Technical Effieciency in Cotton Production: The Role of Premium Payments in Turkey

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Providing about two million employments from textile to agriculture, cotton is an important and a strategic product for Turkey. Thus, support programs become critical and crucial for the cotton production. For cotton farmers, premium payments affecting the cost measures become vital next to the market prices. This study measures the technical efficiency of cotton production, incorporating support premium payments as one of the background variables to capture the effect of premiums on efficiency scores for cotton production using stochastic frontier model. The premium payments found to be the most important determinant of inefficiencies, and the results of our analysis suggest that premiums paid to farmers increase efficiency for cotton production. In addition, regional production was important explaining inefficiencies. Although three regions in Turkey did not behave parallel and showed different characteristics in production, efficiency gap between these regions is closed recently

Measuring and evaluating efficiency of hospitals through total quality management: A multi-criteria data envelopment analysis model

The purpose of this study is to measure and evaluate the efficiency of 12 hospitals in Turkey using a multi-criteria Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology. Number of beds, number of physicians and the critical factors of total quality management in the health care sector were used as inputs of the model. The outputs used in this analysis incorporated financial and non-financial performance of hospitals, number of outpatients and number of patient days. Performance of the hospitals was measured using subjective measures based on executive's perception of how their organization performed relative to the competition. Results provide management with information regarding the relatively best practice hospitals in the observation sets and locate the relatively inefficient hospitals by comparison with the best practice ones. At last some suggestions are made for the least efficient hospital. © 2007 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved

Hemi-Castaing ligamentoplasty for the treatment of chronic lateral ankle instability: a retrospective assessment of outcome

Purpose: In the treatment of chronic ankle instability, most non-anatomical reconstructions use the peroneus brevis tendon. This, however, sacrifices the natural ankle stabilising properties of the peroneus brevis muscle. The aim of this study was to evaluate the functional outcome of patients treated with a hemi-Castaing procedure, which uses only half the peroneus brevis tendon. Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study of patients who underwent hemi-Castaing ligamentoplasty for chronic lateral ankle instability between 1993 and 2010, with a minimum of one year follow-up. Patients were sent a postal questionnaire comprising five validated outcome measures: Olerud-Molander Ankle Score (OMAS), Karlsson Ankle Functional Score (KAFS), Tegner Activity Level Score (pre-injury, prior to surgery, at follow-up), visual analog scale on pain (VAS) and the Short Form 36 (SF-36). Results: Twenty patients completed the questionnaire on functional outcome. The OMAS showed good to excellent outcome in 80% and the KAFS in 65%, the Tegner Score improved from surgery but did not reach pre-injury levels, the VAS on pain was 1 of 10 and the SF-36 returned to normal compared with the average population. Conclusions: Even though most patients were satisfied with the results, outcome at long-term follow-up was less favourable compared with the literature on anatomical reconstructions. In accordance with the literature, we therefore conclude that the initial surgical treatment of chronic lateral ankle instability should be an anatomical repair with augmentation (i.e. the Broström-Gould technique) and the non-anatomical repair should be reserved for unsuccessful cases after anatomical repair or in cases where no adequate ligament remnants are available for reconstruction

The effect of amifostine at pre- and postoperative irradiation damage on microvascular anastomoses, nerve regeneration and wound dealing

A comparative study was undertaken to evaluate the possible effects of amifostine on irradiation damage to the healing of microvascular anastomoses, nerve regeneration through neurorrhaphy and flap survival, either preoperative irradiation+surgery or surgery+postoperative irradiation model in New-Guinea pigs. We observed benefical effects of amifostine on wound healing, nerve regeneration both clinically and microscopically. Amifostine appears to act with a mechanism similar to that of the endogenous thiols. Therefore, its radioprotective effect is probably mediated in part via enhancement reactions