Practitioners within the criminal justice system have been cautious about claiming that their work with offenders directly impacts on the level of subsequent re-offending. This article provides an overview of the generation and use of evidence on effectiveness within the criminal justice system,...

Health care practitioners (especially doctors) have always given assurances that what they do is efficacious. But in the past 50 years justification of the effectiveness of health care interventions has attained a new prominence. Evidence, at least notionally, now lies at the heart of health...

Healthcare professionals are increasingly held accountable for the standards of care that they provide. The focus of control for this accountability can be either internal or external activity to the professional body and can use implicit or explicit quality assessment techniques. The science of...

Professional boundaries make inter-professional communication, collaboration and teamwork more challenging and can jeopardise the provision of safe, high quality patient care. This in-depth interview study conducted in three UK acute hospital organisations in 2003–2004 explored how...

This paper examines the relationship between senior management team culture and organizational performance in English acute hospitals (NHS Trusts) over three time periods between 2001/2002 and 2007/2008. We use a validated culture rating instrument, the Competing Values Framework, to measure...

Long waiting times for inpatient treatment in the UK National Health Service have been a source of popular and political concern, and therefore a target for policy initiatives. In the London Patient Choice Project, patients at risk of breaching inpatient waiting time targets were offered the...

In consumer theory, the principles of Lancaster's characteristics approach and hedonic pricing appear to offer the most promising insight into choice when qualitative aspects are important. The paper reconciles these principles with the family of non-parametric frontier estimation methods known...