"Pixie dust".

Purpose: Creating a culture of patient safety and developing a skilled workforce are major challenges for health managers. However, there is limited information to guide managers as to how patient safety culture can be improved. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of reflexivity and develop a model for magnifying the effect of patient safety culture and demonstrating a link to improved perceptions of quality of care.

Bricks-and-mortar and patient safety culture.

Purpose Building a new hospital requires a major investment in capital infrastructure. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of bricks-and-mortar on patient safety culture before and two years after the move of a large tertiary hospital to a greenfield site. The difference in patient safety perceptions between clinical and non-clinical staff is also explored.

Dynamic workplace interactions for improving patient safety climate.

Purpose Employee engagement (EE), supervisor support (SS) and interprofessional collaboration (IPC) are important contributors to patient safety climate (PSC). The purpose of this paper is to propose and empirically test a model that suggests the presence of a three-way interaction effect between EE, IPC and SS in creating a stronger PSC. Design/methodology/approach Using validated tools to measure EE, SS, IPC and PSC data were collected from a questionnaire of 250 clinical and support staff in an Australian health service.

Novel oral drug administration in an animal model of neuroleptic therapy.

A novel method of oral drug administration was used in a neuroleptic animal study. Seventy male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly subdivided into four groups, which were treated with clozapine, haloperidol, diazepam or a vehicle solution (5% sucrose solution). Oral drug treatment was achieved by training the rats to drink the drug of choice mixed with five percent sucrose or vehicle solution from a syringe.

Behavioural effects of parafascicular thalamic lesions in an animal model of parkinsonism.

We recently reported that the centromedian-parafascicular thalamic complex (CM-Pf) degenerates in Parkinson's disease and progressive supranuclear palsy. The contribution of such thalamic pathology to disease symptoms has not yet been established. The present study therefore investigated the behavioural impact of lesioning the corresponding thalamic region (termed Pf) on a range of behaviours present in rodents.