes, processes and multiple stakeholder perspectives through a multi-method approach (incorporating interviews, questionnaires and documentary analysis). This revealed that an effective, collaborative style of working had been fostered between board members, resulting in synergy. Furthermore, a number of governance arrangements were identified that specifically supported partnership developments, including quorum regulations and adherence to decision-making by consensus. A series of recommendations are presented that were made with the aim of strengthening the community voice on the board and preserving the most effective and empowering elements of practice following the transition.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

PubMed2003

Health promotion partnerships in Israel: motives, enhancing and inhibiting factors, and modes of structure.

Multisectoral cooperation is an important strategy in working for health promotion. Fifty-two health professionals completed a questionnaire measuring factors motivating, enhancing and inhibiting partnerships. The respondents also reported the type or structure of the partnerships. The results indicated that partnerships were formed primarily in order to promote the project; however, previous positive experience with partnerships was also very important as a motivating force for joining partnerships. The three most important facilitating factors were related to project management: effective leadership, aims of the project, and sharing a vision and goals. The two most frequent items mentioned as very important barriers to partnerships were related to dysfunction of the steering committee. Two types or structures of partnerships were identified. The first was fragmental, where partnerships existed only at specific stages of the project; most respondents reported working within this structure. The second type was continuous, where partnerships existed through all the project's stages. Using multiple regression analysis we found that health staff (mainly nurses) worked more frequently in fragmental partnership structures than did health promotion and welfare workers. In addition, the more experienced the respondents, the less they worked in fragmental partnership structures. These results highlight the importance of acquiring skills for working in partnerships and indicate a need for guidelines to be agreed by the partners at the beginning of the working process.

Administrative Personnel↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Inter-organizational networks on the Dutch home health care market.

The demand for home care in the Netherlands is growing and changing. A decreasing rate of institutionalization, combined with an increasing number of elderly people with special age-related, often complex health problems, has led to new groups of patients, to be cared for in their home settings. This requires a strong coordination of services between suppliers from the primary and secondary health care sectors. In order to promote coordinated care, Dutch health care providers are building inter-organizational networks. The development of such arrangements was the target of 12 demonstration projects, selected by the Ministry of Health for the National Home Care Programme. This article presents some of the results of an evaluation study of the Programme, with special attention given to the question of the extent to which such inter-organizational networks contribute to the balance between quality and cost.

Comprehensive Health Care↗

PubMed2004

Transplant coordination activities in the Başkent University Hospital Network.

Our transplantation center adopted a new model of operation, with 3 affiliated centers of the Başkent University. The aim of this system is to standardize procedures related to organ procurement and transplantation, to increase organ donation, and to improve the quality of services. The transplant team is composed of a transplant coordinator, and transplant clinicians and surgeons. The transplant coordinator works independently, and promotes organ donation and procurement, organizes interviews with donor families, and is in contact with national and international organ-sharing organizations. The organs and tissues are transplanted in the Ankara hospital of the network if the cadaver organ source is one of the Başkent University hospitals. If no appropriate recipient is available, the organs and tissues are offered to the National Coordination Center for other transplantation centers. To implement this system most efficiently and effectively, periodic situation analyses were made.

Algorithms↗

PubMed1999

Qualitative research and the profound grasp of the obvious.

OBJECTIVE: To discuss the value of promoting coexistent and complementary relationships between qualitative and quantitative research methods as illustrated by presentations made by four respected health services researchers who described their experiences in multi-method projects. DATA SOURCES: Presentations and publications related to the four research projects, which described key substantive and methodological areas that had been addressed with qualitative techniques. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Sponsor interest in timely, insightful, and reality-anchored evidence has provided a strong base of support for the incorporation of qualitative methods into major contemporary policy research studies. In addition, many issues may be suitable for study only with qualitative methods because of their complexity, their emergent nature, or because of the need to revisit and reexamine previously untested assumptions. CONCLUSION: Experiences from the four projects, as well as from other recent health services studies with major qualitative components, support the assertion that the interests of sponsors in the policy realm and pressure from them suppress some of the traditional tensions and antagonisms between qualitative and quantitative methods.

