From the Editor,
It is with pleasure; I present to our readers, another journal issue of outstanding contributions from healthcare researchers and practitioners from around the globe.
Kamalasanan, Sathiyamurthi and Subbarayalu in their paper, “A tool to assess the quality perception of healthcare employees,” deal with the issue of employee perceptions of healthcare quality in hospitals in India. They present a study offering evidence of reliability and validity of the newly developed Health Care Perception Scale for the assessment of employee perception of the quality of services offered in selected hospitals in India, with potential applications in other contexts.
In their paper, “Development and validation of the Expanded Mindful Eating Scale,” Kawasaki, Akamatsu, Omori, Sugawara, Yamazaki, Matsumoto, Fujiwara, Iwakabe and Kobayashi develop and validate the Expanded Mindful Eating Scale and an expanded mindful eating model created for the promotion of health and sustainability.
The focus of the paper, “The cost-effectiveness of insulin analogs and regular insulin for diabetes control: a case study in Iran,” by Pakdaman, Akbari, Dehghan, Asgharzadeh and Namayandeh, is to present research on the cost-effectiveness of insulin analogs versus regular insulin for diabetes control in Yazd Diabetes Center in 2017. According to authors, results of the study are helpful to the government to allocate more resources to apply the cost-effective method of the treatment and to protect patients with diabetes from the high cost of treatment.
In their paper, “Improving the US hospital reimbursement: how patient satisfaction in HCAHPS reflects lower readmission,” Chen, Cates, Taylor and Cates, examine whether patient readmission rates are associated with patient satisfaction and Medicare reimbursement rates in the US hospitals. The findings of their research suggest that a high-readmission rate is not associated with lower payment. Such results appear to conflict with the goals of value-based purchasing programs, which seek to penalize hospitals financially for higher readmission rates.
The paper, “Identifying contextually relevant improvement measures, illustrated by a case of executive walkrounds,” by Reed, Wilson and Hayes describes a method to engage salient organizational stakeholders in identifying and ranking measures of healthcare improvement programs. According to authors, the proposed method can be applied in diverse healthcare settings.
In their paper, “Satisfaction with maternal and birth services: a survey in public hospitals in Turkey,” Ozkan, Chiang, Aba and Celik describe a study to determine the satisfaction of women who underwent normal delivery and cesarean section with maternal care in five state-run hospitals in Northwestern Turkey. According to authors, the evidence-based results of the study will help hospital administrators to improve healthcare quality and focus on increasing women's satisfaction with maternal care.
The paper, “Exploring interdisciplinary teamwork to support effective ward rounds,” by Walton, Hogden, Long, Johnson and Greenfield explore if health professionals share understanding of teamwork that supports collaborative ward rounds. Authors report that rounds such as structured rounding aim to improve teamwork. Inverting this concept to first develop effective collaboration will support team adaptability and resilience. This enables teams to transition between the multiple rounding processes undertaken in a single ward. The emphasis becomes high quality teamwork rather than a single rounding process.
It is sincerely hoped that through these expositions of methods and best practices for improving healthcare quality, articles presented in this issue contribute in some small measure to the body of knowledge for this critical aspect of healthcare research.
The success that this journal has enjoyed, now for over 30 years of its publication would not have been possible without the continued interest, involvement and above all contributions of its authors, reviewers and readers. Professor Sameer Kumar, Associate Editor, I and the entire Editorial Team will work tirelessly to earn this valued trust of the journal's stakeholders.
Finally, I wish to present below the Editorial Statement of this journal for the benefit of potential authors.
All successful submissions to this journal are expected to meet the following criteria:
(1)Manuscripts must be prepared according to the Author Guidelines posted on the journal portal.
(2)The research problem must be clearly and very succinctly defined before the solution on solving the problem is described.
(3)Existing methods for solving the problem must be thoroughly reviewed.
(4)Proposed methods for solving the problem must be clearly described, rigorously justified and tested. In addition, a demonstration of its practical value must be offered. Whenever possible, the performance of the new method should be presented in comparison with those of existing methods.
(5)The paper must be well written, flow logically and its major contributions must be clearly articulated.
(6)Whenever possible and feasible, data should be made publicly accessible for verification.
If existing methodology is applied to solve a problem, then innovation of a publishable application could be demonstrated by the superior quality of the solution. Particular attention will be paid in making publication decisions on the clarity of problem statement, fidelity of model formulation, credibility of data, generalizability of contribution and significance of research impact.
A predominantly large number of overall submissions to our journal are case studies or survey studies. It is the journal's policy that any studies and datasets that include human patients, should offer proof of Institutional Review Board clearance, which must be provided to the Editor at the time of submission of the manuscript. Such clearance must include (1) name and location of study's sponsor institution, (2) title and purpose of the study, (3) date(s) when the study was conducted and (4) permission to publish results of the study.
Finally, I wish to appeal to authors, reviewers and readers of this journal to contribute to its success by volunteering to review manuscripts submitted to us, within the requested time. We value and need your expertise to maintain high quality of articles published, that all of us have come to expect and aspire from this journal.
We welcome your comments and feedback.
