Search results

There is a growing consensus within the NHS of the importance of obtaining feedback from patients in order to improve the quality of health care; consequently, many patient satisfaction surveys are now undertaken. However, much research is based on provider‐held assumptions about service quality. This study focuses on patient satisfaction with coronary bypass surgery, starting with the concerns expressed by patients and using these as a basis for evaluating different aspects of care. The paired comparison technique was employed to produce a ranked list of aspects of care that were perceived to be in greatest need of improvement. Some difficulties were encountered in administering the ranking technique to patients in a highly specialized health‐care setting; however, results were obtained and validated for follow‐up patients. The item of most concern to these patients was a lack of sensitivity about when patients felt ready for discharge.

Describes the results of a postal questionnaire survey of all 1,383 hospital consultants in the North Western Region of the UK in 1994; updating a similar survey conducted in 1987. In both surveys, consultants were asked to describe their current management role, management training received and any perceived future training needs. A series of open questions in the 1994 survey explored barriers and incentives to the take‐up of management training. The results show that in 1994 more doctors were taking on greater management responsibility and from an earlier age. Consequently, the proportion of consultants expressing a need for management training had risen from 62 per cent in 1987 to 73 per cent in 1994. The most useful courses were local budgeting and business planning. However, many consultants described problems in accessing training. Concludes by highlighting policy implications arising from the surveys which will need to be addressed if consultants are to fulfil their management potential.

Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, enables the provision of tailored health services to patients. In the prevention, early detection, and treatment of cancers, precision medicine is highly promising, given the increasing use of genomic profiling for diagnosis and adapting therapies in several tumor types. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can support this process by analyzing vast amounts of relevant data. However, high-quality data and financial investments in the health system are essential for the implementation of precision medicine and AI solutions in routine cancer care.

Building on the quantitative outcomes of a foresight exercise published in another study, this article collects qualitative data to gain more detailed insights into the future of precision oncology in Belgium and discusses the role of AI in this field. It reports the results of a series of expert workshops, focusing on four hypothetical future scenarios that are centered around technological and economic issues that must be overcome for the widespread use of precision oncology in Belgium.

The study concludes that all four scenarios discussed in the workshops would require supportive policy measures in Belgium, which should go beyond mere technological and economic considerations, such as involving patient associations and the public in policy design or creating multi-disciplinary expert groups for precision medicine.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to employ foresight methodology to illustrate possible future scenarios, scrutinize feasible approaches for implementing precision oncology in Belgium, and discuss the use of AI in this context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how firms can use social media such as Facebook to recruit top job prospects.

In the context of a fictitious event presumably sponsored by a potential employer, a sample of university students became members of a new private and secret Facebook user group dedicated to this event for a period of four days. They were exposed to event sponsorship activation messages varying systematically with respect to the mode of processing (i.e. passive or active) and their focus (i.e. the brand or the event).

The results show that their expectations as regards the salary that they would require to become employees were higher in the active mode of processing. Also, their attitude toward the sponsor as an employer was more favorable when the activation messages focussed on the brand rather than on the event. In addition, further analyses showed that the effects of message focus and mode of processing on the attitudinal responses toward the sponsoring employers were mediated by the degree of elaboration and richness of social interactions of the Facebook group's members as well as their attitude toward the activation messages.

Managers seeking to gain a recruiting edge through their social media presence should use online messages that stimulate more active processing and that have high entertainment value since this leads to more favorable responses toward the employer. These messages should insist more on the brand than on the event that is sponsored.

This study is the first study to foray into the usage of social networking sites for recruitment purposes. It represents one of the few research efforts to monitor the interactions of users in a social media platform by means of a controlled experiment performed in situ through the creation of an ad hoc Facebook group.

WE begin a new year, in which we wish good things for all who work in libraries and care for them, in circumstances which are not unpropitious. At times raven voices prophesy the doom of a profession glued to things so transitory as books are now imagined to be, by some. Indeed, so much is this a dominant fear that some librarians, to judge by their utterances, rest their hopes upon other recorded forms of knowledge‐transmission; forms which are not necessarily inimical to books but which they think in the increasing hurry of contemporary life may supersede them. These fears have not been harmful in any radical way so far, because they may have increased the librarian's interest in the ways of bringing books to people and people to books by any means which successful business firms use (for example) to advertise what they have to sell. The modern librarian becomes more and more the man of business; some feel he becomes less and less the scholar; but we suggest that this is theory with small basis in fact. Scholars are not necessarily, indeed they can rarely be, bookish recluses; nor need business men be uncultured. For men of plain commonsense there need be few ways of life that are so confined that they exclude their followers from other ways and other men's ideas and activities. And, as for the transitoriness of books and the decline of reading, we ourselves decline to acknowledge or believe in either process. Books do disappear, as individuals. It is well that they do for the primary purpose of any book is to serve this generation in which it is published; and, if there survive books that we, the posterity of our fathers, would not willingly let die, it is because the life they had when they were contemporary books is still in them. Nothing else can preserve a book as a readable influence. If this were not so every library would grow beyond the capacity of the individual or even towns to support; there would, in the world of readers, be no room for new writers and their books, and the tragedy that suggests is fantastically unimaginable. A careful study, recently made of scores of library reports for 1951–52, which it is part of our editorial duty to make, has produced the following deductions. Nearly every public library, and indeed other library, reports quite substantial increases in the use made of it; relatively few have yet installed the collections of records as alternatives to books of which so much is written; further still, where “readers” and other aids to the reading of records, films, etc., have been installed, the use of them is most modest; few librarians have a book‐fund that is adequate to present demands; fewer have staffs adequate to the demands made upon them for guidance by the advanced type of readers or for doing thoroughly the most ordinary form of book‐explanation. It is, in one sense a little depressing, but there is the challenging fact that these islands contain a greater reading population than they ever had. One has to reflect that of our fifty millions every one, including infants who have not cut their teeth, the inhabitants of asylums, the illiterate—and, alas, there are still thousands of these—and the drifters and those whose vain boast is that “they never have time to read a book”—every one of them reads six volumes a year. A further reflection is that public libraries may be the largest distributors, but there are many others and in the average town there may be a half‐dozen commercial, institutional and shop‐libraries, all distributing, for every public library. This fact is stressed by our public library spending on books last year at some two million pounds, a large sum, but only one‐tenth of the money the country spent on books. There are literally millions of book‐readers who may or may not use the public library, some of them who do not use any library but buy what they read. The real figure of the total reading of our people would probably be astronomical or, at anyrate, astonishing.

The purpose of this paper is to outline several critical risk theories and explore their application to risk concerns in mental health care. This will contribute to the on-going debate about risk management practices and the impact these might have on recovery and social inclusion. Notably, while risks like suicide can be therapeutically addressed, risk management may involve paternalistic practices that exclude the participation needed for recovery.

A viewpoint of key risk theories will be presented to provide a critical eye about some clinical risk concerns in mental health care. Implications for recovery and social inclusion will then be discussed alongside direction for practice and research.

Clinical concerns seemed to involve difficulties with uncertainty, holding onto expertise, and the othering of patients through risk. These concerns suggest the patient voice might become lost, particularly within the backdrop of clinical fears about blame. Alternatively, a relational approach to risk management could have merit, while patient expertise may develop understanding in how to improve risk management practices.

Clinical concerns appear more than managing potential harms; it can involve appraising behaviours around societal norms, explaining to an extent why mental illness might be addressed in terms of risks. While the points raised in the paper support existing findings about risk management, the underlying reasons drawing on the critical risk theories are less explored.