An Approach to Establishing International Quality Standards for Medical Travel.

The number of individuals traveling abroad is increasing annually. The rising popularity of medical travel and the absence of clear minimum quality requirements in this area urgently call for the development of international standards to ensure good practice and patient safety. The aim of this study is to identify the key domains in medical travel where quality standards should be established.

Evidence on global medical travel.

The potential benefits of travelling across national borders to obtain medical treatment include improved care, decreased costs and reduced waiting times. However, medical travel involves additional risks, compared to obtaining treatment domestically. We review the publicly-available evidence on medical travel.

Best Practice: Medical Training From an International Perspective.

This study seeks to help inform the further development of medical education and training for primary care in Germany. It explores approaches to medical education and training in a small number of high-income countries and how these seek to address shortages of doctors practising in primary or ambulatory care through reforming their education and training systems. It does so by means of an exploratory analysis of the experiences of three countries: England, France and the Netherlands, with Germany included for comparison.

A new resource for identifying and assessing the impacts of research.

The impact case studies submitted by UK Higher Education Institutions to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014 provide a rich resource of text describing impact beyond academia and across all disciplines. Using text mining techniques and qualitative assessment, the 6,679 non-redacted case studies submitted were analysed and the impact described was found to be multidisciplinary, multi-impactful, and multinational. By digging deeper into the data, the health gains from health research in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Years was also estimated.

Regulating Quality and Safety of Health and Social Care: International Experiences.

This study is concerned with "standards of quality and safety" within health and social care systems. Care standards are intended to support efforts in maintaining and improving the quality of care; they have been developed across countries, although the ways in which they are implemented and applied differs between nations. Taking a range of six countries, we review the regulatory mechanisms that have been implemented to ensure that essential standards of care are applied and are being adhered to, and consider the range of policy instruments used to encourage and ensure continuous quality improvement.

CLAHRCs in practice: combined knowledge transfer and exchange strategies, cultural change, and experimentation.

Objectives: The nine NIHR CLAHRCs are collaborations between universities and local NHS organizations that seek to improve patient outcomes through the conduct and application of applied health research. The theoretical and practical context within which the CLAHRCs were set up was characterized by a considerable degree of uncertainty, and the CLAHRCs were established as a natural experiment.

Methods: We adopted a formative and emergent evaluation approach.

Stakeholder challenges in purchasing medical devices for patient safety.

Objective: This study identifies the stakeholders who have a role in medical device purchasing within the wider system of health-care delivery and reports on their particular challenges to promote patient safety during purchasing decisions.

Methods: Data was collected through observational work, participatory workshops, and semi-structured qualitative interviews, which were analyzed and coded. The study takes a systems-based and engineering design approach to the study.

General practitioner experience and perception of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) care pathways: a multimethod research study.

Objectives: This is a pilot study with the objective of investigating general practitioner (GP) perceptions and experiences in the referral of mentally ill and behaviourally disturbed children and adolescents.

Design: Quantitative analyses on patient databases were used to ascertain the source of referrals into Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and identify the relative contribution from GP practices. Qualitative semistructured interviews were then used to explore challenges faced by GPs in referring to CAMHS.