The competition in international food markets is increasingly moving towards products with higher levels of added value and higher degrees of differentiation, requiring companies to become more market-oriented. Market orientation is ‘the extent to which an actor in the marketplace uses knowledge about the market, especially about customers, as a basis for decision-making on what to produce, how to produce it, and how to market it’. Market orientation comprises three constructs: market intelligence generation, dissemination and responsiveness. Value chain governance can facilitate market orientation requirements. Value chain governance includes network governance, contracting and informal relationships. Knowledge about how governance can facilitate a value chain’s market orientation is limited. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore how the governance of a global food value chain can facilitate the value chain’s market orientation. The study applies a multiple case study design. Four in-depth case studies were conducted on global food value chains from New Zealand to Western Europe dealing with the products apples, kiwis, venison and lamb. Interviews were conducted with actors from these four value chains in the Netherlands as well as in New Zealand. In each value chain actors with similar functions were interviewed in order to make the results comparable. Analysis of the case studies shows that network governance (i.e. leadership, shared governance and facilitation), contractual agreements (i.e. type and content: price, volume, quality) and informal relationships (i.e. trust and commitment) can contribute to the market orientation of a value chain. Leaderships and shared governance, in combination with good informal relationships in the chain, as well as contractual incentives, are main contributors to market orientation in global fresh food value chains. The paper adds to the still very scarce literature on governance of value chains and market orientation of value chains.

Background Quality improvement (QI) approaches are widely used across health care, but how well they are reported in the academic literature is not clear. A systematic review was conducted to assess the completeness of reporting of QI interventions and techniques in the field of perioperative care. Methods Searches were conducted using Medline, Scopus, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, the Cochrane Effective Practice and Organization of Care database, and PubMed. Two independent reviewers used the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) checklist, which identifies 12 features of interventions that studies should describe (for example, How: the interventions were delivered [e.g., face to face, internet]), When and how much: duration, dose, intensity), to assign scores for each included article. Articles were also scored against a small number of additional criteria relevant to QI. Results The search identified 16,103 abstracts from databases and 19 from other sources. Following review, full-text was obtained for 223 articles, 100 of which met the criteria for inclusion. Completeness of reporting of QI in the perioperative care literature was variable. Only one article was judged fully complete against the 11 TIDieR items used. The mean TIDieR score across the 100 included articles was 6.31 (of a maximum 11). More than a third (35%) of the articles scored 5 or lower. Particularly problematic was reporting of fidelity (absent in 74% of articles) and whether any modifications were made to the intervention (absent in 73% of articles). Conclusions The standard of reporting of quality interventions and QI techniques in surgery is often suboptimal, making it difficult to determine whether an intervention can be replicated and used to deliver a positive effect in another setting. This suggests a need to explore how reporting practices could be improved.

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Sepsis-induced cardiogenic shock in combination with severe acute respiratory failure represents a life-threatening combination that is often refractory to the conventional methods of treatment. We describe the case of a 33-year-old patient who developed acute cardiovascular collapse and ARDS secondary to superinfection of Panton-Valentine leukocidin-positive Staphylococcus aureus and H1N1 pneumonia who underwent successful combination therapy for severe sepsis-related cardiomyopathy and respiratory failure using extracorporeal membrane oxygenation and cytokine adsorption therapy.