Creating Coherence-Based Nurse Planning in the Perinatology Care System.

The combination of increasing demand and a shortage of nurses puts pressure on hospital care systems to use their current volume of resources more efficiently and effectively. This study focused on gaining insight into how nurses can be assigned to units in a perinatology care system to balance patient demand with the available nurses. Discrete event simulation was used to evaluate the what-if analysis of nurse flexibility strategies and care system configurations from a case study of the Perinatology Care System at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Modeling Patient Journeys for Demand Segments in Chronic Care, With an Illustration to Type 2 Diabetes.

Chronic care is an important area for cost-effective and efficient health service delivery. Matching demand and services for chronic care is not easy as patients may have different needs in different stages of the disease. More insight is needed into the complete patient journey to do justice to the services required in each stage of the disease, to the different experiences of patients in each part of the journey, and to outcomes in each stage.

The impact of accessibility and service quality on the frequency of patient visits to the primary diabetes care provider: results from a cross-sectional survey performed in six European countries.

Background: Visits to the primary diabetes care provider play a central role in diabetes care. Therefore, patients should attend their primary diabetes care providers whenever a visit is necessary. Parameters that might affect whether this condition is fulfilled include accessibility (in terms of travel distance and travel time to the practice), as well as aspects of service quality (for example in-practice waiting time and quality of the provider's communication with the patient).

Correction: The relationship between context, structure, and processes with outcomes of 6 regional diabetes networks in Europe.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Development of a universal short patient satisfaction questionnaire on the basis of SERVQUAL: Psychometric analyses with data of diabetes and stroke patients from six different European countries.

Objective: A short questionnaire which can be applied for assessing patient satisfaction in different contexts and different countries is to be developed.

Methods: Six items addressing tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy, and communication were analysed. The first five items stem from SERVQUAL (SERVice QUALity), the last stems from the discussion about SERVQUAL.