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The purpose of this paper is to review how patient and public involvement (PPI) can contribute to quality improvement functions and describe the levels of PPI in quality improvement functions at hospital and departmental level in a sample of European hospitals.

Literature review and cross-sectional study.

PPI takes multiple forms in health care and there is not a single strategy or method that can be considered to reflect best practice. The literature reveals that PPI can serve important functions to support quality improvement efforts. In contrast, the assessment of actual PPI in quality improvement shows that PPI is low.

Findings are not representative of hospitals in the EU.

A diverse set of methods and tools that can be employed to realize PPI. Service providers should consider PPI at all stages, in particular in setting quality standards and criteria and in evaluating the results.

Contextualization of empirical findings with case studies from the literature that inform further practice and research on PPI.

The spotlight has recently been placed on managers’ responsibility for patient-centred care as a result of Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust failings. In previous research, clinicians reported that managers do not have an adequate structured plan for implementing patient-centred care. The purpose of this paper is to assess the perceptions of European hospital management with respect to factors affecting the implementation of a patient-centred approach.

In total, 15 semi-structured interviews were conducted with hospital managers (n=10), expert country informants (n=2), patient organisations (n=2) and a user representative (n=1) from around Europe. Participants were purposively and snowball sampled. Interviews were analysed using framework analysis.

Most participants felt that current levels of patient-centred care are inadequate, but accounted that there were a number of macro, meso and micro challenges they faced in implementing this approach. These included budget constraints, political and historical factors, the resistance of clinicians and other frontline staff. Organisational culture emerged as a central theme, shaped by these multi-level factors and influencing the way in which patient-centred care was borne out in the hospital. Participants proposed that the needs of patients might be better met through increasing advocacy by patient organisations and greater staff contact with patients.

This study is the first of its kind to obtain management views from around Europe. It offers an insight into different models of how patient-centred care is realised by management. It indicates that managers see the value of a patient-centred approach but that they feel restricted by a number of factors at multiple levels.

Much work about health reform and systems improvement in healthcare looks at shortcomings and universal problems facing health systems, but rarely are accomplishments dissected and analyzed internationally. The purpose of this paper is to address this knowledge gap by examining the lessons learned from health system reform and improvement efforts in 60 countries.

In total, 60 low-, middle- and high-income countries provided a case study of successful health reform, which was gathered into a compendium as a recently published book. Here, the extensive source material was re-examined through inductive content analysis to derive broad themes of systems change internationally.

Nine themes were identified: improving policy, coverage and governance; enhancing the quality of care; keeping patients safe; regulating standards and accreditation; organizing care at the macro-level; organizing care at the meso- and micro-level; developing workforces and resources; harnessing technology and IT; and making collaboratives and partnerships work.

These themes provide a model of what constitutes successful systems change across a wide sample of health systems, offering a store of knowledge about how reformers and improvement initiators achieve their goals.

Few comparative international studies of health systems include a sufficiently wide selection of low-, middle- and high-income countries in their analysis. This paper provides a more balanced approach to consider where achievements are being made across healthcare, and what we can do to replicate and spread successful examples of systems change internationally.

“First principles” of international business (IB) thinking should be applied systematically when assessing the functioning of internationally operating firms. The most important first principle is that entrepreneurially oriented firms seek to create, deliver and capture economic value through cross-border linkages. Such linkages invariably require complementary resources from a variety of parties with idiosyncratic vulnerabilities to be meshed. Starting from first principles allows bringing to light evidence-based insight. For instance, most companies are not global and even the world’s largest firms rarely change the location of key strategic functions. International new ventures (INVs), emerging economy multinational enterprises (MNEs) and family firms face unique vulnerabilities but also command resources that can be used to create value across borders. The quest for “optimal” international diversification appears to be a futile academic exercise, and in emerging economies with institutional voids, relational networks – and more broadly, informal institutions – are unlikely to function as scalable substitutes for formal institutions. In global value chains (GVCs), many lead firms and their partners have been able to craft governance mechanisms that reduce bounded rationality and bounded reliability challenges, and it is also critical for them to use governance as a tool to create entrepreneurial space. Finally, many of the world’s largest companies have been on successful trajectories toward reducing their climate change footprint for a few decades. But these firm-specific trajectories are fraught with challenges and cannot just be imposed via unilateral, macro-level targets decided upon by individuals and institutions lacking a clear understanding of innovation and capital expenditure processes in business.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of patient participation on patient satisfaction and the subsequent effect on patient behavior outcomes

The research employs self-administered survey method to test hypotheses. The convenience sampling approach is used to collected data from 410 patients in metropolitan cities of India. The data are analyzed using SmartPLS to test the proposed model.

The results shows patient participation is positively related to behaviour outcomes and patient confidence and satisfaction mediate the effect of patient participation on adherence.

The study was limited to a small sample which may somewhat limit generalization of the findings. However, the findings, based on primary data, are insightful. Second, the current study was cross-sectional in nature, whereas a longitudinal study could had measured changes in perceptions over an extended time period.

The results provide interesting insights about the significance of patient participation in positive behavior outcome. These insights will enable health care professionals and government to formulate a suitable policy through which to encourage patient participation in health treatment regimes.

The paper demonstrates the influence of patient participation on behavior. There has been little research on this aspect in the Indian context to date, so this study offers an important guideline to the health care industry in relation to introducing customer empowerment into health care regimes.

