Search

Ernest Amory Codman had an early penchant fondness for recording surgical complications and analyzing these recordings to determine a surgeon's ability along with a hospital's efficiency. This idea and the actions that followed suit in his career were not well received by his fellow colleagues. However, Codman's influence and spirit remained and helped shape important institutions in American medicine such as the The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations.

This study integrates research from strategy, economics, and applied psychology to examine how organizations may leverage their human resources to enhance firm performance and competitive advantage. Staffing and training are key human resource management practices used to achieve firm performance through acquiring and developing human capital resources. However, little research has examined whether and why staffing and training influence firm-level financial performance (profit) growth under different environmental (economic) conditions. Using 359 firms with over 12 years of longitudinal firm-level profit data, we suggest that selective staffing and internal training directly and interactively influence firm profit growth through their effects on firm labor productivity, implying that staffing and training contribute to the generation of slack resources that help buffer and then recover from the effects of the Great Recession. Further, internal training that creates specific human capital resources is more beneficial for prerecession profitability, but staffing is more beneficial for postrecession recovery, apparently because staffing creates generic human capital resources that enable firm flexibility and adaptation. Thus, the theory and findings presented in this article have implications for the way staffing and training may be used strategically to weather economic uncertainty (recession effects). They also have important practical implications by demonstrating that firms that more effectively staff and train will outperform competitors throughout all pre- and postrecessionary periods, even after controlling for prior profitability., ((c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved.)

This biographical sketch on E.A. Codman corresponds to the historic text, The Classic: A Study in Hospital Efficiency: As Demonstrated by the Case Report of the First Five Years of a Private Hospital (1918), available at DOI 10.1007/s11999-012-2751-3.

This is an abridged version of the Classic Article by E.A. Codman, A Study in Hospital Efficiency: As Demonstrated by the Case Report of the First Five Years of a Private Hospital. The full article is available as supplemental material for the abridged version in the online version of CORR®. An accompanying biographical sketch of E.A. Codman is available at DOI 10.1007/s11999-012-2750-4 . The Classic Article is © 1918 and is reprinted courtesy of Thomas Todd Co. from E.A. Codman. A Study in Hospital Efficiency: As Demonstrated by the Case Report of the First Five Years of a Private Hospital. Boston: Thomas Todd Co.; 1918: 4-10,108,162.

Oral history methodology was used to investigate the perspectives of retired British district nurses and Australian domiciliary nurses who had practiced between 1960 and 2000. Interviews yielded insights into the dramatic changes in community nursing practice during the last four decades of the 20th century. Massive changes in health care and government-led drives for greater efficiency meant moving from practice governed by "experiential time" (in which perception of time depends on the quality of experience) to practice governed by "measured time" (in which experience itself is molded by the measurement of time). Nurses recognized that the quality of their working lives and their relationships with families had been altered by the social, cultural, and political changes, including the drive for professional recognition in nursing itself, soaring economic costs of health care and push for deinstitutionalization of care. Community nurses faced several dilemmas as they grappled with the demands for efficiency created by these changes.

Spain was officially represented at the preliminary international conference the "International Committee for the Assistance to Sick and Wounded Soldiers" (better known as the "Geneva Committee") organised at Geneva in October 1863; and joined the Red Cross one year later on the occasion of the first Geneva Convention in August 1864. This article explores the ambivalence between the humanitarian ethos and the military efficiency in the early Spanish Red Cross through the works of Nicasio Landa (1830-1891). A medical major of the Spanish Military Health Service, the co-founder of the Spanish section of the Red Cross in 1864, and its general inspector in 1867, Landa was its most active promoter, and responsible for its connections with the Geneva Committee and other national sections of this international association during its early times. He was not only an active correspondent, but also a prolific author of monographs, leaflets and articles in specialized and daily newspapers on humanitarianism and war medicine, in addition to being the founder of the Spanish Red Cross journal La Caridad en la Guerra in 1870.

This paper is an amended and abridged version of a seminar given at the NET/NEP 1st Nurse Education International Conference in Vancouver, Canada. The topic of the paper arose from our growing concerns about the state of nurse education and its position in the university at the start of the twenty-first century. We share the fears expressed by Readings that the university has lost its way and is increasingly driven by a business agenda and a quest for ever-greater efficiency. Our biggest concern is with the impact that the so-called 'posthistorical university' is having on the study of nursing, particularly the growing pressure on nurse academics to focus their attention and energy on output at the expense of process, and on research at the expense of practice and practitioner development. We suggest that the solution might lie with Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of postmodern philosophy as a way of opening up debate and, in his words, saving the honour of thinking.

During recent years the significance of the concept of human error has changed considerably. The reason for this has partly been an increasing interest of psychological research in the analysis of complex real life phenomena, and partly the changes of modern work conditions caused by advanced information technology. Consequently, the topic of the present contribution is not a definition of the concept or a proper taxonomy. Instead, a review is given of two professional contexts for which the concept of error is important. Three cases of analysis of human-system interaction are reviewed: (1). traditional task analysis and human reliability estimation; (2). causal analysis of accidents after the fact, and (3). design of reliable work conditions in modern sociotechnical systems. It is concluded that "errors" cannot be studied as a separate category of behaviour fragments; the object of study should be cognitive control of behaviour in complex environments.

Two major debates in the literature, productivity performance and the decline of the cotton industry, are joined in the analysis presented in this article on the attempts to raise productivity through the introduction of the more looms per weaver system in cotton weaving in the inter-war years. We find that the limited resultant changes were the outcome of understandable predisposition to maintain co-operative behaviour which meant that productivity enhancing schemes with long term potential were sacrificed for more modest schemes which preserved consensus in the short term.

The author examines the forces and relations of production in Pavlov's laboratory at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Medicine during the first phase of its operation (1891-1904). As in any production site, the forces of production included its physical plant and technologies, its workforce (with its skills), and management's ideas about what constituted good products and how best to produce them. In Pavlov's laboratory, these included a physical plant adapted for physiological surgery and "chronic experiments," dog-technologies and experimental practices created in accordance with Pavlov's Bernardian vision of physiology, and a workforce dominated by physicians untrained in physiology who were seeking quick doctoral degrees. The relations of production featured an authoritarian structure and cooperative ethos that allowed Pavlov to use coworkers as extensions of his sensory reach, while enabling him constantly to monitor the work process, to control the "interpretive moments" in experiments, to incorporate results into his developing ideas, and to convert them efficiently into marketable products.