The main thrust of this article is to discuss a survey of 60 companies, predominantly from the user’s perspective, that use the Internet currently; and to examine the effectiveness of their current Internet Web sites. The results of an online survey were subjected to statistical analysis and this revealed some interesting findings. It was found that 30 percent of the companies had facilities for conducting transactions online and only 7 percent charged users for Web site access. Overall, the Web sites rated highly in terms of ease of access, content and structure but scored poorly for their number of unique features. Of the six industry sectors surveyed (electronic commerce, entertainment and leisure, financial and banking services, information services, retailing and travel and tourism), it was the retailing sector that showed the best overall performance. The best individual Web site in the survey was the Financial Times (http://www.ft.com). It is suggested that this initial survey work could be advanced by extending the sample size and by devising a programme of more extensive statistical analysis.

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In today’s highly competitive healthcare environment, hospitals increasingly realise the need to focus on service quality as a means to improve their competitive position. Customer‐based determinants and perceptions of service quality therefore play an important role when choosing a hospital. This paper attempts to determine the expectations and perceptions of patients through the use of a generic, internationally used market research technique called SERVQUAL. An analysis covering 252 patients revealed that there was an overall service quality gap between patients’ expectations and perceptions. Thus, improvements are required across all the six dimensions, namely, tangibility, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and accessibility and affordability.

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Personnel of inner-city emergency departments (EDs), which are frequently the only source of medical care for many patients, may be in a unique position to detect human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection earlier than personnel at other recommended screening sites. To assist development of ED-based screening strategies for HIV infection, we undertook a serosurvey of HIV infection in adult patients attending an ED during a 6-week period in 1992 using an identity-unlinked technique and compared our findings with data collected similarly in 1988. Of 1,606 patients, 183 (11.4%) were HIV-positive, compared with 6.0% in 1988. Seroprevalence rates of HIV infection among patients only at risk of heterosexual transmission increased more than fourfold (7% to 30.3%). CD4+ cell counts were higher in those patients with undiagnosed HIV infection than in those with known HIV infection. Targeting minority patients aged 25-44 years, intravenous drug users, and those patients at heterosexual risk would have identified 87% of patients with new HIV infection, while requiring screening of 41% of the study sample. Targeted voluntary screening programs in certain EDs would likely detect significant numbers of new early HIV infections.