Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) Residents Have a False Sense of Security That Could Jeopardize Their Safety in a Disaster

High-rise apartments bring unique challenges in emergency situations. To better understand the needs of apartment-dwelling seniors in emergency situations and potential sources of support available, a novel collaborative community development approach was used with seniors living in a naturally occurring retirement community (NORC) in London, Ontario, Canada (N = 2500; mean ± SD age = 79 ± 9.53 years). A surprising finding was a false sense of security, with seniors expecting that management would take care of all needs. This finding reinforces the critical need for better public messaging for seniors, as well as targeted emergency management plans for frailer older individuals living in the community.     

The functional capacity of healthcare workers with history of severe acute respiratory distress syndrome (SARS) complicated with avascular necrosis--case report

Two years after the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong, 128 healthcare workers continued to present with musculoskeletal complaints and 38 workers were diagnosed with avascular necrosis (AVN) in different joints. 13 healthcare workers were referred to six designated Physiotherapy Departments of the Hospital Authority for a tailor-made standardized Functional Capacity Evaluation (FCE) from 2004 to 2005 on a voluntary basis. Job analysis, workers' self-perceived disability and functional capacity, non-material handling tests, and the cardiopulmonary fitness test were performed. Retrospective review of the FCE data showed that there were 17 AVN of hips, 16 AVN of knees, 3 AVN of shoulders. All patients had AVN of lower limb joints. Nearly full ranges of movement (ROM) were observed in the knees involved, but the hip range was decreased for most subjects suffering from hip AVNs. Most workers (n=12) could not complete the cardiopulmonary test due to intolerable joint pain. Six workers' self-perceived physical demands level (PDC) matched with the physical demands level identified by the FCE. 12 healthcare workers attained a sedentary physical demands level and were unable to match with their previous job demands. One staff was classified as light physical demands and managed his original duty. Four workers had returned to work at the time FCE was performed. The tailor-made FCE added information to facilitate the return-to-work planning for the staff. Four more workers returned to work with modified duties one year after the FCE.     

Can cultural values help explain the positive aspects of caregiving among Chinese American caregivers?

This study used an adaptation of the caregivers' stress model to examine the positive aspects of caregiving with 113 Chinese American family caregivers who provided care to their elderly relatives. The hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicated that combination of caregiver background characteristics, stressors, and cultural values had direct effects on positive aspects of caregiving. Unlike previous studies in which cultural values were not measured, this study found that cultural values helped explain positive aspects of caregiving. Specifically, cultural values, caregiver's health, and caregiver's age predicted positive aspects of caregiving. Service implications are discussed based upon the findings.     

Critical success factors in managing modular production design: Six company case studies in Hong Kong, China, and Singapore

Many researchers have explored the advantages of modular product design, its design methods and its effects on product performance. Modular design is, for example, required for product platform, mass customization and postponement in order to achieve greater product variety and differentiation. However, a few empirical studies explicitly examine how to coordinate modular product design in a managerial way. This paper addresses it by conducting multiple case studies with six companies which have successfully adopted modular product design for five years. Seven critical factors are explored in the management of modular product design. These are pre-defined product advantage, selectively used design rules, module definition, system integration, technological newness, internal communication, and supplier and customer involvement. While most of the literature studies the technical dimension of modular design within a firm, this study focuses on the managerial side across the supply chain. It gives new insights on how to manage modular product design and proposes future research opportunities.     

Debiasing or rebiasing? Moderating the illusion of delayed incentives

This paper studies corrective strategies for the illusion of delayed incentives (Soman, 1998), the phenomena that money-for-effort transactions that are unattractive in the present appear attractive when they are in the future. This illusion occurs because future effort is discounted more heavily than future monetary outcomes. In this research, we show that this bias of differential discounting can be corrected by asking consumers to perform effort at the time of decision-making. We further outline three explanations for why this intervention attenuates the illusion of delayed incentives, and discuss whether these explanations constitute a debiasing effect or a rebiasing effect (Larrick, 2004). We report the results of two laboratory experiments and discuss theoretical and practical implications of our findings.     

