Social care stakeholders' perceptions of the recruitment of international practitioners in the United Kingdom—a qualitative study

Mobility of labour is common within Europe and globally, particularly in social and health care. This article examines the findings from a qualitative study of 15 expert or stakeholder views that explored supply and demand factors in international social care staff recruitment to the United Kingdom (UK). Findings are that international social care workers have a better reputation and are perceived as being harder workers, more productive, more reliable, more focused and more likely to stay in a post longer than local workers. However, there is also the perception that employment in social care is a stepping-stone into other forms of employment both in the UK and when returning to home countries, through access to training, experience and improved job opportunities. The impact of migration policies on the composition of international workers is further noted because greater numbers of social care staff are coming to the UK from the European Union and fewer from Commonwealth states. Changes in the profile of international workers are discussed, with a need identified to address cultural and language differences to ensure good outcomes for service users.     

An international review of the long-term care workforce: policies and shortages

The developed world's population is aging, due to trends of increased life expectancies and decreased fertility rates. These trends are predicted to increase demand on long-term care services. At the same time, the long-term care workforce is in shortage in most of the developed world. Moreover, such shortages are expected to increase due to parallel socio-demographic factors. The increase in demand for longterm care, coupled with shortage in supply of care workers, has promoted some attention from policymakers. The current paper provides an international review of institutional arrangements for long-term care in different developed countries and in particular explores different strategies used or proposed to resolve the shortage in the long-term care workforce.     

张恨水小说的话语世界与传统因缘

张恨水小说的话语与传统因缘有着密切联系。在形式上,张恨水改良了传统的章回体小说;在描写手法上,注重人物心理和场景的描写;在题材上,描写了市民的生活;在思想上,体现了五四时期的新思想。总之,张恨水小说的独特魅力在于它既保留了传统小说的精华,又借鉴了西方学的优点。     

Sex Selection for Daughters: Demographic Consequences of Female-Biased Sex Ratios

Population Research and Policy Review - Modern fertility techniques allow parents to carry out preimplantation sex selection. Sex selection for non-medical purposes is legal in many high-income...     

An evaluation of the population and development program in Egypt

Previous rural surveys analyzing the impact of the Egyptian Population and Development Program on KAP variables (knowledge, attitudes, and practices of contraception) have produced mixed results. In 1982 a survey specifically designed to measure program impact contained refinements in questionnaire measurement, sampling, and analysis. Each refinement intensified the apparent program impact. Fertility itself still appears unresponsive, and attitudes toward family size have changed little, but marked differences between program and nonprogram areas in contraceptive knowledge, attitudes, and practice suggest imminent fertility declines in program areas.     

Turning away from the public sector in children's out-of-home care: An English experiment

This paper reports on the evaluation of an English experiment which, for the first time, moved statutory social work support for children and young people in out-of-home care from the public to the private or independent sector. Five social work practices (SWPs), independent or semi-independent of local government, were established and evaluated using a matched control design with integrated process evaluation. Social work teams in the public sector, selected to correspond to key characteristics of the SWP sites, provided control sites.     

Employers' Experiences and Views of Grow Your Own Social Work Programmes: A Qualitative Interview Study

In the light of expressed support for Grow Your Own or employer sponsored schemes for social work training, this article explores why they are not so frequently adopted. It draws on findings from a multi-method study of GYO activities and outcomes in England, in particular interviews with 27 participants from 20 organisations employing social workers and funding GYO activity. These interviews revealed that GYO was seen as a means to recruit and retain new social workers, specifically to recruit workers who were able to start practice immediately and needed minimal support, but also to widen access to the profession and to demonstrate evidence of the employers' wider commitment to its non-qualified staff by providing a career pathway. Not all those interviewed were able to provide firm data as evidence of their belief in the value of GYO schemes. The article concludes that the reasons for the decline in GYO schemes lie in the sizeable investment required to develop and sustain them. It identifies some mismatch between the need for immediate solutions to workforce shortages and the longer-term investment in students and in workforce development staff who are necessary to reap the benefits of such schemes.     

Identification and Identification Failure for Treatment Effects Using Structural Systems

We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for effect identification, thereby characterizing the limits to identification. Our results link the nonstructural potential outcome framework for identifying and estimating treatment effects to structural approaches in economics. This permits economic theory to be built into treatment effect methods. We elucidate the sources and consequences of identification failure by examining the biases arising when the necessary conditions fail, and we clarify the relations between unconfoundedness, conditional exogeneity, and the necessary and sufficient identification conditions. A new quantity, the exogeneity score, plays a central role in this analysis, permitting an omitted variable representation for effect biases. This analysis also provides practical guidance for selecting covariates and insight into the price paid for making various identifying assumptions and the benefits gained.     

Shrinkage Estimation of the Memory Parameter in Stationary Gaussian Processes

The correct and efficient estimation of memory parameters in a stationary Gaussian processes is an important issue, since otherwise, forecasts based on the resulting time series would be misleading. On the other hand, if the memory parameters are suspected to fall in a smaller subspace through some hypothesis restrictions, it becomes a hard decision whether to use estimators based on the restricted spaces or to use unrestricted estimators over the full parameter space. In this article, we propose James-Stein-type estimators of the memory parameters of a stationary Gaussian times series process, which can efficiently incorporate the hypothetical restrictions. We show theoretically that the proposed estimators are more efficient than the usual unrestricted maximum likelihood estimators over the entire parameter space.     

Financial Contracting,Governance Structures and the Accounting Regulation of Islamic Banks: An Analysis in Terms of Agency Theory and Transaction Cost Economics

Because Islamic banks are prohibited from entering into transactions based on riba (interest), they mobilise funds mainly on the basis of the mudaraba (profit-sharing) form of contract. Thus, in the place of interest-bearing customer deposits, Islamic banks offer investment accounts the return on which depends on the return on the pool of assets in which the customers' funds are invested by the bank. In contrast to conventional deposits, such investment accounts therefore yield a variable periodic return which may be negative (a loss). Islamic investment accounts are thus a form of limited-duration equity investment.This type of investment account raises a set of issues concerning the contractual relations between the bank and the holders of such investment accounts. These issues may be addressed from the perspectives of both Agency Theory (principal-agent and principal-principal relations) and Transaction Cost Economics (contractual forms and governance structures), and it is the purpose of this paper to do so. In particular, we focus on governance issues such as the monitoring possibilities which may or may not be contractually available to investment account holders. We conclude that, under present contractual arrangements, investment account holders depend unduly upon 'vicarious' monitoring by or on behalf of shareholders, a situation aggravated by current shortcomings in financial reporting and limitations of the scope of external auditing. The latter have implications for accounting regulation as applied to Islamic banks. The paper concludes with some suggestions as to how this situation could be ameliorated.