ABSTRACT: By international standards, Ireland is a relatively small dairy producer. However, the industry plays a critical role to the national economy, accounting for approximately 3% of national gross domestic product. This paper presents insights into udder health and intramammary antibiotic usage on Irish dairy farms during 2003-2010, based on ...

The number of people in immediate need of anti-retroviral treatment (ART) in the southern African region continues to significantly exceed the capacity of health systems there to provide it. Approaches to this complex rationing dilemma have evolved in different directions. The ethical concepts of fairness and equity have been suggested ...

Primary health care (PHC) mandates the provision of services delivered by a collaborative team of providers, ultimately to improve quality of care and health status. Considering the challenges related to interprofessional collaboration within novel PHC models, we explored how the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Classification of Functioning, Disability and ...

As the U.S. health care system enters a new era, the importance of team-based care approaches grows. How is the health care community ensuring that providers and administrators are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs) foundational for effective teamwork? Are these KSAs transferring into daily practice? This review ...

Based on empirical research about teamwork in human service organizations in Sweden, the concept of collaborative health (CH) encapsulates the physical, psychological and social health resources the individual uses in teamwork; resources which at the same time are influenced by the teamwork. My argument built on empirical research leading up ...

Despite the call for open and team-based approaches to error disclosure, the participation beyond physicians and managers is not a common practice in health care settings. Moreover, within the growing literature base on error disclosure, team-based error disclosure is an emerging concept. To address this knowledge gap, a study was ...

In service industries other than health care, unit employees who report a favorable service climate-characterized by commitment to a team concept and intrateam interactions that are supportive, collegial, and collaborative-have high levels of consumer satisfaction and work unit productivity. The authors evaluated whether similar primary care team (PCT) functioning influenced ...

Infusion therapy is one of the most invasive, complex, and pervasive therapies in the current health care system, yet there is very little investment in organizational knowledge management and intellectual human capital required to maintain patient safety. Catheter complications, fluid and medication errors, inadequate nutritional support, and transfusion of incompatible ...

American health care is about to undergo the most dramatic transformation in many a decade. And the hard work begins right in your own C-suite. As a hospital leader, take a hard look at your executive team-including yourself-to make sure you have the right mix of skills for this new ...

Empirical research on multi-disciplinary health care teams has yet to explore the development of mutual understanding between team members in the course of their collective clinical decision-making. This paper addresses this gap in the literature directly by examining changes in mutual understanding and the extent to which its facilitation is ...

Increasingly, primary health care teams (PHCTs) depend on the contributions of multiple professionals. However, conflict is inevitable on teams. This article examines PHCTs members' experiences with conflict and responses to conflict. This phenomenological study was conducted using in-depth interviews with 121 participants from 16 PHCTs (10 urban and 6 rural) ...

The term shoe-leather epidemiology is often synonymous with field epidemiology or intervention epidemiology. All 3 terms imply investigations initiated in response to urgent public health problems and for which the investigative team does much of its work in the field (i.e., outside the office or laboratory). Alexander D. Langmuir is ...

Interest in partnering with faith-based organizations (FBOs) to address health disparities has grown in recent years. Yet relatively little is known about these types of partnerships. As part of an evaluation of the Institute for Faith and Public Health Collaborations, representatives of 34 faith-health teams (n = 61) completed semi-structured ...

Team-based primary care offers the potential to dramatically improve the quality and efficiency of care, but its broader adoption is hindered by an education system that trains health professions in silos. Collaborative models that educate multiple practitioners together are needed to create a new generation of health professionals able to ...

This paper presents and evaluates a methodological approach aiming at analysing some of the complex interaction between patients and different health care practitioners working together in teams. Qualitative health care research describes the values, perceptions and conceptions of patients and practitioners. In modern clinical work patients and professional practitioners often ...

Multidisciplinary groups are common in the health care arena, from operating teams to mental health treatment groups to guideline development groups. Differences among group members in information, background, training and skills can potentially help groups reach good decisions and complete complex tasks in variable circumstances. Too often, however, differences in ...

BACKGROUND: Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a proactive risk assessment tool used to identify potential vulnerabilities in complex, high-risk processes and to generate remedial actions before the processes result in adverse events. FMEA is increasingly used to proactively assess and improve the safety of complex health care processes ...