A social choice theory of legitimacy

We develop a formal theory of legitimate collective choice. In our theory a policy choice is legitimate if the process through which the final choice was determined is consistent with some principle that can be used to (perhaps partially) rank the potential policy choices. The set of principles in any choice situation is taken to be exogenous, but a decision-making process is defined so as to deal with any nontrivial set of principles. Such a process is itself referred to as legitimate if it is guaranteed to select a legitimate outcome for each possible exogenous set of principles. We characterize the class of procedures that are legitimate, prove that legitimate policy decisions consistent with principles always exist and characterize the set of policy decisions that are legitimate for a any given set of principles. As we do not require the principles to be weak orders of the alternatives, our theory provides a notion of legitimacy that can be satisfied even when the guiding principles are potentially cyclic or incomplete. Accordingly, our theory illustrates one nontautological means by which majoritarian principles can be reconciled with legitimacy.     

Keeping Australia's Older Workers in the Labour Force. A Policy Perspective

As in other western industrialised countries the structural ageing of the Australian population has significant labour market implications. Government has responded with a range of policies to persuade older workers to abandon early retirement and/or remain in the workforce past traditional retirement ages. But whether this generation of workers will be prepared to change their retirement plans in response to policy encouragement, and whether current policy measures will translate into significant numbers of older workers extending their labour force participation is uncertain. Using the Australian Survey of Retirement Attitudes and Motivations (ASRAM) a recently completed, nationally representative survey of Australian workers aged 40 – 59 years we find that while the Government message about working longer is getting through, older workers are relatively unresponsive to current policy measures. Other policies, especially policies outside the financial realm, are needed to maximise the number of older Australians in the labour force.     

Engaging on the ‘front line’: exploring how family support teams construct meaning in their work with young mothers

This paper explores the provision of family support services for young mothers within a Sure Start Children's Centre, drawing on data collected within a larger study. It identifies how the family support team attempted to build supportive relationships with young mothers between the ages of 16 and 19 years. The findings presented here draw on narrative interviews (n = 10) and focus group interviews (n = 2) with the family support team that included early years workers, family support workers and their managers. The findings captured how the participants actively resisted the stigma (Goffman 1963) of teenage motherhood in order to support young mothers in gaining the necessary skills and knowledge to care for their child. Drawing on the findings, this paper argues that the building of a supportive relationship enables a young mother to construct positive counter‐narratives about her parenting experience. This suggests that the family \to offer informal early support to young mothers who are at risk of more formal intervention. However, the complexity of this task should not be underestimated because in doing this, the family support team must at all times ensure the well‐being and safety of the child.     

Which Champions,Which People? Public and User Involvement in Health Care as a Technology of Legitimation

This paper concerns two practices, public consultation and user involvement, whose adoption has been urged upon the UK National Health Service in recent years. Public consultation is a local attempt to seek the views of a broad constituency of persons. User involvement is a local attempt to include organized groups of service users in the planning, and occasionally the management, of such services. The paper has four objectives. First, it locates the topic in the context of several related current debates. Second, it outlines the main findings of a recent empirical study of public consultation as they relate to the above debates. Third, it summarizes the relevant findings of an empirical study of user involvement. Finally, it examines these two practices as "technologies of legitimation" which can be seen as a means by which managerial legitimacy is maintained in the context of an increasingly pluralistic policy arena.     

Potency Factors for Risk Assessment at Libby,Montana

We reanalyzed the Libby vermiculite miners’ cohort assembled by Sullivan to estimate potency factors for lung cancer, mesothelioma, nonmalignant respiratory disease (NMRD), and all‐cause mortality associated with exposure to Libby fibers. Our principal statistical tool for analyses of lung cancer, NMRD, and total mortality in the cohort was the time‐dependent proportional hazards model. For mesothelioma, we used an extension of the Peto formula. For a cumulative exposure to Libby fiber of 100 f/mL‐yr, our estimates of relative risk (RR) are as follows: lung cancer, RR = 1.12, 95% confidence interval (CI) =[1.06, 1.17]; NMRD, RR = 1.14, 95% CI =[1.09, 1.18]; total mortality, RR = 1.06, 95% CI =[1.04, 1.08]. These estimates were virtually identical when analyses were restricted to the subcohort of workers who were employed for at least one year. For mesothelioma, our estimate of potency is K_M = 0.5 × 10^?8, 95% CI =[0.3 × 10^?8, 0.8 × 10^?8]. Finally, we estimated the mortality ratios standardized against the U.S. population for lung cancer, NMRD, and total mortality and obtained estimates that were in good agreement with those reported by Sullivan. The estimated potency factors form the basis for a quantitative risk assessment at Libby.