Using Q methodology to assess the needs of emergency medicine support staff employees

The support staff members of any Department of Emergency Medicine perform a plethora of tasks that are crucial to the productivity of both individual physicians and the department as a whole, It is important to ensure that th e personal and professional needs of the support staff are being met, This report describes the use of a relatively new statistical technique, Q metho dology, to elucidate the needs of the support staff, This method allowed th e investigators to quantitatively reveal the presence of two distinct viewp oints on employee needs among the support staff. Additionally, opinions tha t were held by the employees concerning their needs were identified, These results allowed for strategies to be tailored to both the individual and th e group. The results indicate that Q methodology can have widespread applic ation in the relatively new area of health care quality research. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc.