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Based on a case study in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, the purpose of this paper is to explore the difficulties faced by local health care providers in the face of constantly evolving refugee policies, programs, and arrivals. In doing so, it illustrates the complications faced by service providers in providing care to refugee arrivals and how the diversity of arrivals challenges health care provision and ultimately the health and well-being of refugees.

A series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews with key service professionals in both the social service and health fields in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, examined both health and health care issues.

Beyond challenges for service providers that have been previously flagged in the literature, including language barriers and the limited time that they have with their clients, analysis revealed that health care providers faced other challenges in providing care, with one challenge reflecting the difficulty of providing care and services to a diverse refugee population. A second challenge reflected the lack of knowledge associated with constantly evolving policies and programs. Both challenges potentially limit the abilities of care providers.

On-going changes to refugee and health care policy, along with the diversity of refugee arrivals, will continue to challenge providers. The challenge, therefore, for health care providers and policy makers alike is how to ensure adequate service provision for new arrivals.

The Federal government should do a better job in disseminating the impact of policy changes and should streamline programs. This is particularly relevant given limited budgets and resources, tri-partite government funding, short time-frames to prepare for new arrivals, inadequate background information, barriers/challenges or inequitable criteria for access to health and social services, while addressing an increasingly diverse and complex population.

The research reinforces the complexity of the needs and challenges faced by refugees when health is considered, and the difficulty in providing care to this group.

While there is a large refugee health literature, there is relatively little attention to the challenges and difficulties faced by service providers in addressing the health needs of the diverse refugee population, a topic that is particularly important given limited funding envelopes, shifting policies and programs, and a focus on clients (refugees). It is this latter piece – the challenges faced by providers in providing care to refugees – which this paper explores.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the implications of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic for future research on intersection feminist studies of foodwork.

This paper offers a brief summary of feminist domestic foodwork research and COVID-19 food-related media commentary, focusing on race, gender and class.

This paper shows how domestic foodwork during pandemic lockdowns and the wider contexts reproduced racial, classed and gendered inequalities and hierarchies.

The paper is limited by the recency of the pandemic and lack of empirical studies but still offers recommendations for a post-pandemic intersectional feminist agenda for studies and policy interventions relation to domestic foodwork.

The paper raises the importance of foodwork for feminist organisational studies, and how it consolidated and created racialised, gendered and classed inequalities during the pandemic, offering insights for future research and policy interventions around food and labour.

Recent New Zealand reports have identified the nursing workforce for its potential to make a significant contribution to increased productivity in health services. The purpose of this paper is to review critically the recent and current labour approaches to improve nursing productivity in New Zealand, in a context of international research and experience.

An examination of government documents regarding productivity, and a review of New Zealand and international literature and research on nursing productivity and its measurement form the basis of the paper.

It is found that productivity improvement strategies are influenced by theories of labour economics and scientific management that conceptualise a nurse as a labour unit and a cost to the organisation. Nursing productivity rose significantly with the health reforms of the 1990s that reduced nursing input costs but impacts on patient safety and nurses were negative. Current approaches to increasing nursing productivity, including the “productive ward” and reconfiguration of nursing teams, also draw on manufacturing innovations. Emerging thinking considers productivity in the context of the work environment and changing professional roles, and proposes reconceptualising the nurse as an intellectual asset to knowledge‐intensive health organisations.

Strategies that take a systems approach to nursing productivity, that view nursing as a capital asset, that focus on the interface between nurse and working environment and measure patient and nurse outcomes are advocated.

The paper shows that reframing nursing productivity brings into focus management strategies to raise productivity while protecting nursing and patient outcomes.

This study aims to address the gap by empirically exploring how residential construction-production progress, which includes project commencement, under-construction and project completion, responds dynamically to fluctuations in house prices.

A vector autoregressive model and an impulse response function are applied to simulate and analyse the circle of the stage-responsiveness of residential construction to residential property price dynamics in the state of Victoria, Australia. The quarterly numbers of dwelling units commenced, under-construction and completed are used as the proxy for the residential construction activities at three stages over the construction progress.

The analysis indicates that the dynamics are essentially transmitted throughout the construction process and can substantially impact the pace of production progress. The findings from this study provide an empirical base that should be useful in developing price-elasticity and production theories applicable to the context of residential property construction.

The findings described above have been generated basically by examining the case of Victoria, Australia at a macro level. The generalisation of the research output needs to be verified further by future researchers using data collected from other regions/countries. Nevertheless, the reliability of the conclusions with particular practical implications can be substantially improved by future researchers by analysing more markets and production proxies at the activity level.

Based on new empirical findings, this research argues that building activity (i.e. under construction) played as a gateway between the construction and housing sectors, via which the inter-responsiveness of the housing supply in terms of construction activities and housing prices are transmitted.

