Pharmacy for the Future: A Student’s Perspective on Pediatric Pharmacy

Children make up a special patient population which requires careful attention and precision. Healthcare professionals should be well equipped with the knowledge and tools to properly care for this delicate group. This article addresses a pharmacy student’s perspective on pediatric concentration within the field. Pediatric pharmacists possess the power of specialized care and effective commu­nication which can potentially save children’s lives. Children are the future, and it is crucial that pharmacists help protect the destiny of that future

Introduction to Library Trends 53 (3) Winter 2005: Consumer Health Issues, Trends, and Research, Part 2: Applicable Research in the 21st Century

published or submitted for publicatio

Can Accreditation Work in Public Health? Lessons From Other Service Industries

Reviews the literature on the experiences and outcomes of existing accreditation programs in health and social service industries in order to derive implications about the potential benefits and costs of accreditation for public health agencies

Use of Targets to Improve Health System Performance: English NHS Experience and Implications for New Zealand

The setting of quantitative, time-limited ?targets? backed up by institutional and managerial rewards and sanctions has been a notable feature of performance improvement efforts in the National Health Service (NHS) in England since 1998 and especially in the period 2000-2004. Performance improved in the areas covered by English NHS targets, most markedly in relation to waiting times, but also in relation to treatment outcomes. None of the other parts of the United Kingdom followed England and similar trends were not observed, particularly not in waiting times, despite similar injections of funds. Despite the improvements in performance in target areas, targets were criticised, principally, for having perverse and unintended consequences (e.g. distorting priorities, encouraging ?gaming?, etc) which could have potentially out-weighed their benefits. On the other hand most experts in performance improvement in public services argue that carefully chosen, incentivised targets are a useful part of the performance management repertoire when used well (e.g. when sanctions and rewards are proportionate). Some dysfunctional consequences are to be expected, but can be mitigated. Given the similarities between the English NHS and the New Zealand public health system, there is scope to use targets and related incentives sparingly to improve performance in New Zealand in areas of high importance to government and the public.performance measurement; performance management; performance improvement methods; target-setting; control of public services

Time and dose dependency of bone-sarcomas in patients injected with radium-224

The time course and dose dependency of the incidence of bone-sarcomas among 900 German patients treated with high doses of radium-224 is analysed in terms of a proportional hazards model with a log-normal dependency of time to tumor and a linear-quadratic dose relation. The deduced dose dependency agrees well with a previous analysis in terms of a non-parametric proportional hazards model, and confirms the temporal distribution which has been used in the Radioepidemiological Tables of NIH. However, the linear-quadratic dose-response model gives a risk estimate for low doses which is somewhat less than half that obtained under the assumption of linearity. Dedicated to Prof. W. Jacobi on the occasion of his 60th birthday Work performed under Euratom contracts BI6-D-083-D, BI6-F-111-D, U.S. Department of Energy contract DE-AC 02-76 EV-00119, the U.S. National Cancer Institut

Finite size corrections in random matrix theory and Odlyzko's data set for the Riemann zeros

Odlyzko has computed a data set listing more than $10^9$ successive Riemann zeros, starting at a zero number beyond $10^{23}$. The data set relates to random matrix theory since, according to the Montgomery-Odlyzko law, the statistical properties of the large Riemann zeros agree with the statistical properties of the eigenvalues of large random Hermitian matrices. Moreover, Keating and Snaith, and then Bogomolny and collaborators, have used $N \times N$ random unitary matrices to analyse deviations from this law. We contribute to this line of study in two ways. First, we point out that a natural process to apply to the data set is to thin it by deleting each member independently with some specified probability, and we proceed to compute empirical two-point correlation functions and nearest neighbour spacings in this setting. Second, we show how to characterise the order $1/N^2$ correction term to the spacing distribution for random unitary matrices in terms of a second order differential equation with coefficients that are Painlev\'e transcendents, and where the thinning parameter appears only in the boundary condition. This equation can be solved numerically using a power series method. Comparison with the Riemann zero data shows accurate agreement.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, Version 2 added some new references in bibliography, Version 3 corrected the scaling on the spacing distribution and some typo