The Evolution of national health policy and the Illinois health care delivery system.

Prepared by the Illinois Health Care Cost Containment Council.

The road to better health for all of Illinois : improving the public health system /

Mode of access: Internet.

National housing act : hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate, Seventy-third Congress, second session, on S. 3603, a bill to improve nation-wide housing standards, provide employment and stimulate industry ; to improve conditions with respect to home mortgage investment, and to eliminate the necessity for costly second-mortgage financing, by creating a system of mutual mortgage insurance and by making provision for the organization of additional institutions to handle home financing ; to promote thrift and protect savings ; to amend the Federal home loan bank act ; to amend the Federal reserve act ; and for other purposes. May 16-24, 1934.

Duncan U. Fletcher, chairman.

Prospective case review of a global e-health system for doctors in developing countries

The Swinfen Charitable Trust has managed email consultations for doctors in developing countries since 1999. The process was handled manually for the first three years and then subsequently using an automatic message-handling system. We conducted a prospective review of email consultations between referring doctors and consulting specialists during six months of automatic operation (December 2003 to May 2004). During the study period 125 consultations took place. These concerned a wide range of specialties (e.g. orthopaedics 17%, dermatology 16%, obstetrics and gynaecology 11%, radiology 10%). Of these referrals, 33% (41) were for paediatric cases. Consulting specialists, who were based in five countries, were volunteers. Referring doctors were from 24 hospitals in 12 developing countries. The median time from referral to definitive reply was 1.5 days (interquartile range 0.6-4.9). There was an 85% response rate (n = 106) to a survey concerning the value of the consultation to the referring doctor. All the referring doctors who responded made positive comments about the service and half said that it improved their management of the case. The second-opinion consultation system operated by the Swinfen Charitable Trust represents an example of a global e-health system operated for altruistic, rather than commercial, reasons.

Reform of the New Zealand Health System:problematization, mobilization and change

This paper will seek to explicate the changes in the New Zealand health sector informed by the concepts of problematization, inscription and the construction of networks (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987, 1993). This will involve applying a framework of interpretation based on the concepts of Latour's sociology of translation. Material on problematization and inscription will be incorporated into the paper in order to provide an explanatory frame of reference which will enable us to make sense of the processes of change in the New Zealand health sector. The sociology of translation will be used to explain the processes which underlie the changes and will be used to capture effects, such as changes in policy and structure, producing new networks within which 'allies' could be enrolled in support of the health reforms.

An expert system for the development of a health and safety policy/risk assessment in the plastics industry

Health and safety policies may be regarded as the cornerstone for positive prevention of occupational accidents and diseases. The Health and Safety at Work, etc Act 1974 makes it a legal duty for employers to prepare and revise a written statement of a general policy with respect to the health and safety at work of employees as well as the organisation and arrangements for carrying out that policy. Despite their importance and the legal equipment to prepare them, health and safety policies have been found, in a large number of plastics processing companies (particularly small companies), to be poorly prepared, inadequately implemented and monitored. An important cause of these inadequacies is the lack of necessary health and safety knowledge and expertise to prepare, implement and monitor policies. One possible way of remedying this problem is to investigate the feasibility of using computers to develop expert system programs to simulate the health and safety (HS) experts' task of preparing the policies and assisting companies implement and monitor them. Such programs use artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to solve this sort of problems which are heuristic in nature and require symbolic reasoning. Expert systems have been used successfully in a variety of fields such as medicine and engineering. An important phase in the feasibility of development of such systems is the engineering of knowledge which consists of identifying the knowledge required, eliciting, structuring and representing it in an appropriate computer programming language.

Florida International University College of Medicine and Jackson Health System Partner to Establish New Teaching Program

Press Release from Florida International University 's Office of Media Relations on the partnership between the Florida International University College of Medicine and Jackson Health System to establish a new teaching program.