Background: It is required that health care professionals continuously work with patient safety and quality improvements, and the skills of registered nurses are significant in this work. However, quality improvement also requires commitment and knowledge about how to improve health care and ensure patient safety. There is a lack of studies that highlights the importance of supportive functions for this work. Nurses in clinical settings can be utilized as facilitators that make things easier for other health care professionals who are engaged in quality improvement and patient safety. In order to gain understanding about the significance and needs of nurses with a role of facilitator, it is urgent to learn from their experiences of facilitating quality improvement in health care.Aim: The aim was to study nurses? experiences of facilitating quality improvement of nursing care, patient safety and multi-professional collaboration in health care.Method: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were performed with ten registered nurses who had experience of being in the role of facilitators.

In the master thesis the focus of the study has been on the special library of the Goethe-institute in Stockholm. A survey was made among the visitors coming to the library, to find out how they used the library and how they would judge the quality of service. To find out how the needs and the opinions of the users were meet by the library I also made an interview with the staff one librarian and the chief librarian. In the analysis I used the theory about service quality of Christian Grönroos as a framework. The theory distinguishes the service quality into technical resp.

Today, maintenance is a big part of the daily life on board ships. It is also one of the bigger expenses a shipping company has and without any loss of quality tries to run as economically advantageous as possible. In the hunt for economical savings the shore-based industry has subsequently applied the use of condition based maintenance, CBM, were a component is maintained according to its actual state. This leads to a reduction of maintenance costs since no parts are unnecessarily replaced. However, within the maritime sector a periodical maintenance is still the most commonly used maintenance system.The purpose of this paper is to chart the factors that are the reason for the low implementation of CBM on board the Swedish merchant fleet's ships.

The aim of this paper is to explain and compare non-compliance of two EU-directives, ?the quality of bathing water? and ?the working time directive?. This study answers the questions: Why didn?t Sweden implement the directive on bathing water quality and the working time directive correctly? Are the reasons for non-compliance the same or different in the two cases? The paper is designed as a case study and with an explanatory attempt we explain why the two directives weren?t implemented correctly in Sweden. The theoretical approach is based on both general- and EU-specific implementation theories.

Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a further development of the Six Sigma draft to carry through preventing quality measures in developing and designing of new products and processes. With increasing demands on enterprises development processes to be more safety and faster the need of DFSS arise as a product, process and service development concept in the organisations. Design for Six Sigma aims to improve and structure the development process of an organisation and consider the application of the innovation problem solving. The concept aims to leave the structure of the traditional Six Sigma concept and instead, from an innovative perspective, search for new solutions to existing problems. The concept constitute of a toolbox with a lot of quality tools that are divided into phases in a development model.

Inventories of epiphytic lichens on Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) were conducted at three sites in east central Sweden: along the newly build motorway (Road E4), along the old road (Road 600) and in a reference site, to compare the effects of traffic pollution on lichen diversities. At each site, species richness, lichen mean sensitivity value (MK), air quality index of the forest stand/sample plot (LKI) and nitrogen impact value (N) were calculated and it was tested if there was any difference between the sites. Twenty-four species were observed in total, and Parmeliopsis ambigua and Hypogymnia physodes were the most common species at all sites. At Road E4, fewer lichen species were observed than at the other sites and this might be due to the impact of air pollution. The species richness at Road 600 was similar to that of the reference site, which might be explained by the improved air quality.

ABSTRACTProblems with high turnover in nursing has escalated during the last years both nationally and internationally. according to previous research job satisfaction and quality of care was connected to specific features of the hospital work environement. It was also recommended by Coomber & Barriball (2007) to analyze job satisfaction at ward level with qualitative interviews to get a deeper and more extended insight in which specific features are of importance.The aim of this study was to investigate and describe the experiance of job satisfaction in relation to quality of care from nurses perspective. This study was carried out at an orthopaedic ward with primary nursing as organizational context of care.Two focus group interviews were conducted, they comprised nine nurses with at least two years experiance of primary nursing. A qualitative content analysis with inductive approach was used in order to develop more detailed insights of potential factors influencing work satisfaction at ward level.

With the globalization, companies in the West chose to shift production to developing countries to cut down costs. This had a major impact when child labor and very poor working conditions in these factories were discovered and led many companies to take responsibility for their suppliers and the employees by adopting voluntary so-called Codes of Conduct.There is a subtle balance to enforce improvement of working conditions for employees at suppliers´ factories and to keep costs down. On the one hand, companies would like to conduct extensive audits at their suppliers to ensure code of conduct compliance and thus protect their legitimacy. On the other hand, audits are expensive so companies would like to minimize audits to keep costs down. Companies thus have to strike a delicate balance in relation to how many and what suppliers they choose to audit.

