Elective Patient Admission and Scheduling under Multiple Resource Constraints

We consider a patient admission problem to a hospital with multiple resource constraints (e.g., OR and beds) and a stochastic evolution of patient care requirements across multiple resources. There is a small but significant proportion of emergency patients who arrive randomly and have to be accepted at the hospital. However, the hospital needs to decide whether to accept, postpone, or even reject the admission from a random stream of non‐emergency elective patients. We formulate the control process as a Markov decision process to maximize expected contribution net of overbooking costs, develop bounds using approximate dynamic programming, and use them to construct heuristics. We test our methods on data from the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and find that our intuitive newsvendor‐based heuristic performs well across all scenarios.     

Der Spagat zwischen Ehrenamt und Dienstleistung

The already existing social political debate about a new culture of citizenship engagement has reached the internal live of traditional independent social care associations. Their specificity is, among others, that, they are not only voluntary organisations based on moral values, but also that they have developed into services companies with a staff of over one million regular employees.     

Experimentelle vignettendesigns in faktoriellen surveys

Der faktorielle Survey (Vignettenanalyse) als empirisches Messmodell zur differenzierten Untersuchung komplexer Fragestellungen wurde vor allem in der jüngeren Vergangenheit wieder entdeckt und angewandt. Eine Herausforderung bei der Planung fast aller Vignettendesigns stellt die notwendige Reduktion der Vignettenpopulation dar, da zumeist nicht alle Vignetten jedem einzelnen Respondenten zur Beurteilung vorgelegt werden k?nnen. In diesem Beitrag thematisieren wir die mit den verschiedenen Strategien zur Vignettenselektion und Vignettensetbildung verbundenen Implikationen bezüglich der statistischen Analyse und inhaltlichen Interpretation der Ergebnisse. Dabei zeigen sich die Vorzüge von experimentellen Vignettendesigns, die auf den Techniken der gezielt geplanten Fraktionalisierung und Konfundierung aufbauen. Anhand einer Pilotstudie, bei der unter Einsatz des faktoriellen Surveys normative Meinungen über die Zuerkennung der ?sterreichischen Staatsbürgerschaft an Migranten erhoben wurden, beschreiben wir die praktische Umsetzung eines konfundiert faktoriellen Vignettendesigns und dessen ad?quate statistische Analyse. Empfehlungen für die praktische Umsetzung eines experimentellen Vignettendesigns beschlie?en den Beitrag.     

Division of Labor in German Dual‐Earner Families: Testing Equity Theoretical Hypotheses

On the basis of 52 German dual‐earner couples with at least 1 child younger than 5 years, we tested the effects of an unequal division of labor on relationship satisfaction. We analyzed diary reports of time allocated to productive activities according to the actor‐partner‐interdependence model. Hierarchical linear models showed that rather than individual time allocated to household work, the absolute difference in partners’ contribution to productive activities influenced relationship satisfaction. This reduction in satisfaction disappeared after accounting for perceived social appreciation of individual contributions. Models with gender‐specific slopes showed the effect of input and output to be different for women and men. The findings indicate that a relative equity model best explains the effects of an unequal division of labor.     

Balancing Qualified Staff Requirements with Shortage of Recruits in Child Care – The NSW Experience

In Australia and many other countries, government regulations require that children's services, such as long day care centres and preschools, employ certain numbers of qualified early childhood teachers. This recognises that training and experience of staff are the most significant factors determining the quality of care. At the same time Australia is facing a shortage of qualified early childhood teachers, and governments are grappling with how staff requirements can be met. In this article we examine the New South Wales Government approach, which waives temporarily the requirement to employ qualified teachers if children's services providers can show that they have made all reasonable effort at recruiting the required staff. We consider the impact of the temporary waiver on quality of care, and whether it is necessary to compromise government standards in this way. Our research concludes that most providers committed to good quality care do not resort to using the temporary waiver.     

An assessment of the validity and reliability of the SOGS-RA

The present is a validation study seeking to determine the degree of confidence that can be placed on inferences about problem gambling among adolescents in the Atlantic provinces, based on their South Oaks Gambling Screen-Revised for Adolescents (SOGS-RA) scores. The major source of data was a 1998 survey of 13,549 students in junior and high school of the public school systems of the 4 Atlantic provinces of Canada. The SOGS-RA was found to have adequate stability and internal consistency reliability. Statistically significant gender differences were demonstrated relative to endorsement and construct validity. Regarding the latter, this study shows that the existing cut-point of the SOGS-RA score for problem gambling identifies as problem gamblers, markedly different proportions of male than female daily gamblers. Regarding construct validity in relation to the Atlantic Alcohol and Drug Risk Continua, this study suggests that while statistically highly significant, the association between problem gambling and substance-related problems may be of low clinical significance. Regarding criterion validity, there is an urgent need to perform the types of enquiry that will allow clarification about how adolescent problem gambling is conceptualized, by adults versus adolescents, by males versus females, and from a clinical versus a public or population health perspective.