The aim of this study was to explore what women with recurrent ovarian cancer perceived as important in their communication with the health care team. Interviews were conducted with 12 women at the end of chemotherapy treatment at a department of gynecological oncology in central Sweden. The interviews were subjected ...

Lean production is a process management philosophy that examines organizational processes from a customer perspective with the goal of limiting the use of resources to those processes that create value for the end customer. Lean manufacturing emphasizes increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, and using methods to decide what matters rather than ...

INTRODUCTION: In 2006, the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers convened a collaborative to systematically improve health care delivery for patients with diabetes in 17 community health centers. Our goal was to identify facilitators of and barriers to success reported by teams that participated in this collaborative. METHODS: The collaborative's ...

This study aims to contribute to the limited set of interactional studies of health occupational relations. A "negotiated order" perspective was applied to a multi-site setting to articulate the ways in which clinicians' roles, accountabilities and contributions to patient care are shaped by the care setting and are influenced by ...

Collaborative interdisciplinary working is central to contemporary health policy. The specialized and co-ordinated multidisciplinary care provided in stroke units is considered to contribute to improved patient outcomes in such units. However, how stroke unit teams co-ordinate their work is not clearly understood. This paper reports on a grounded theory study ...

This descriptive exploratory study analyzed user satisfaction with the care received at a Family Health Unit in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil. In total, 40 users from families registered in the FHU were selected, using key informants and the snowball sampling technique, and interviewed. Thematic content analysis was used to analyze the ...

PURPOSE: The study aims to explore the meaning of interdisciplinary collaboration within the context of health care. ORGANIZING FRAMEWORK: Rodgers' Evolutionary View of Concept Analysis was employed to identify attributes, antecedents, and consequences of interdisciplinary collaboration. METHODS: Utilizing an inductive approach, a systematic review of the literature was undertaken in ...

BACKGROUND: The application of non-technical skills (NTSs) in health care has previously been described in other health-care educational programmes. NTSs are behavioural principles such as leadership, task distribution and communication. The aim of this study was to identify NTSs suitable for improving team performance in multi-professional cardiac arrest teams, and ...

This study determined the effects and costs of a multifactorial, interdisciplinary team approach to falls prevention. Randomized controlled trial of 109 older adults who are at risk for falls. This was a six-month multifactorial and evidence-based prevention strategy involving an interdisciplinary team. The primary outcome was number of falls during ...

Australia continues to explore methods to restructure primary health care services to meet stressors within the health system. The primary health care strategy and its support for larger general practices and multidisciplinary team contributions, raise opportunities for re-engineering general practice services.

In Wales, the National Leadership and Innovation Agency in Healthcare (NLIAH) Change Agent Team (CAT) has found that its service improvement methodology of Communities of Practice (CoP), where motivated frontline staff in health and social care come together to share issues and develop solutions to mutual problems, is a highly ...

In this paper, the director and the administrator of the MacArthur Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health reflect on the evolution of the network. Against the backdrop of the science of "team science," they describe the history and process of the network including the forging of a group agenda, the ...

This study identified that hospitalized elder persons and their family preferred active or collaborative level of participation (LOP) in discharge destination decisions, whereas health care team members (HCTMs) preferred passive LOP. Recognition of preferred LOP by HCTMs is instrumental to developing discharge plans that are tailored to the individual's need ...

In 2002, the Egypt Ministry of Health and Population faced the challenge of improving access to and quality of services in rural Upper Egypt in the face of low morale among health workers and managers.From 1992 to 2000, the Ministry, with donor support, had succeeded in reducing the nationwide maternal ...

A detailed family health history is currently the most potentially useful tool for diagnosis and risk assessment in clinical genetics. We developed and evaluated the usability and analytic validity of a patient-driven web-based family health history collection and analysis tool. Health Heritage(©) guides users through the collection of their family ...

The timely incorporation of health research into the routine practice of individual health practitioners and interprofessional teams is a widely recognized and ongoing challenge. Health professional engagement and learning is an important cog in the wheel of knowledge translation; passive dissemination of evidence through journals and clinical practice guidelines is ...

