Case Studies

The book includes a large number of case studies. These are ‘stories to illustrate a point’ and are linked to relevant discussions in the main text. They are all based on real situations but are not intended to be a complete description of actual events. Some poetic licence has been used to clarify or amplify the intended learning. You might describe them as ‘parables’.

New case studied are a way of spreading ideas and developing the theme of ‘adding value’: the relationship between benefits and costs. Case studies do not need to be long or complicated. They do not need to be written in formal ‘academic’ style; they are telling a story. Short, concise contributions that illustrate small improvements in value are equally as useful as descriptions of major projects. We suggest that a length of about 1000 words should be aimed at.

The case studies will be moderated before posting and will not be identifiably linked to your log-in. You should think very carefully whether or not you want to identify your organization or yourself in the text. If you do so, the responsibility will be yours. Patient confidentiality is an absolute requirement.

We have adapted the format for case studies used in the book to be a more appropriate template for the Web. The section marked Keywords/Tags is useful and you may use both phrases and single words, but only single words can be used as Tags. These will be enabled at the moderation stage and will be searchable.

Not all the headings in the template are needed but in the interest of consistency, the ones not marked as optional should always be used.

‘Value’ can be summarized in a diagram that links it to whether benefits and costs increase, decrease or stay the same. We have made it possible to chose and insert an appropriate value diagram into your case study.

Whilst recognizing the difficulty in assessing benefits and costs in healthcare, we believe that it is important that clinical engineers adopt an approach of questioning whether or not a proposed activity adds ‘value’ and for whom. This will require that clinical engineers develop skills in assessing benefits and costs.

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