Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the barriers and enablers to lean implementation as part of an imaging quality improvement programme from a socio-cultural perspective. Design/methodology/approach: An in-depth 33 month ethnographic study, using observation and qualitative...

Model selection strategies play an important, if not explicit, role in quantitative research. The inferential properties of these strategies are largely unknown, therefore, there is little basis for recommending (or avoiding) any particular set of strategies. In this paper, we evaluate several...

Background: A validated productivity questionnaire, the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment questionnaire for Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (WPAI-GERD), exists for Swedish patients with GERD. Objective: To assess responsiveness to change of the WPAI-GERD and construct validity of the...

SummaryNearly one tenth (8 per cent) of each cohort of school leavers in Northern Ireland experience long spells of unemployment and inactivity (“Status 0â€) between the ages of 16 and 18. This is important because many such young people are likely to end up unemployed and long-term...

The English version of the WPAI-GERD showed good cross-sectional construct validity, and results indicated that the WPAI-GERD is responsive to change. Although the results also indicated that longitudinal construct validity may be poor, the overall findings suggest that further study of the...

This paper argues that until about 10 years ago the caring role of the nurse was restricted primarily to the biological functioning of the patient. The more recent concern with communication and patient 'psychology' in the nursing literature suggests that nursing has succeeded, through this...

Using two longitudinal and nationally representative datasets, this study employs a cross-cohort analysis to examine age, cohort and period effects in the prevalence of sleep loss through worry for people over the age of 50 in the UK. The likelihood of reporting sleep loss through worry is...

This paper briefly describes how the genealogical method, as derived from Foucault's work, might be used to explore the problem of chronic illness. The genealogical method is differentiated from other qualitative methods, from epidemiology, and from the history of ideas. Finally, the particular...

Evidence-based medicine enables the profession to resist at least some of the challenges to its traditional autonomy: if informed doctors provide what is scientifically proven to be the best care there is less justification for external constraints. Yet, this defensive strategy depends on...

 The role of diagnostic labels in medicine is usually that of labelling an illness as a means of communication. Control over labelling processes in medicine is ordinarily imposed via medical schools, textbooks, education or by diagnostic manuals. Diagnostic labels often change following new...