AbstractAim: The aim of this study was to describe cancer patients? experiences of quality of life and wellbeing in relation to yoga practice.Method: A descriptive qualitative study with semi structured interviews was carried out during the fall of 2009 at the University of Uppsala. Informants in the study were cancer patients who were participating in the yoga/psychotherapy group at the clinic of oncology at the Akademiska hospital in Uppsala.Result: Five out of six informants experienced that their quality of life and their wellbeing improved by practicing yoga. One informant had mixed feelings which were not due to the yoga practicing, but to the place where it was practiced. For her this place was associated with illness.

In this thesis proposals for different designs of a borehole thermal energy storage (BTES) have been developed for the building DN-huset in Stockholm, Sweden. To build a BTES results in savings in energy costs by approximately 44 %, i.e. 2 million Swedish crowns annually. Furthermore, a BTES would reduce the annual environmental impact with roughly 75-157 tonnes of CO2 equivalents per year, depending on how the electricity consumption?s environmental impact is estimated.

Since companies have realised the importance of customer loyalty and since the service sector has gained higher significance in recent years, we found it interesting to study what leads to customer loyalty in service companies. The theories we have chosen to consider are customer loyalty, service quality, service guarantees, affinity marketing, loyalty programmes and customer clubs, the customer in focus and other factors that influences customer loyalty. To find out how service companies are working with cus- tomer loyalty, we have conducted a case study within three service companies. Our findings are that customer loyalty has a significant importance for the companies we studied. Quality and personnel were the factors we found had the greatest impact in service companies concerning customer loyalty.

Quality is the main focus in management of all laboratories. Accurate results of the analyses are not only determined by the analytical procedure but also by preanalytical factors. In the total analytical process of clinical specimens, there are many possible preanalytical sources of error. Monetoring of temperature on test samples of the transport boxes is one way to reduce the mistakes in the preanalytical phase.In this study, four laboratories from primary health care were invited to participate. The temperature has been measured on test samples of the transport boxes being delivered to the laboratory.In three cases the temperature remained within the limits, but in the fourth case the temperature varied more than the allowed interval.

In Sweden there are currently two separate guidelines you may use whenperforming calculations on frameworks, BKR and the Eurocodes. Although at theend of 2010 you are not allowed to use BKR any longer and only the Eurocodeswill be viable. The aim of this thesis is to explain how the Eurocodes and EKS work and alsohow they compare to the current guideline BKR. Similarities and differencesbetween these guidelines are also discussed so that the reader will get a betterunderstanding of how the Eurocodes are applied. The areas discussed are asfollows:Principles and adviceSafety ClassesSymbols and IndexesLifespanLoads and partial coefficientThe thesis also deals with the impact that this transition into a new guideline willhave on corporations, guideline costs, education and computer software. As anexample a rough estimate on what costs this transition will create on a companywith 20 employees is also included. Calculations have been performed in order to investigate how the design valuesdiffer between the two guidelines, the Eurocodes and BKR.

A large proportion of businesses around the world is today ISO 9001 certified and is consequently conducting internal audits on a regular basis. It has however not been possible to conclude that internal audits always add value to the organisation, despite the large utilisation of this tool. Some authors, e.g. Alic & Rusjan (2010) and Wealleans (2000), mean that there are possibilities that internal audits may be used as a value-adding improvement tool. This has led to the emergence of this master?s thesis.The purpose of the case study was therefore formulated to examine how internal quality audits can be made more effective and used as an improvement tool.

This investigation?s task was to map manufacturing of special qualities at Stora Enso Packaging under a certain period, analyze if rules concerning special qualities is followed, which consequences this results in concerning use of paper, waste and costs and to give suggestions on alternative solutions. The goal was to give sugges-tions that help the company to reach its business ratio that the production de-partment uses within use of paper and productivity in the corrugated cardboard machine.Stora Enso Packaging is a part of the forest group Stora Enso and is one of Swe-den?s leading producers of corrugated cardboard. Stora Enso Packaging acts pri-mary on the Swedish market, where they have a market share of 25 %.To be able to analyze orders with special qualities we did a data collection during two months, where we mapped incoming orders.