Nick Black

..Other countries with a unified health system could learn much from the English experience. Countries with pluralist systems might benefit from specific parts of the experience...

..Selecting peer reviewers who will provide high-quality reviews is a central task of editors of biomedical journals...

..To describe the impact of surgery for stress incontinence on the severity of symptoms, other mental and physical symptoms, and overall health. To describe the incidence of postoperative complications...

..We studied whether non-response rates to post-operative questionnaires are associated with patients' characteristics and organisational features of providers...

..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...

..Our objectives were to determine the relative frequency of use of different metrics that can be derived from PROMs, explore clinicians' and patients' views of the options available, and make recommendations...

..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...

..Patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) are being used to inform national quality indicators for health care providers in England. Our objective was to explore patients' views of different formats and content of these data displays...

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

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

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

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

..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...

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..Nonresponse to patient-reported outcome (PRO) questionnaires after surgery might bias the results. Our aim was to gauge the potential impact of nonresponse bias by comparing the outcomes of early and late responders...

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

..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...

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

..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...

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..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...

..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 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...

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

..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...

..To review the literature on the impact of compositional format and content of quantitative data displays on people's comprehension, choice and preference...

..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...

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

..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...

..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...

..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...

..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...

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