Evaluating the organisational climate in Italian public healthcare institutions by means of a questionnaire

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>By means of the ICONAS project, the Healthcare Agency of an Italian Region developed, and used a standardised questionnaire to quantify the organisational climate. The aims of the project were (a) to investigate whether the healthcare institutions were interested in measuring climate, (b) to estimate the range of applicability and reliability of the instrument, (c) to analyse the dimensions of climate among healthcare personnel, (d) to assess the differences among employees with different contractual positions.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The anonymous questionnaire containing 50 items, each with a scale from 1 to 10, was offered to the healthcare organisations, to be compiled during ad hoc meetings. The data were sent to the central project coordinator. The differences between highly specialised staff (mostly physicians) and other employees were assessed after descriptive statistical analysis of the single items. Both Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis were used.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Ten healthcare organisations agreed to partecipate. The questionnaire was completed by 8691 employees out of 13202. The mean value of organisational climate was 4.79 (range 1–10). There were significant differences among single items and between the 2 groups of employees. Multivariate methods showed: (a) one principal component explained > 40% of the variance, (b) 7 factors summarised the data.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Italian healthcare institutions are interested in assessing organisational phenomena, especially after the reforms of the nineties. The instrument was found to be applicable and suitable for measuring organisational climate. Administration of the questionnaire leads to an acceptable response rate. Climate can be discribed by means of 7 underlying dimensions.</p

Automatic Approaches to On-Land/On-Board Filtering and Lossy Compression of AVIRIS Images

Hyperspectral imaging is widely used in different applications [1]. However, the obtained data occupy rather large volume and their compression is important for data transmission via communication lines, transferring to customers and/or archiving [2]. Lossless compression is often unable to produce a desirable compression ratio (CR) [1, 2], thus, lossy compression techniques are widely applied [3]. For lossy compression, there are two conflicting requirements – to provide larger CR an

Watermarking spectral images with three-dimensional wavelet transform subject to various illumination conditions

Digital imaging continues its expansion into various applications. Spectral images are becoming more popular as one field of digital imaging. At the same time, the economic and security aspects in the utilization of images are finding increased emphasis. In this study, the authors apply a watermarking method for spectral images, whereby embedding is based on the three-dimensional wavelet transform. The authors study the influence of illumination to the watermarked images. The authors also define how to estimate an unknown illuminant. Experiments were performed on a dataset of 13 spectral images. These experiments indicate that the illumination in spectral images should be established before watermarking, owing to the properties of the illuminants. Using the proposed watermarking method, the embedded watermark is also robust towards lossy compression. Guidelines for the parameter selection for watermarking with the proposed approach are given