First experiences with patient safety initiatives in Greek rural primary care. Action research by the LINNEAUS collaboration on patient safety in primary care.

Background: Accreditation of primary care organizations within Greece is still in its infancy. Our task in Greece was to attempt to introduce a patient safety initiative in a local area, focusing on developing minimum standards for accreditation, assess whether a pragmatic approach would engage physicians, and provide evidence of improvement.

Objective: To use monitoring of clinical performance as the basis for the launch of an accreditation system for primary care in Greece and to report on the process and lessons learnt.

Developing a European urban health indicator system: results of EURO-URHIS 1.

More than half of the world's population now live in cities, including over 70% in Europe. Cities bring opportunities but can be unhealthy places to live. The poorest urban dwellers live in the worst environments and are at the greatest risk of poor health outcomes.

PARENT joint action: increasing the added value of patient registries in a cross-border setting.

Patient registries are poorly interoperable and as a result data exchange or aggregation across organizations, regions and countries for secondary purposes (i.e. research and public health) is difficult to perform.

Implementing clinical protocols in oncology: quality gaps and the learning curve phenomenon.

Background: The quality improvement effort in clinical practice has focused mostly on 'performance quality', i.e. on the development of comprehensive, evidence-based guidelines.

Oxygen availability during orthotopic liver transplantation.

Studies have stressed the role of adequate tissue oxygenation in the light of an optimal patient outcome and allograft viability in liver transplantation. The practice of monitoring conventional hemodynamic parameters during liver transplantation could be complemented by parameters assessing real oxygen availability. In the present prospective study, real arterial available oxygen content (CavlO(2)) and its extraction ratio (O(2)ERavl) were calculated.