Presents a case study of hospital quality assurance in a regional hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The focus is on the quality monitoring method used in the hospital. While the quality monitoring method may not be perfect, it does serve as a basis for evaluating the standard of care and ensuring...

Improving quality and productivity simultaneously is vital to organizational competitiveness. Although continuous improvement is accepted as the objective for world class competition, it is not clear as to which interventions achieve the best performance, which variables intervene by enhancing...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to further the theoretical understanding of leadership in emergency type organisations by modelling contextual aspects which are assumed to influence it. Design/methodology/approach – A theoretical analysis followed by an operationalisation of key...

Purpose Legitimizing health-care networks over time is crucial to the survival of the networks, but studies providing insight into the motivational paradigms used to legitimize networks and mergers are missing. This study aims to contribute by analyzing which motivational paradigms, namely,...

Purpose – Increasing globalisation of the healthcare sector suggests that there may be new competitive opportunities for emerging economies in this price‐sensitive sector. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which emerging economies, and in particular the four major Asian...

The article features a study based on postal questionnaires and structured interviews, targeting senior members of the hospital pharmacy profession. The aim was to examine the potential of practice and performance benchmarking as a means of improving competence and capabilities within the...

In the field of inventory management, it is a well‐known fact that centralisation, by sharing the risk between several entities, helps reduce the inventory required to provide a certain level of service. In practice, centralisation can be difficult to accomplish, because improvements to the...

Due to the diversity of its players, the American healthcare sector has experimented with different types of integrated supply chain management systems for medical supplies. In the 1980s, US distributors were offering customers the so‐called stockless replenishment method, whereby the...

The paper presents the main results of a benchmarking project involving eight Italian hospitals. The project sought to examine and compare the organisational processes adopted in different operating blocks, i.e. complex organisational units comprising many different actors whose performance...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper, in the context of hospital wards, is to test a model in which the ward manager's orientation towards a given organizational climate contributes to determine the climate perceived by medical and nursing staff, and this, in turn, has an impact on patient...