Nick Black

..The objective was to measure the impact of surgery on a representative sample of patients so as to determine whether or not overutilisation of surgery is occurring...

..One of the major advantages of nonrandomized studies is that they can make use of existing large, high quality databases that have been assembled for other reasons and therefore provide excellent value-for-money...

..While recognising the contributions of the 'great men of medicine', the book takes as much interest in the six ambulance stations built by the London County Council (1915) as the grandest teaching hospitals...

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..The application of economic models of 'payback' would fail to recognize such contributions which, in turn, could threaten future funding of health services research...

..The staggering increase in hospital beds in Dartford in the late 19th century is just an exceptional example of the way health services so often develop...

..It is widely accepted that the passive dissemination of national clinical guidance has little or no impact on practice...

..In addition, use of existing clinical databases is severely limited by a lack of knowledge of their availability...

..Effective interprofessional management of individual patients depends upon confidence in colleagues' skills and good communication. Factors that hamper these must be addressed in the development of this system of referral...

..To demonstrate the importance of measuring both the horizontal and vertical components of equity in order to examine whether patients are receiving the health care that they need...

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..Modernization' policies aimed to alter the boundaries around critical care and create a comprehensive, seamless service...

..For health performance indicators derived from skewed distributions, funnel plots designed with symmetric control limits may increase the risk of false alarms about poor performance...

..To evaluate the impact and cost effectiveness of a programme to transform adult critical care throughout England initiated in late 2000...

..To compare two consensus development methods commonly used for developing clinical guidelines in terms of the judgments produced, closeness of consensus, amount of change between rounds, concordance with research evidence and reliability...

..To compare general practitioners' perceptions of chronic fatigue syndrome and irritable bowel syndrome and to consider the implications of their perceptions for treatment...

..To demonstrate the importance of measuring both the horizontal and vertical components of equity in order to examine whether patients are receiving the health care that they need...

..We used an innovative approach to develop a referral guideline for patients with chronic knee pain that explicitly incorporates patients' preferences...

..The challenge for this research is that the findings are valued and used by health service professionals, managers and users...

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..To describe the use and characteristics of national confidential enquiries (NCEs) into adverse outcomes of healthcare in high-income countries and to review the evidence of their impact...

..Their accounts suggest that modernisation can be a professionalising strategy, with responses to change being neither resistant nor compliant, but sceptically strategic...

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..It is hoped that this will encourage research in this crucial area of health services by facilitating a coherent approach to the diverse needs identified...

..Given the benefits to the public of such research activities, methods need to be found to ensure the continuation of such research while meeting legitimate concerns about individual privacy and confidentiality...

..Our aim was to compare the case-mix and patients' reported outcomes of surgery in ISTCs and in NHS providers...

..The Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) Co-morbidity Consensus Group was convened to improve existing instruments that identify co-morbidity in International Classification of Diseases tenth revision administrative data...

..To determine the value of a single item on patients' satisfaction with their condition for assessing outcome in four common surgical procedures...

..CONCLUSIONS: Severe sepsis is common and presents a major challenge for clinicians, managers, and healthcare policymakers. Intensive care unit admissions meeting severe sepsis criteria have a high mortality rate and high resource use...

..To analyse data from a trial and report the frequencies with which major and minor errors are detected at a general medical journal, the types of errors missed and the impact of training on error detection...

..To assess whether results obtained in secondary care can be extrapolated to primary care and suggest how future trials should be designed to provide more rigorous evidence...

..Conventional guidelines have limited effect on changing physicians' test ordering. We sought to determine the effect of patient-specific ratings vs conventional guidelines on appropriate investigation of angina...

..To determine the effects of training on the quality of peer review...

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..Many journals give authors who submit papers the opportunity to suggest reviewers. Use of these reviewers varies by journal and little is known about the quality of the reviews they produce...