Patient choice in the NHS: How critical are facilities services in influencing patient choice?

Purpose – From December 2005, patients in the UK needing an operation will be offered a choice of four or five. These could be NHS trusts, foundation trusts, treatment centres, private hospitals or practitioners with a special interest operating within primary care. This is called “Choose and Book”. The purpose of this research is to discover how critical facilities management service factors are in influencing a choice of hospital. The aim is to find out what the most important influencing factors are to people when making a choice of which hospital to have their operation. If facilities services and the patient environment are influencing factors in the patient experience, which are considered critical. Design/methodology/approach – Focus groups were used as the primary method of data collection. Findings – The study finds that all three focus groups placed more importance on clinical factors than facilities factors. High standards of cleanliness and good hospital food were the two facilities factors that participants in all groups placed most importance on. Cleanliness was highlighted by all three groups as a top facilities priority for the NHS at the moment and there was a general perception that private hospitals have better standards of cleanliness. Practical implications – By understanding how important facilities factors are in influencing patient choice and which ones have a critical impact, it will help NHS trusts focus on where they channel their resources.</p

An experimental evaluation of head-up display formats

Three types of head-up display format are investigated. Type 1 is an unreferenced (conventional) flight director, type 2 is a ground referenced flight path display, and type 3 is a ground referenced director. Formats are generated by computer and presented by reflecting collimation against a simulated forward view in flight. Pilots, holding commercial licenses, fly approaches in the instrument flight mode and in a combined instrument and visual flight mode. The approaches are in wind shear with varied conditions of visibility, offset, and turbulence. The displays are equivalent in pure tracking but there is a slight advantage for the unreferenced director in poor conditions. Flight path displays are better for tracking in the combined flight mode, possibly because of poor director control laws and the division of attention between superimposed fields. Workloads is better for the type 2 displays. The flight path and referenced director displays are criticized for effects of symbol motion and field limiting. In the subjective judgment of pilots familiar with the director displays, they are rated clearly better than path displays, with a preference for the unreferenced director. There is a fair division of attention between superimposed fields

Land use/land cover mapping (1:25000) of Taiwan, Republic of China by automated multispectral interpretation of LANDSAT imagery

Three methods were tested for collection of the training sets needed to establish the spectral signatures of the land uses/land covers sought due to the difficulties of retrospective collection of representative ground control data. Computer preprocessing techniques applied to the digital images to improve the final classification results were geometric corrections, spectral band or image ratioing and statistical cleaning of the representative training sets. A minimal level of statistical verification was made based upon the comparisons between the airphoto estimates and the classification results. The verifications provided a further support to the selection of MSS band 5 and 7. It also indicated that the maximum likelihood ratioing technique can achieve more agreeable classification results with the airphoto estimates than the stepwise discriminant analysis

Single-stage experimental evaluation of boundary layer blowing techniques for high lift stator blades. 1 - Compressor design

Boundary layer blowing techniques for high lift stator blades in axial flow compressor

Random harmonic analysis program, L221 (TEV156). Volume 1: Engineering and usage

A digital computer program capable of calculating steady state solutions for linear second order differential equations due to sinusoidal forcing functions is described. The field of application of the program, the analysis of airplane response and loads due to continuous random air turbulence, is discussed. Optional capabilities including frequency dependent input matrices, feedback damping, gradual gust penetration, multiple excitation forcing functions, and a static elastic solution are described. Program usage and a description of the analysis used are presented

Korean coastal water depth/sediment and land cover mapping (1:25,000) by computer analysis of LANDSAT imagery

Computer analysis was applied to single date LANDSAT MSS imagery of a sample coastal area near Seoul, Korea equivalent to a 1:50,000 topographic map. Supervised image processing yielded a test classification map from this sample image containing 12 classes: 5 water depth/sediment classes, 2 shoreline/tidal classes, and 5 coastal land cover classes at a scale of 1:25,000 and with a training set accuracy of 76%. Unsupervised image classification was applied to a subportion of the site analyzed and produced classification maps comparable in results in a spatial sense. The results of this test indicated that it is feasible to produce such quantitative maps for detailed study of dynamic coastal processes given a LANDSAT image data base at sufficiently frequent time intervals

Application of future remote sensing systems to irrigation

Area estimates of irrigated crops and knowledge of crop type are required for modeling water consumption to assist farmers, rangers, and agricultural consultants in scheduling irrigation for distributed management of crop yields. Information on canopy physiology and soil moisture status on a spatial basis is potentially available from remote sensors, so the questions to be addressed relate to: (1) timing (data frequency, instantaneous and integrated measurement); and scheduling (widely distributed spatial demands); (2) spatial resolution; (3) radiometric and geometric accuracy and geoencoding; and (4) information/data distribution. This latter should be overnight, with no central storage, onsite capture, and low cost

Monitoring forest canopy alteration around the world with digital analysis of LANDSAT imagery

There are no author-identified significant results in this report

Analysis of the dynamics of shifting cultivation in the tropical forests of Northern Thailand using LANDSAT modeling and classification of LANDSAT imagery

There are no author-identified significant results in this report