Quality in practice: applying the patient inventory method at a Danish psychiatric hospital.

Quality Problem: Patient care pathways should be organized according to the needs of the patients. This requires methods to assess whether the specific pathways ensure the right care for the right person at the right time and in the right setting.

Initial Assessment: Previous investigations indicate that ~25% of the patients in Danish hospitals experience inappropriate elements in their care pathways.

Patient Inventory: a quality improvement method.

Providing high quality care requires that patient care pathways are organized according to the needs of the patient. The organization of high-quality integrated patient care requires methods to assess 'appropriateness' of the care pathways to identify challenges in delivering the right procedure, for the right person at the right time and setting and with the most appropriate use of resources. There is a need for methods to assess appropriateness that can easily be implemented in daily clinical practice.

Diagnosis and mortality of emergency department patients in the North Denmark region.

Background: Emergency departments handle a large proportion of acute patients. In 2007, it was recommended centralizing the Danish healthcare system and establishing emergency departments as the main common entrance for emergency patients. Since this reorganization, few studies describing the emergency patient population in this new setting have been carried out and none describing diagnoses and mortality.