Background The importance of Small Area Variation Analysis for policy-making contrasts with the scarcity of work on the validity of the statistics used in these studies. Our study aims at 1) determining whether variation in utilization rates between health areas is higher than would be expected by chance, 2) estimating the statistical power of the variation statistics; and 3) evaluating the ability of different statistics to compare the variability among different procedures regardless of the...| BioMed Central
Publish with BMC Health Services Research, an open access journal with 2.7 Impact Factor and 26 days to first decision.| BioMed Central
Background Palliative care can improve the quality of life of people with dementia. However, nurses and other healthcare professionals often lack the confidence and skills to provide palliative care and struggle to initiate timely conversations about wishes and needs for palliative care. The DEDICATED approach aims to enhance the quality of palliative dementia care by improving knowledge, competencies, and interprofessional collaboration of healthcare professionals. This study explores its im...| BioMed Central
Background Patients as active partners in their personal healthcare are key drivers to reducing costs, securing an effective usage of resources, and ensuring patient-provider satisfaction. Even though these benefits are acknowledged, a theoretical framework for the plethora of concepts used in this context, such as patient engagement, patient empowerment, or patient involvement is missing. Furthermore, the heterogeneous or synonymous usage of these terms leads to miscommunication, missing sta...| BioMed Central