Organizational culture predicts job satisfaction and perceived clinical effectiveness in pediatric primary care practices

Background: In recent years, there has been a growing understanding that organizational culture is related to an organization's performance. However, fewstudies have examined organizational culture in medical group practices. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of organizational culture on provider job satisfaction and perceived clinical effectiveness in primary care pediatric practices. Research Design: This cross-sectional study included 36 primary care pediatric practices located in Connecticut. Participants: There were 374 participants in this study, which included 127 clinicians and 247 nonclinicians. Measures: Office managers completed a questionnaire that recorded staff and practice characteristics; all participants completed the Organizational Culture Scale, a questionnaire that assessed the practice on four cultural domains (i.e., group, developmental, rational, and hierarchical), and the Primary Care Organizational Questionnaire that evaluated perceived effectiveness and job satisfaction. Results: Hierarchical linear models using a restricted maximum likelihood estimation method were used to evaluate whether the practice culture types predicted job satisfaction and perceived effectiveness. Group culture was positively associated with both satisfaction and perceived effectiveness. In contrast, hierarchical and rational culture were negatively associated with both job satisfaction and perceived effectiveness. These relationships were true for clinicians, nonclinicians, and the practice as a whole. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates that practice culture is associated with job satisfaction and perceived clinical effectiveness and that a group culture was associated with high job satisfaction and perceived effectiveness. Copyright © 2010 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

REDUCED ORDER MODELLING OF THE THERMAL BEHAVIOUR OF AN OFFICE SPACE

Reduced Order Models (ROMs) have proven to be a valid and efficient approach to model the thermal behaviour of building zones. The main issues associated with the use of zonal/lumped models are how to (1) divide the domain (lumps) and (2) evaluate the pa- rameters which characterise the lump-to-lump exchange of energy and momentum. The object of this research is to develop a methodology for the generation of ROMs from CFD models. The lumps of the ROM and their average property values are automatically ex- tracted from the CFD models through user defined constraints. This methodology has been applied to validated CFD models of a zone of the Environmental Research Insti- tute (ERI) Building in University College Cork (UCC). The ROM predicts temperature distribution in the domain with an average error lower than 2%. It is computationally efficient with an execution time of 3.45 seconds. Future steps in this research will be the development of the procedure to automatically extract the parameters which define lump-to-lump energy and momentum exchange. At the moment these parameters are evaluated through the minimisation of a cost function. The ROMs will also be utilised to predict the transient thermal behaviour of the building zone.