Academic Medical Centers↗

PubMed1996

[Everything is relative...about the Hanoi Institute of Traditional Medicine].

At the Symposium entitled "Health, Culture, and Quality of Life" held in Hanoi in 1993, the authors of this report met the physicians in charge of the Traditional Medicine Institute of Hanoi which works with the World Health Organization for traditional medicine. After an historical overview of the foundation of this center providing research, care, and training under the auspices of the Hanoi School of Medicine, Professor Hoang Bao Chau described a practice based on revision of ancestral traditions in accordance with scientific methods, the resulting synthesis being up-to-date yet in keeping with heritage. This novel and pragmatic approach, which takes into account the complexity of man, offers an opportunity to reflect on the current status of medical practices in the world and on their adaptation to each population at a time when the experience of the Other seems almost impossible to communicate.

Academies and Institutes↗

PubMedDate not supplied

An economic paradigm for nurse practitioner program development.

In 1987 a collaborative nurse practitioner program was developed and implemented by George Mason University, a public institution, and The George Washington University, a private institution. Three economic factors affecting decisions related to the development of the collaborative program are discussed: (1) optimal use of resources, (2) consumer and institutional utility, and (3) demand for the program. Optimal use of resources was based on collaboration in the areas of faculty and administrative resources and existing curriculum, thereby reducing the cost burden at each institution. From the perspective of consumer and institutional utility, the program was structured financially to enhance the well-being of students and both institutions. Finally, the consumer demand for the program was addressed by maintaining the higher proportion of credits at the lower-cost institution, thus enabling more students to afford the program. The success of the institutions in addressing the economic factors noted above can serve as a paradigm for program development in other universities and graduate programs.

Costs and Cost Analysis↗

PubMed2004

Better governance in academic health sciences centres: moving beyond the Olivieri/Apotex Affair in Toronto.

The Toronto experience suggests that there may be several general lessons for academic health sciences complexes to learn from the Olivieri/Apotex affair (OAA) regarding the ethics, independence, and integrity of clinical research sponsored by for profit enterprises. From a local perspective, the OAA occurred when there already was a focus on the complex and changing relationships among the University of Toronto, its medical school, the fully affiliated teaching hospitals, and off campus faculty because of intertwined interests and responsibilities. The OAA became a catalyst that accelerated various systemic reforms, particularly concerning academic/industry relations. In this article, the evolving governance framework for the Toronto academic health sciences complex is reviewed and these policy and process reforms discussed. These reforms have created collaborative activity among research ethics boards and contract research offices of the partner institutions, and allowed the joint university/hospital ethics centre to play a role in governance and policy, while respecting the missions and mandates of the involved institutions. Although few of the policies are dramatically innovative, what is arguably novel is the elaboration of an overarching governance framework that aims to move ethics to a central focus in the academic complex. Time alone will tell how sustainable and effective these changes are.

Academic Medical Centers↗

PubMed2006

Patient-provider partnerships in healthcare: enhancing knowledge translation and improving outcomes.