This research firstly attempts to explore the inter-responsiveness between the real estate and construction sectors. A simulated circle of the stage-responsiveness of residential construction to residential property price dynamics is proposed, which can serve as a significant foundation for developing the theory of construction production.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

WE publish this issue on the eve of the Brighton Conference and our hope is that this number of The Library World will assist the objects of that meeting. Everything connected with the Conference appears to have been well thought out. It is an excellent thing that an attempt has been made to get readers of papers to write them early in order that they might be printed beforehand. Their authors will speak to the subject of these papers and not read them. Only a highly‐trained speaker can “get over” a written paper—witness some of the fiascos we hear from the microphone, for which all papers that are broadcast have to be written. But an indifferent reader, when he is really master of his subject, can make likeable and intelligible remarks extemporarily about it. As we write somewhat before the Conference papers are out we do not know if the plan to preprint the papers has succeeded. We are sure that it ought to have done so. It is the only way in which adequate time for discussion can be secured.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

The ongoing shift to telework has brought about tremendous opportunities for employees to reimagine their use of technology. Opportunities abound for both discovering new technologies and new uses of existing technologies. However, opportunity alone is not enough to turn ideas into action. This opinion paper aims to identify grace, place and space as key concepts that can help managers navigate challenges and opportunities for technological innovation posed by telework.

The authors provide a concise review of related research and events that inform the selection of conditions necessary to foster employee technological innovation.

The authors identify three primary conditions necessary to foster employee technological innovation – grace, place and space. “Grace” refers to employee autonomy, “place” refers to networking and “space” refers to a reduction of overload. While telework may create opportunities for innovation, it also presents difficulties. Therefore, for each condition, the authors discuss inherent tensions and advise managers regarding how they can resolve those tensions and bring about innovation with a decentralized workforce.

The authors situate the discussion on facilitating conditions that foster employee technological innovation in today's current environment, one in which a rapid expansion of telework among employees is creating difficulties for managers. This paper addresses the “new normal” that managers will face for the foreseeable future.

Using a sense making approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine the role that virtual health communities play as a source of informational and social support for pregnant diabetic women. The paper helps to understand how women suffering from a critical medical condition (i.e. diabetes during pregnancy and birth) manage a complex health situation.

The data sample consisted of 507 posts collected from a virtual health community for diabetic pregnant women. Data were analysed deductively looking for different expressions of normality and different types of health information about diabetes.

Content analysis revealed four themes that reflect the process that diabetic women go through from their attempts to conceive through pregnancy and birth. The findings show that for women dealing with a chronic illness such as diabetes, the breakdown of normal was the beginning of the pregnancy that prompted a new range of informational and emotional needs. The members of the community negotiated a socially constructed sense of normality and tried to empower other members with a new sense of normal by sharing information about their births. The findings also showed that members of the community disclosed personal health information to elicit medical information, advice and social support from other members.

The study highlighted the significance of sense-making processes in managing complex health situations and the value of virtual communities as sources of information and social support as to resolve discontinuities in the management of their illnesses.

The purpose of this paper is to review the historic development of the requirements for sub-floor (also known as “basementless space” or “crawl space”) moisture management in the USA, UK and New Zealand (NZ) from 1600s to 1969.

The review of 171 documents, including legislation, research papers, books and magazines, identified three time periods where the focus differed: 1849, removal of impure air; 1850–1929, the use of ground cover and thorough ventilation; and 1930–1969, the development of standards.

Published moisture management guidance has been found from 1683, but until the 1920s, it was based on the provision of “adequate” ventilation and, in the UK, the use of impermeable ground cover. Specific ventilation area calculations have been available from 1898 in the UK, 1922 in the USA and 1924 in NZ. These are based on the area of ventilation per unit floor area, area of ventilation per unit length of perimeter wall, or a combination of both. However, it was not until 1937 in the USA, 1944 in NZ and after the period covered by this paper in the UK, that numerical values were enforced in codes. Vents requirements started at 1 in. of vent per square foot of floor area (0.7 per cent but first published in the USA with a misplaced decimal point as 7 per cent). The average vent area was 0.69 per cent in USA for 19 cases, 0.54 per cent in NZ for 7 cases and 0.13 per cent in UK for 3 cases. The lower UK vent area requirements were probably due to the use of ground covers such as asphalt or concrete in 1854, compared with in 1908 in NZ and in 1947 in USA. The use of roll ground cover (e.g. plastic film) was first promoted in 1949 in USA and 1960 in NZ.

Common themes found in the evolution of sub-floor moisture management include a lack of documented research until the 1940s, a lack of climate or site-based requirements and different paths to code requirements in the three countries. Unlike many building code requirements, a lack of sub-floor moisture management seldom leads to catastrophic failure and consequent political pressure for immediate change. From the first published use of performance-based “adequate” ventilation to the first numerical or “deemed to satisfy” solutions, it took 240 years. The lessons from this process may provide guidance on improving modern building codes.

This is the first time such an evaluation has been undertaken for the three countries.