Facilitators and Barriers to Implementing Transitional Care Managers Within a Public Health Care System

Transitional care is crucial to ensure quality of care and safety for elderly patients. In the context of health care reforms promoting a shift from a hospital-centered approach to a home care approach, transitional care becomes a vital component and social workers can play an important role in easing transitions. Most recent studies have focused on the development or improvement of transitional care intervention models or tools, but few have addressed implementation issues. In this study, the implementation process of an innovative intervention aiming to integrate transitional care managers (TCMs) from Health and Social Services Centres (HSSC) within two Canadian hospitals was evaluated. Data collection comprised focus groups (n = 8), direct observations, meeting minutes, activity grids and logbooks. To facilitate the implementation of TCMs, decisions were made to clearly indicate their involvement in patients’ files and concentrated their efforts on a restricted number of units. Barriers included confusion about target clientele, inequitable information exchange between partners, limited powers regarding coordination of care, and organizational constraints limiting additional measures to improve transitional care. Evaluating implementation processes is crucial to efficiently identify obstacles and apply additional implementation strategies to promote the integration of new practices within the health care system.     

Facilitating the professional transition of migrants in Australia: does gender matter?

This article explores the provision and effects of a program devised to facilitate the professional transition of skilled migrants from non‐English‐speaking backgrounds (NESB) arriving in Australia on permanent visas. The program (‘Skilled Professional Migrants Program’—SPMP) was delivered by AMES Australia and internally evaluated through a telephone survey of 337 past participants. A report of survey results, primarily gauging short‐term post‐program employment outcomes, presented a very positive picture. In this paper we take a fresh look at the quantitative and qualitative survey data in order to analyse the success of the program from the perspective of gender. The paper focuses on gender differences in professional employment transition post‐program in the context of the structural impact of the gendered labour market. We found a significant difference between NESB men and women in their post‐program labour market incorporation into professional jobs that matched their skills. The gendered structures also influenced the ‘networking effect’ of the professional transition program.     

Assesment of managerial behavior in the correction of ergonomic problems at an airport

As demanded at Collective Employment Agreement (CEA), three ergonomic assessment of work (AEW) were made into an airport from a big Brazilian city (in particular, at the flight tower), with a 2 years interval between them. The objective was to produce a report pointing out problems and solutions. At the third time (2010), were verified that the work conditions where almost the same from 2006 and 2008, although all recommendations made in the reports. This work presents how the AET Team worked with this situation. At the third AEW, due the lack of real changes and the necessity of a report, the strategy was to know how workers where dealing with the complains and constraint detected at the previous reports, and how it interfere in abnormal or danger situations. Trying to explain this organizational phenomenon, we resort to Resilience Engineering to understand how those f/actors played to achieve its objectives.     

Understanding disabling barriers: a fruitful partnership between Disability Studies and social practices?

Disabled people are regularly denied their human rights, since policies and laws are hard to translate literally into practice. This article aims to make connections between social practice theories and Disability Studies, in order to understand the problems faced by disabled people, using different methods to look in detail at how practices are shaped and how disabled people get excluded. Disabled people are active agents in making change, both informally on an everyday basis and through formal actions. Thus we also suggest that the insights of disabled people could bring a fresh perspective to social practice theories, by troubling the taken-for-granted in our everyday lives.     

Promoting responsible gambling via prevention messages: insights from the evaluation of actual European messages

Prevention messages are short sentences supposed to broadcast preventive intentions. Three types of messages are noticeable: messages correcting erroneous beliefs, messages informing about the risks and messages promoting responsible gambling. While the results in the literature about messages promoting results are alerting, they are frequently used in European prevention campaigns. The present study relied on language and semantics models to evaluate the communicative and preventive values of 14 messages: 7 were actual European prevention messages and 7 messages were created for the study. Overall, 339 participants answered an online questionnaire in which they evaluated the communicative value of one of the messages and then ranked all the messages according to their preventive level. Results showed that messages informing about the risks and messages correcting erroneous beliefs have a higher level of communicative value than messages promoting responsible gambling. Indeed, the latter are judged as more ambiguous and as less preventive than the two other types of messages. As models of conversational pragmatics suggest that ambiguous messages convey at least two interpretations, the article discusses the possibility that individuals comprehend these messages as incentives to control their impulses (prevention) and incentives to control the game (promotion).     

Response of wild bee communities to beekeeping,urbanization, and flower availability

Urban Ecosystems - Wild bees provide pollination services and are currently declining at the global scale. A potential cause for this decline is competitive interactions with domestic honey bees....     

Expectations and realisations: the employment story of a young man with cerebral palsy

Britain has laws and a range of policies which promote the employment of disabled people. The lack of progress to get disabled people into paid work has resulted in huge dissatisfaction for some. Evidence of disability and employment problems is often expressed as hard data, but what of the personal experiences of trying to find employment? This article is based on interviews with ‘Nick’, a young man with cerebral palsy who wanted to recount his preparation for work, including work experience, through school, the Connexions service and the local Employment Office. He explained how he felt his voluntary work and work experiences were not fully planned and ultimately unsatisfactory. Nick found paid employment, but soon discovered that there were too many problems for him to continue. He reflected on his experiences, including his own initial confidence, his despair at the ending of his paid employment and the realities of what employment means for him.     

Quantile and Probability Curves Without Crossing

This paper proposes a method to address the longstanding problem of lack of monotonicity in estimation of conditional and structural quantile functions, also known as the quantile crossing problem (Bassett and Koenker (1982)). The method consists in sorting or monotone rearranging the original estimated non‐monotone curve into a monotone rearranged curve. We show that the rearranged curve is closer to the true quantile curve than the original curve in finite samples, establish a functional delta method for rearrangement‐related operators, and derive functional limit theory for the entire rearranged curve and its functionals. We also establish validity of the bootstrap for estimating the limit law of the entire rearranged curve and its functionals. Our limit results are generic in that they apply to every estimator of a monotone function, provided that the estimator satisfies a functional central limit theorem and the function satisfies some smoothness conditions. Consequently, our results apply to estimation of other econometric functions with monotonicity restrictions, such as demand, production, distribution, and structural distribution functions. We illustrate the results with an application to estimation of structural distribution and quantile functions using data on Vietnam veteran status and earnings.     

International governance mode choice: Evidence from Brazilian franchisors

The purpose of this article is to test a novel, integrative theory of governance mode selection in the context of international franchising from Brazil. Given the Brazilian emerging market context, we added and tested another variable in the model relating to environmental distance between the home (Brazil) and host countries. To test the theory, we employed two logistic regression models and representative data from the Brazilian Franchising Association in addition to the World Bank's Doing Business index, and the CEPII (Centre d'études prospectives et d'informations internationales). Findings show that three factors influence Brazilian franchisors' choices regarding international governance modes: the environmental uncertainty of the host countries, their behavioral uncertainty, and the franchisors' financial capacity. However, the environmental distance does not influence internationalization strategies of Brazilian firms. Emerging markets firms' governance modes of entry can be adequately explained with the existing model despite contextual differences.