In the complex health arena, a key proposition is that no person acting alone is as effective as a team to drive best practices and outcomes. Another key factor supporting best outcomes is access to the best information to support best choices. Currently, stakeholders suffer from a paucity of real-world knowledge of actual practices and outcomes that allows care gaps to go undiscovered. A body of evidence indicates that measurement and timely feedback of actual practices can decrease the gaps between usual and best care. This is driven by the stakeholders' desire to be the best they can be, and it is enabled by the measured knowledge of where practices fall short of gold standards. The addition of patient partners to such communities of care offers promise of further acceleration and broader impact of knowledge translation and associated beneficial outcomes. For example, in the Improving Cardiac Outcomes in Nova Scotia (ICONS) community-based heart disease project, there was a marked decrease in rates of re-hospitalization over the five-year course of the project. This improvement was only very weakly, or not at all, related to traditional risk factors, such as the presence of multiple illnesses or older age, or to the use of efficacious medical therapies. However, ICONS provided an extensive and repeated multimedia communication among patients, families and providers of project goals, strategy and general news, as well as repeated measurements of practices and outcomes. One outcome of this shared knowledge may have been the reduced need for re-hospitalization. While exact cause-and-effect relationship remain uncertain, patient-provider integrated health networks appear feasible and offer promise for efficient knowledge creation and its population-effective translation. The model and its implementation may be improved by testing further locally responsive initiatives in innovative partnership clusters and by training more personnel resources in inter-professional settings.

Canada↗

PubMed1991

External quality assessment of immunoassays of peptide hormones and tumour markers: principles and practice.

External quality assessment schemes (EQAS) have traditionally emphasised the achievement of between-laboratory consensus. Although this is important, the application of EQAS to relatively new and evolving techniques such as immunoassay calls for a wider and more searching remit if the goals of accurate assays, properly used, are to be achieved. This article outlines the principles of EQAS for peptide hormones and tumour markers, emphasising key aspects such as validation of target values, dependency of results on sample type, and assessment of method characteristics such as vulnerability to interfering factors. The latter are considered to be important as they can affect patient care more seriously than modest degrees of imprecision or inaccuracy. EQAS play a unique role in providing objective data on assays performed in many laboratories under routine conditions and the data they provide can guide improvement in diagnostic reagents and laboratory practice.

Artifacts↗

PubMed2003

Social services representation in Primary Care Groups and Trusts.

Against a rapidly changing policy backdrop, health providers and social services departments in England are attempting to develop partnerships in order to effectively provide services. Relations between health and social care organisations have long been recognised as being problematic, in terms of historically poor relationships between GPs and social services departments and the non-coterminous natures of many organisational boundaries. The development of Primary Care Groups and Trusts has provided an opportunity to try to overcome some of these problems. This paper draws on a national survey of a sample of Primary Care Groups/Trusts and associated in-depth case studies to describe the roles of the social services representatives on Primary Care Group Boards/Trust Executive Committees and discusses the extent to which closer collaboration in the development of services is occurring and its potential for development in the future. It highlights the importance of greater organisational stability and the need for time to form effective partnership arrangements in the future.

Cooperative Behavior↗

PubMed1997

Service system performance and integration: a baseline profile of the ACCESS demonstration sites. Access to Community Care and Effective Services and Supports.

OBJECTIVE: Networks of agencies at the 18 demonstration sites in the Access to Community Care and Effective Services and Supports (ACCESS) program for homeless persons with serious mental illness were surveyed to profile baseline levels of systems performance and integration as part of a longitudinal evaluation of systems change and client outcomes. METHODS: Interviews were conducted with a representative from each of 875 agencies in the 18 service networks. Information was obtained about the perceived performance of the service system and the extent of systems integration as measured by client referrals, funds exchanges, and information sharing between agencies. Measures consisted of two multi-item scales assessing the accessibility and coordination of services for the target population in each community and four indexes of interagency relationships. RESULTS: Services at baseline for homeless mentally ill persons at the program sites were rated as relatively inaccessible, and the coordination of services between agencies was rated as even more problematic. Interagency ties were largely based on client referrals and information exchanges, with very few instances of funding transfers in the form of contracts or grants. On average, at baseline agencies that had received an ACCESS grant were better connected to their local service network than were other agencies. CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with the premise of the ACCESS demonstration, services for persons who are homeless and mentally ill in urban America are fragmented and not very accessible. The longitudinal design of the evaluation will allow for an assessment of efforts to improve services and systems integration and of the effects of these improvements on client outcomes.

Adult↗