This paper aims to provide insight in the set‐up and governance of niche (organic, local and/or regional) pork supply chains and networks (netchains) in the UK, Greece, and Spain, characterized by societal embeddedness and differentiation in food production.

The study consists of 29 expert interviews; it compares the different types of netchain innovation trajectories and concludes on each innovation driver and barrier what lessons can be learnt.

The findings clearly demonstrate the influence of the institutional setting on these netchains; whereas in the UK there is a clear focus on operational excellence and leadership, both in Greece and Spain the focus is on preservation of tradition and culture.

The paper provides directions for further research based on the conclusion that for niche pork netchains to enjoy market growth, effective netchain driven learning structures are needed to catalyze innovation.

Although a lot has been written on the adoption of innovations, the combination of the social network theory with innovation adoption theory seems to be absent in the present literature. So whereas normally theory on innovation adoption is looking at adoption of individual innovations, this study is taking a broader perspective by looking at the adoption of a range of innovations on a netchain level.

The purpose of this article is to analyze and compare between the frameworks of performance measurement in primary health care in the world. The subject of search is to compare if the frameworks of performance measurement in primary health care have an influence on performances of health centers.

We conducted a systematic review of the literature to (1) identify the conceptual framework for measuring quality management systems, (2) assess the effects of conceptual framework on quality improvement and quality of care outcomes. We opted for the frameworks that are more cited in the literature and we analyzed and compared between these frameworks.

Eight dimensions were identified for assessing performance in Primary Health Care Facilities “PHCF” in more than 50% frameworks: Effectiveness, Safety, Accessibility, Equity, Efficiency, Acceptability, Patient Centeredness and Timeliness.

The limits of this study can be represented by the following elements: (1) lack of exhaustiveness with regard to the current Frameworks. (2) The evaluation of reliability and validity of the qualitative studies remains difficult to appreciate. (3) Most of the evaluation tools of the primary health care are not validated yet. (4) The difference in performance levels between countries, especially for the developed countries and the multitude of the frames of measure of performance, limits the comparability of the results.

This study provides a conceptual and descriptive literature on the different conceptual frameworks for performance measurement in primary health care, and a practical and useful tool for comparison between the different conceptual frameworks. Several organisations of accreditation or certification introduced, developed, incorporated and checked the indicators of clinical quality in the organizations of health care. Some studies revealed links with the governance, the access, the continuity, the coordination, the efficiency and the strength primary care (Dionne Kringos, 2018). Improvements in the quality of care have been observed in the results of accreditation and certification bodies regarding hospital infection control infrastructure, organization and performance.

Even if the links are not established within the framework of a scientific research, quality approaches are generally recognized as an essential tool to help establishments to improve the quality and the safety of the patients. Until now, it is not still common to make evaluation of the quality of care in the “PHCF” to obtain the relevant information. The necessity of having performance measurement tools, which puts in coherence the piloting of the operational level with the strategy, to integrate the organizational objectives into the measures of operational performances and make estimate its structures towards a real management by the quality.

Neo-institutional theory suggests that organisations change occurs when institutional contradictions, caused by exogenous and endogenous dynamics, increase over time to the point where change can no longer be resisted. Human praxis will result, but only when sufficiently powerful interests are motivated to act. This paper aims to examine the role that the accreditation of business schools can play in increasing institutional contradictions and hence fostering organisational change towards stakeholder engagement and engagement with social responsibility and sustainability issues. Numerous accreditations are promulgated within the higher education and business school contexts and a number of these relate to, or have aspects that relate to, ethics, social responsibility and sustainability.

The paper first analyses the take up of accreditations across UK business schools and then uses a case study to illustrate and explore stakeholder engagement and changes related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability linked to accreditation processes.

Accreditations are found to be an increasingly common interest for UK business schools. Further, a number of these accreditations have evolved to incorporate issues related to ethics, social responsibility and sustainability that may cause institutional contradictions and may, therefore, have the potential to foster organisational change. Accreditation alone, however, is not sufficient and the authors find that sufficiently powerful interests need to be motivated to act and enable human praxis to affect change.

This paper draws on previous research that considers the role of accreditation in fostering change that has also been carried out in healthcare organisations, public and professional bodies. Its findings stem from an individual case study and as such further research is required to explore whether these findings can be extended and apply more generally in business schools and universities in different contexts.

This paper concludes by recommending that the newly established UK & Ireland Chapter of PRME encourages and supports signatory schools to further embed ethics, social responsibility and sustainability into all aspects of university life in the UK. This also provides an opportunity to engage with the accrediting bodies in order to further support the inclusion of stakeholder engagement and issues related to this agenda in their processes.

This paper contributes by introducing accreditation as an institutional pressure that may lead indirectly to organisational change and supports this with new evidence from an illustrative case study. Further, it draws on the role of institutional contradictions and human praxis that engender organisational change.

This article analyzes the decline of the Amsterdam squatters’ movement, examining not why the movement declined, but how. I argue decline is a critical moment for activists, one full of creative action. Decline is a defining moment through which the present, past, and future are interpreted. Narratives are key to understanding this process. As the movement emergence narrative declined, competing narratives of decline emerged. The widening chasm between the initial story and the movement's status compelled activists to choose between saving the movement or the narrative. I identify four critical moments during the movement's response to decline: they initially deny decline; after admitting decline, they debate tactics, followed by debating identities; and finally they demand decline as the only solution for the movement's problem. The movement moves through a process of increasing exclusion, working to resolve internal contradictions defined by the original narrative and identity.