Sponsored day care in a changing world

Sponsored day care is the term generally used to describe the purchase of places by local authorities in independent day care services (such as childminders, nurseries and playgroups) for children in need. This paper considers the development and operation of sponsored day care services in 12 English local authorities, in the context of current policy developments within early childhood services. It suggests that provision for children in need is in danger of being marginalised by the current focus on early education and child care for working parents, and highlights the importance of developing services for children in need within an overall strategy for children's services. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Evaluation of the Integrated Services Pilot Program from Western Australia

Independent evaluation of refugee-focused programs in developed nations is increasingly a mandatory requirement of funding bodies and government agencies. This paper presents an evaluation of the Integrated Services Centre (ISC) Pilot Project that was conducted in Australia in 2007 and early 2008. The purpose of the ISC program was to provide integrated support to humanitarian refugees in settlement, physical health, mental health and employment. The Pilot Project was based in two primary schools in Perth, Western Australia. The evaluation utilized a flexible qualitative ‘engaged’ methodology and included interviews, focus groups and telephone interviews with the key stakeholders, project staff and a small number of refugee families. The strength of the qualitative methodology (including data that is narrative rich) is that it highlights issues as perceived by each stakeholder and provides insights into the daily work by ISC staff that helped to uncover unintended outcomes. Despite the fact that the ISC evaluation was supposed to be a ‘before and after’ design, the researchers acknowledge a common weakness in many evaluations (including the ISC) that when baseline data is required, evaluators are recruited after the project has begun. This issue is discussed in the paper. It is critical that independent evaluators are able to begin collecting baseline data as soon as programs are launched, if not before.     

Can a Sector‐Wide Approach Underpin and Advance Universal Health Coverage?

Fragmented management approach makes the provision of comprehensive health care for achieving universal health coverage very unlikely. This article aims to explore the potential contribution of a systemic approach—the sector‐wide approach (SWAp)—to achieving universal health coverage (UHC), using the Mongolian context as an example. The paper describes UHC and factors that hinder its achievement in developing countries, based on the Mongolian experience. The analysis focuses on the root factors hindering the achievement of UHC and examines how these affect system and local capacity critical for achieving UHC. Two principally different approaches, a sector‐wide (holistic) approach and a standalone project (fragmented) approach are compared in terms of their contribution to the main indicators of achieving UHC. The current stage of the Mongolian health SWAp is identified and early rewards of a SWAp are presented. The paper proposes a SWAp as a potential approach to tackle these root factors to help in achieving UHC, because it is a promising instrument that promotes a systems‐strengthening and capacity‐building approach to enable effective coordination of standalone projects in alignment with the national priorities.     

Corporate planning for social responsibility

From his position as Senior Chaplain of a team of Industrial Chaplains, working in industry yet not part of it, the author probes the necessity for a global perspective as a setting for all decisions. The multi-national family of man with limited resources provides the context for multi-national planning and for corporate strategies. We need an ethic for society so that ethical considerations are seen to be pertinent to relationships between nations as well as relations between individuals. This paper suggests a simple model of the ethical dimensions of a global village, which will enable us to see the world perspective while operating at the corporate level and with immediate responsibilities that seem limited but are extensive.     

Going from theory to practice: the mixed success of approval voting

Approval voting (AV) is a voting system in which voters can vote for, or approve of, as many candidates as they like in multicandidate elections. In 1987 and 1988, four scientific and engineering societies, collectively comprising several hundred thousand members, used AV for the first time. Since then, about half a dozen other societies have adopted AV. Usually its adoption was seriously debated, but other times pragmatic or political considerations proved decisive in its selection. While AV has an ancient pedigree, its recent history is the focus of this paper. Ballot data from some of the societies that adopted AV are used to compare theoretical results with experience, including the nature of voting under AV and the kinds of candidates that are elected. Although the use of AV is generally considered to have been successful in the societies—living up to the rhetoric of its proponents—AV has been a controversial reform. AV is not currently used in any public elections, despite efforts to institute it, so its success should be judged as mixed. The chief reason for its nonadoption in public elections, and by some societies, seems to be a lack of key “insider” support.     

A useful distribution for fitting discrete data: revival of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution

Summary.  A useful discrete distribution (the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution) is revived and its statistical and probabilistic properties are introduced and explored. This distribution is a two-parameter extension of the Poisson distribution that generalizes some well-known discrete distributions (Poisson, Bernoulli and geometric). It also leads to the generalization of distributions derived from these discrete distributions (i.e. the binomial and negative binomial distributions). We describe three methods for estimating the parameters of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution. The first is a fast simple weighted least squares method, which leads to estimates that are sufficiently accurate for practical purposes. The second method, using maximum likelihood, can be used to refine the initial estimates. This method requires iterations and is more computationally intensive. The third estimation method is Bayesian. Using the conjugate prior, the posterior density of the parameters of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution is easily computed. It is a flexible distribution that can account for overdispersion or underdispersion that is commonly encountered in count data. We also explore two sets of real world data demonstrating the flexibility and elegance of the Conway–Maxwell–Poisson distribution in fitting count data which do not seem to follow the Poisson distribution.