Towards Body–Mind–Spirit Integration: East Meets West in Clinical Social Work Practice

Contemporary trends in clinical practice are moving more toward an integrative approach that views the mind, the body and the spirit as inter-connected entities. There is an increasing interest in approaches that utilize physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual components in assessment and treatment. This paper presents an integrative body–mind–spirit approach in clinical social work practice which is informed by the Eastern philosophical traditions of Daoism, Buddhism, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. Our work with a bereaved elderly woman is presented to illustrate how the three key intervention principles: (1) promoting a dynamic balance within the individual through multi-modal intervention; (2) fostering strengths; and (3) facilitating meaning-making can be effective in helping people in a clinical setting.     

Factors influencing the success of PPP at feasibility stage – A tripartite comparison study in Hong Kong

Public Private Partnerships (PPP) have been used extensively in both developing and developed countries in delivering various types of projects, ranging from road construction, railway transport systems to health care facilities and schools. Critical success factors of PPP schemes at the implementation stage were identified. It is however more important for decision-makers to identify the factors for feasibility evaluation of adopting the PPP at the outset. This study aims to explore the key successful ingredients to be assessed at the initial stage of PPP projects as perceived public sector, private consortium and general community so as to attain a “triple win” scenario, via a questionnaire survey and a series of expert interviews conducted in Hong Kong. Survey results indicate that the most critical factor for evaluating the feasibility of PPP projects, especially to the general community, is an acceptable level of tariff. Cost effectiveness and financial attractiveness are the most important evaluation factors as ranked by the public sector and private consortium respectively. In addition, the existence of a long-term demand for the proposed services, availability of strong private consortium, alignment with government’s strategic objectives, as well as reliable service delivery are also rated as highly important to the success of PPP schemes. Addressing the tripartite expectations is indispensable to ensure the feasibility and successful delivery of public services and infrastructure projects via PPP schemes.     

Chinese Singaporean attitudes towards poverty and inequality: A comparative analysis

Ng IYH, Koh G. Chinese Singaporean attitudes towards poverty and inequality: a comparative analysis Based on a survey of 191 Chinese respondents, this article discusses the attitudes of Singaporean Chinese towards poverty, inequality and government intervention. Using the Z‐test for two proportions and cluster analysis, findings were compared with similar studies in the USA and the UK. Chinese Singaporeans were found to be very aware of the growing inequality, but they adopted a narrower definition of poverty than British respondents. This might be the reason why they were more sympathetic towards the poor and supportive of more government anti‐poverty efforts than were American respondents. From the cluster analysis, the Singaporean sample produced a third group who were ‘satisfied but concerned’, on top of the two polar groups, ‘sceptics’ and ‘liberals’, present in the British study. A majority of respondents also supported the view that more should be done to help the poor and were willing to pay more taxes for that purpose.     

Electricity Time‐of‐Use Tariff with Stochastic Demand

In this article, we study the electricity time‐of‐use (TOU) tariff for an electricity company with stochastic demand. The electricity company offers the flat rate (FR) and TOU tariffs to customers. Under the FR tariff, the customer pays a flat price for electricity consumption in both the peak and non‐peak periods. Under the TOU tariff, the customer pays a high price for electricity consumption in the peak period and a low price for electricity consumption in the non‐peak period. The electricity company uses two technologies, namely the base‐load and peak‐load technologies, to generate electricity. We derive the optimal capacity investment and pricing decisions for the electricity company. Furthermore, we use real data from a case study to validate the results and derive insights for implementing the TOU tariff. We show that in almost all the cases, the electricity company needs less capacity for both technologies under the TOU tariff than under the FR tariff, even though the expected demand in the non‐peak period increases. In addition, except for some extreme cases, there is essentially no signicant reduction in the total demand of the two periods, although the TOU tariff can reduce the demand in the peak period. Under the price‐cap regulation, the customer may pay a lower price on average under the TOU tariff than under the FR tariff. We conduct an extensive numerical study to assess the impacts of the model parameters on the optimal solutions and the robustness of the analytical results, and generate managerial implications of the research findings.     

Editorial

Immigrants from Asian countries who are living in Canada are more likely to live with extended families than Canadian-born seniors. This article focuses on the living arrangements of 161 South Asian immigrant seniors in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and examines the relative importance of various factors that influence living arrangements. Demographic characteristics were associated with living arrangements; seniors who immigrated when they were young and were married were the most likely to live independently. Logistic regression analyses suggest that economic and cultural factors were more important than health and availability of kin factors in explaining living arrangements, after controlling for demographic and immigration variables.     

Deconstructing language practices: discursive constructions of children in Individual Education Plan resource documents

Although Individual Education Plan (IEP) resource documents in Ontario, Canada aim to assist children in achieving their special educational goals, a point of disjuncture exists between the documents’ intentions and children’s actual experiences. Addressing this issue is crucial in preventing inequity and fostering educational development and social well-being for children. We employ critical discourse analysis informed by disability theory to deconstruct the language practices used to conceptualize children in IEP resource documents. Our purpose is to question the underlying assumptions regarding representations of children and illuminate the potentially harmful consequences of such conceptions. We expose the presence of both neutral and harmful language practices and consider how such language may shape the way the documents translate from policy to practice. This study offers a model through which the language of other special education documents can be critically evaluated and proposes potential avenues for creating documents that avoid disabling children further.     

Risk patterns in drug safety study using relative times by accelerated failure time models when proportional hazards assumption is questionable: an illustrative case study of cancer risk of patients on glucose‐lowering therapies

Observational drug safety studies may be susceptible to confounding or protopathic bias. This bias may cause a spurious relationship between drug exposure and adverse side effect when none exists and may lead to unwarranted safety alerts. The spurious relationship may manifest itself through substantially different risk levels between exposure groups at the start of follow‐up when exposure is deemed too short to have any plausible biological effect of the drug. The restrictive proportional hazards assumption with its arbitrary choice of baseline hazard function renders the commonly used Cox proportional hazards model of limited use for revealing such potential bias. We demonstrate a fully parametric approach using accelerated failure time models with an illustrative safety study of glucose‐lowering therapies and show that its results are comparable against other methods that allow time‐varying exposure effects. Our approach includes a wide variety of models that are based on the flexible generalized gamma distribution and allows direct comparisons of estimated hazard functions following different exposure‐specific distributions of survival times. This approach lends itself to two alternative metrics, namely relative times and difference in times to event, allowing physicians more ways to communicate patient's prognosis without invoking the concept of risks, which some may find hard to grasp. In our illustrative case study, substantial differences in cancer risks at drug initiation followed by a gradual reduction towards null were found. This evidence is compatible with the presence of protopathic bias, in which undiagnosed symptoms of cancer lead to switches in diabetes medication. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.