Posts by lizhoffman

I'm a Journal Development Manager at BioMed Central with an interest in health services research, public health, community care & ethics.

Follow author on Twitter: @LizHoffmanbmc

Advancing healthcare quality improvement

lizhoffman on April 19, 2013 at 12:42 pm - 0 Comments

Research is crucial to ensuring that our healthcare and healthcare systems improve and develop to meet the needs of populations. The Academy for Healthcare Improvement fosters an interprofessional community that advances quality improvement in health care through scholarly and educational activities.

Implementation Science is pleased to announce the publication of a new supplement The Proceedings on Advancing the Methods for Healthcare Quality Improvement Research, covering a conference held by the Academy for Healthcare Improvement. The supplement includes presentations on study design, data registries, comparative effectiveness, and healthcare disparities. This conference, held on May 7-8, 2012, was a forum for the current state and future needs of quality improvement research and its methodological and technical …

Right Time, Right Place

lizhoffman on March 21, 2013 at 2:09 pm - 0 Comments

Health systems around the world are looking to improve access to health services and health system effectiveness. Two key interlocking components of a sustainable health workforce solution are to keep scarce skills in the system by effective retention strategies, and to enable them to be deployed where they can best make a positive difference to population health.

Many management, education and policy solutions to achieving a “right time, right place” strategy are being tried and tested in different countries. Human Resources for Health is pleased to announce a new thematic series “Right Time, Right Place: Improving access to health service through effective retention and distribution of health workers.” The aim of this series is to report on new analysis, strategic …

New partnership for Chiropractic & Manual Therapies

lizhoffman on January 18, 2013 at 10:25 am - 1 Comment

Chiropractic & Manual Therapies, which moved to publish with BioMed Central in 2005, has always focused on the publication of evidence-based research into the effectiveness of the treatments offered by the discipline and, as was hoped for by the societies that partner with it, the open access publishing model has played a significant role in reducing the barriers to research literacy in the field.

Since then, the journal has gone from strength-to-strength and we are pleased to announce that The UK College of Chiropractors has joined the Chiropractic and Osteopathic College of Australasia (COCA) and the European Academy of Chiropractic (EAC) to publish Chiropractic & Manual Therapies.

The UK College …

Health Information Science and Systems launches with BioMed Central

lizhoffman on January 10, 2013 at 7:10 pm - 1 Comment

Health Information Science and Systems (HISS) has published its inaugural articles with BioMed Central. HISS is a multidisciplinary journal that aims to use technologies in computer science to assist in disease diagnoses, treatment, prediction and monitoring through the modelling, design, development, visualization, integration and management of health related information.

HISS is edited by Yanchun Zhang who highlights in his launch editorial the broad geographical spread of the authors and hence the wide reach the journal hopes to have, “The first articles published in HISS comprise four papers (in addition to this Editorial) and the authors are from Singapore, Hungary, Australia, USA and China. These initial articles illustrate how …

Editor-in-Chief changes for Implementation Science

lizhoffman on September 3, 2012 at 2:48 pm - 0 Comments

Implementation Science is delighted to announce that Michel Wensing from Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Netherlands and Anne Sales of the Veteran Affairs Center for Clinical Management Research, USA have joined Martin Eccles as co-Editors-in-Chief, having previously served as Associate Editors.

The journal was launched in 2006 with Brian Mittman and Martin Eccles at its helm. It aims to to publish research relevant to the scientific study of methods to promote the uptake of research findings into routine healthcare in clinical, organisational or policy contexts. In his editorial announcing the Editor-in-Chief changes Martin Eccles describes the growth of the journal to become the leading international journal in the field of implementation science.

Call for papers: International Journal for Equity in Health announces special series in Multimorbidity and Equity in Health

lizhoffman on August 16, 2012 at 2:50 pm - 0 Comments

Multimorbidity, the co-occurrence of health conditions in individuals and populations, is a phenomenon with high burden and high prevalence in persons and groups of disadvantaged circumstances, such as low socioeconomic status, immigrants, and ethnic/cultural minorities.

The Editors of International Journal for Equity in Health is now accepting submissions on Multimorbidity and Equity in Health for inclusion in a special series on the topic.

This thematic series will accept papers on patterns and trends of multimorbidity inequity, variations in multimorbidity burden by social characteristics, and on the impact of multimoribity inequity on health care resource use and outcomes.

We welcome submissions via our online system, indicating in the cover letter you would like the manuscript to be considered for …

To test or not to test

lizhoffman on July 13, 2012 at 9:56 am - 0 Comments

With the London 2012 Olympics opening on 27 July, London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOGOC), has built a specially designed laboratory operating around the clock, 7 days a week, testing approximately 6,250 samples and up to 400 samples of participating athletes a day during the Olympics. According to LOGOC, this is more testing than at any other Games.

The question then poses itself – is this testing of any use?

If you are interested in sports or the Olympics and have a view on anti-doping, we welcome you to read this article and discover the interesting perspectives of authors Bengt Kayser and Barbara Broers.

This controversial manuscript highlights the history of anti-doping practices and …

Policing, harm reduction and AIDS: their connection

lizhoffman on July 9, 2012 at 12:14 pm - 0 Comments

Harm reduction in the context of injecting drug use and HIV has been slowly evolving across countries in Southeast Asia but hasn’t been able to reach coverage rates considered necessary to halt and reverse the spread of HIV epidemic. Little is known about the impact of harm reduction programs and policies on the police approaches to drug use and drug users – knowledge essential for successful advocacy and program design.

Are the programs and approaches aimed at fostering an environment supportive of harm reduction for all people who used drugs, effective at influencing law enforcement policy and practice or not?

A thematic series entitled ‘Law Enforcement and Harm Reduction in SE Asia’ looks into these issues. It …

The environment, fetal development and non-communicable diseases

lizhoffman on June 20, 2012 at 12:38 pm - 0 Comments

The medical conditions that increasingly affect modern societies are of overriding concern in public health. To name but a few, these include obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, immune and autoimmune diseases, neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, and several cancers. Governments and medical institutions around the world are battling to fight the devastating effects of these diseases. Their efforts may be targetting the wrong life stages.

The commentary ‘Developmental Origins of Non-Communicable Disease: Implications for Research and Public Health‘, published in Environmental Health focuses on the link between the environmental impact on foetal development and the development of non-communicable diseases. It highlights the plasticity of the development and points to evidence that both the development of foetuses and the progression …

Changing behaviours

lizhoffman on April 24, 2012 at 1:59 am - 0 Comments

Behaviour change is key to increasing the uptake of evidence into healthcare practice and improving health outcomes. There is a wide variety of psychological theories used to explain health care professional behaviours and cognitions. When trying to study the implementation of a behaviour change it is difficult to know which of the large number of theories to apply to which behaviour and setting. The Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) was developed to achieve a better understanding of implementation problems and the underlying processes involved in successful behaviour change. TDF aims to make the psychological theories more accessible for implementation researchers.

The new thematic series on ‘Theoretical Domains Framework for behaviour change research’ is published in Implementation Science. The aim …