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Multi-professional service teams might isolate from the organisation and inhibit knowledge sharing with others. Professional organisations are thus stimulating their teams to bond more closely with other units, hoping this would facilitate knowledge sharing. Yet, studies on social bonding suggest this could actually deter from knowledge sharing. Our study investigates this further asking: do employees display greater intention to share knowledge when their teams possess greater structural, relational and cognitive social capital? Our cross-level study, grounded on a sample of 226 employees (39 teams in four Hospice & Palliative Care Organisations), shows that individuals embedded in teams with greater social capital are indeed more motivated to share knowledge; and that each form of social bonding—increasing frequency of interactions, trust and mutual support, and similarity of goals/meanings—stimulates different mechanisms of knowledge sharing (attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Salicylic acid (SA), a phenolic compound produced by plants, may play a beneficial role on health. This pilot study evaluated whether there might be an association between serum SA and fruit and vegetable (FV) consumption in obese and normal-weight children. Thirty-four obese children (17 boys and 17 girls) and 34 normal-weight children were recruited. Dietary intake was evaluated by the 7-day dietary record. Serum SA was measured using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry method. FV intake in obese and normal-weight children was not different between groups (175.00 (97.66) g versus 192.29 (90.54) g,p = .455). Obese children had lower serum SA than normal-weight children [mean difference, −0.025; 95% CI (−0.044; −0.006) μmol/L]. Serum SA was not associated with daily intake of FV in obese (p = .111) and normal-weight (p = .092) children. Further studies are needed to evaluate the role of FV on serum SA, taking into account also the quantity and the type. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Physicians' willingness to share knowledge is a central antecedent of effective knowledge sharing within hospitals. This paper aims at supporting the micro-foundation of knowledge sharing with the identification of the factors that affect willingness to share and their classification according to a behavioural model grounded in the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The identification of antecedents and their classification is based on the review of the major contributions published on top tier and specialist journals. This study identifies 22 factors that affect physicians' willingness to share. These factors are classified according to the TPB framework, which identifies three behavioural antecedents: attitude, subjective norm and perceived behaviour control. The organization of the factors allows appreciating the diffusion of knowledge-sharing behaviours as the result of three concurring perspectives: raising attention to the benefits of knowledge sharing, building up social pressures from relevant actors and designing appropriate organizational contingencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hospitals often fail to implement new practices due to an inability to promote their use among professionals. How effective promotion can be designed and organized remains unclear, however. The present work addresses this question by investigating the implementation of a cardiologic telesurveillance system in 12 hospitals. Despite an identical technology and unproblematic installation, only in five cases full implementation was achieved. Four promotion strategies—focused on a different combination of three aspects (planning, team involvement, and hero innovation)—were identified through case studies. Qualitative comparative analysis was then employed to identify three alternative strategies for effective promotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this preliminary study was to explore the effect size of different dietary long chain polyunsaturated supplementations on blood lipid profile in children with primary hyperlipidemia. Thirty-six children (8-13 years) were recruited. After an 8-week stabilization period on the Step I diet, they were randomized to additionally receive for a 16-week period one capsule (500 mg) daily of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) alone or a DHA plus eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) mixture (45.6% DHA; 41.6% EPA) or wheat germ oil (control). An effect size (as percentage change from baseline) of +8%, −12% and −16% for high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), total cholesterol/HDL-C ratio and triglycerides was observed in children supplemented with DHA, compared to +2%, −8% and −12%, respectively, in children supplemented with DHA plus EPA. This preliminary study suggests powered trials appear feasible and are warranted to evaluate efficacy of n-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid dietary supplementations on the blood lipid profile of children with primary hyperlipidemia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examined whether a phenylaline-free protein substitute with prolonged release may be beneficial to the protein status of children with phenlyketonuria (PKU) compared to conventional substitutes. Topics discussed include the allocation either a prolonged-release or the current conventional protein substitute for 60 children. Also mentioned was the finding that protein substitutes with prolonged release might be beneficial to protein status in children with PKU.

Healthcare organisations are facing the constant trade off to contain expenditures without sacrificing the quality of patient's care. This challenge to do 'more with less' induced healthcare executives to heavily invest in innovations activities in order to increase the efficiency of their organisations. By taking an individual-level perspective, our study focuses on knowledge-sharing behaviour among healthcare practitioners as a critical element to continuously improve the performance of healthcare organisations. Specifically we explore the effect of intellectual capital on practitioners' knowledge-sharing behaviour, and propose organisational knowledge-sharing climate as mediator. We conducted a survey on three healthcare organisations. Our results substantiate the positive link between intellectual capital and knowledge-sharing behaviour, and reveal that organisational knowledge-sharing climate fully mediates this relationship. These findings provide hospital managers with key implications for the management of intellectual capital as a lever to improve the sharing and the diffusion of knowledge among practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control charts for detecting shifts in the rate of occurrences of rare events are usually implemented by fixing a priori the change to be optimally detected, i.e. under the assumption that the change is from a baseline in-control value to a known out-of-control value. In practice, this assumption is never satisfied. A solution to that problem, mainly devoted to the real world of continuous surveillance, is developed here in terms of a natural extension of the minimizing out-of-control averge run length (ARL) criterion. As an illustrative application, the procedure is analytically solved for the exponential Sets charts. In this case, exact numerical tables of the expected out-of-control ARL, based on the proposed criterion, are also given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a unified methodology for planning one-sided and two-sided time-between-events Shewhart-type control charts in statistical process control. Selection of the control limits; Evaluation of the sensitivity of the chart; Definition of the one-sided and two-sided time-between-events charts by suitable stopping rules; Presentation of a real world oriented design procedure.

An adaptation from Cuscore control charts for normal distributions to the problem of monitoring the rate of occurrence of a rare event is considered. The presented scheme defines an alarm in terms of the sum of ‘scored distances' between successive events of interest. A procedure is given for using this scheme in an ‘optimal’ manner which minimizes the out of control expected delay for a given rate of false alarms. Comparisons over a number of examples, after matching the rate of false alarms, show that the present technique is more efficient than those of Shewhart and Sets, and also than Cusum under conditions of practical relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]