RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Given the current lack of evidence on quality and safety improvements and on the cost-benefits associated with the introduction of eHealth applications, there should be a focus on implementing more mature technologies; it is also important that eHealth applications should be evaluated against a comprehensive and rigorous set of measures, ideally at all stages of their application life cycle.
Method: This is a cross-sectional study involving adult patients of Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, Tamale Teaching Hospital, and Cape Coast Teaching Hospital in Ghana. A questionnaire survey based on the 'A Staff and Patient Environment Calibration Toolkit (ASPECT)' dimensions and health care core service dimensions was used to collect data from 622 patients. SmartPLS was used to analyse the data collected.
Results: The findings of the study show that the quality of health care healing environment mediates the relationship between patients' satisfaction and all of the constructs under the core health care delivery.
Conclusion: Stakeholders of the Ghanaian health care sector should take initiatives to constantly improve the quality of health care healing environment as it has an influence on patient satisfaction of the overall core health care delivery.
Methods: A yearly correlation test for a 5-year period was performed to investigate the association between the wholesale and RRP medicine prices declared by the pharmaceutical industry from 2011 to 2015 on the one hand and the consumer wholesale and retail medicine price database on the other hand. The median price ratio (MPR) was calculated by comparing the consumer retail medicine price to its international reference price. The Krukal Wallis test was used to analyse the pricing trend throughout the 5-year period, and factors that might elevate the MPR above 2.5 were modelled using binary logistic regression.
Results: A total of 2527 medicine price data were analysed. There was a strong significant association between medicine prices declared to the PSD and the retail medicine prices in every year of the 5-year period. Moreover, there was no significant increase in retail medicine prices throughout the 5-year period. The medicine types, retail location, type of manufacturer, medicinal indications, declared wholesale and RRPs significantly influenced the consumer MPRs that where > 2.5.
Conclusion: The declared medicine price was found to have a significant association with the consumer retail medicine price. Thus, it may be a useful reference for consumers purchasing medicines in private healthcare settings. However, the government of Malaysia must develop strategies to increase medicine price transparency for price-control mechanisms in the private healthcare sector.
Materials and methods: A systematic literature survey was adopted in this paper, involving the review of 25 relevant researched articles found in the databases Science Direct, EBSCO, MEDLINE, CINAHL and PubMed.
Result: The systematic literature survey reveals five variables to be core predictors of TQM, signifying how important these variables are in the successful implementation of TQM in the health-care context. Also, it is revealed that the identified core predictors have positive effects on an improved health-care system. However, the systematic survey of the literature reveals a dearth of studies on TQM in the health-care context.
Conclusion: As TQM has become an important management approach for advancing effectiveness in the health-care sector, this kind of research is of value to researchers and managers. Stakeholders in the health sectors should introduce and implement TQM in hospitals and clinics. Nevertheless, this study has limitations, including that the databases and search engines adopted for the literature search are not exhaustive.