OBJECTIVE: To explore the types of communication used within primary health care teams (PHCTs), with a particular focus on the mechanisms teams use to promote optimal clinical and administrative information sharing. DESIGN: A descriptive qualitative study. SETTING: Primary health care teams in Ontario between August 2004 and October 2005. PARTICIPANTS: ...

Employees' perceptions of the emotional requirements of their work role are considered a necessary antecedent of emotion work. The impact of these requirements on the emotions employees display, their well-being, and their clients' satisfaction has been explored in previous research. Emotional requirements have been characterized as organizationally-based expectations (e.g., Brotheridge ...

Traditionally, standards of care have been developed by a panel of experts and then implemented by a multidisciplinary team. We studied the feasibility of involving health professionals of all grades and policymakers in the establishment of standards for postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) in Malawi. The team established these standards using evidence ...

Error in health services delivery has long been recognised as a significant cause of inpatient morbidity and mortality. Root-cause analyses have cited communication failure as one of the contributing factors in adverse events. The formalised fighter pilot mission brief and debrief formed the basis of the National Aeronautics and Space ...

BACKGROUND: Although often used in health care settings as a method for continuous quality improvement, experience with the breakthrough collaborative in nonclinical health care settings is limited. In this article, we report pilot data from a social services collaborative conducted in 2007 to 2009 in Sweden, with special attention given ...

This article forms part of a series looking at the relationship between diet and good health, and the role of the dietitian in the primary health care team. This article discusses the assessment and dietary management of coeliac disease, a T-cell mediated reaction to gluten.

The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) depends heavily on advanced biomedical devices for monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment. Developing safe and effective devices for use in the NICU requires collaborative research and testing efforts between the bioengineering and biomedical disciplines. However, no mechanism exists to match the needs of the clinical ...

High-reliability organisations are those, such as within the aviation industry, which operate in complex, hazardous environments and yet despite this are able to balance safety and effectiveness. Crew resource management (CRM) training is used to improve the non-technical skills of aviation crews and other high-reliability teams. To date, CRM within ...

Since the 2003 launch of NC Health Info, the National Library of Medicine has encouraged the development of Go Local databases. A team of Go Local enthusiasts at North Dakota's only medical school library wanted to obtain NLM funding and build a resource for their rural state. Although short on ...

The health care industry is often overlooked as a major source of industrial pollution, but as this becomes more recognized, many health care facilities are beginning to pursue green efforts. The OR is a prime example of an area of health care that is working to lessen its environmental impact. ...

BACKGROUND AND METHODS: Medical students, nursing students, and other health care professionals in training were integrated with health care workers on interprofessional quality improvement (QI) teams at our academic health center. Teams received training in QI, accompanied by expert QI mentoring, with dual goals of increasing expertise in improvement while ...

This qualitative case study aimed to analyze how health team professionals perceive the work objective in one emergency unit. The place of study was a hospital emergency ward in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Data collection was conducted through observation and semi-structured interview. The results disclose the ...

INTRODUCTION: Stakeholder cooperation in return to work has been increasingly emphasised in research, while studies on how such cooperation works in practise are scarce. This article investigates the relationship between professionals in Swedish interdisciplinary rehabilitation teams, and the aim of the article is to determine the participants' definitions and uses ...

Producing a journal that regularly offers clear articulations from many domains of relationship in health and healthcare, and occasionally offers a new articulation of the patterns that connect across domains, is the first goal the new editorial team for Families, Systems, & Health has set itself. The second is making ...

BACKGROUND: Disaster medical assistance teams (DMATs) have responded to numerous international disasters in recent years. As part of a national survey, the present study was designed to evaluate Australian DMAT experience in relation to health and safety aspects of actual deployment. METHODS: Data were collected via an anonymous mailed survey ...

Successful transition of students to competent work-ready health professionals requires an ability to work in health care teams. Poor communication and teamwork practice has been implicated as a contributing source of error affecting patient safety. Traditional university curriculum structures severely limit the time that students from different professions can spend ...

BACKGROUND: Calls for disaster medical assistance teams (DMATs) are likely to continue in response to international disasters. As part of a national survey, the present study was designed to evaluate Australian DMAT experience in relation to pre- and post-deployment health care. METHODS: Data was collected via an anonymous mailed survey ...