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The study applies the principles behind the SERVQUAL model and uses Donabedian’s framework to compare and contrast Malta’s public and private hospital care service quality. Through the identification of 16 service quality indicators and the use of a Likert‐type scale, two questionnaires were developed. The first questionnaire measured patient pre‐admission expectations for public and private hospital service quality (in respect of one another). It also determined the weighted importance given to the different service quality indicators. The second questionnaire measured patient perceptions of provided service quality. Results showed that private hospitals are expected to offer a higher quality service, particularly in the “hotel services”, but it was the public sector that was exceeding its patients’ expectations by the wider margin. A number of implications for public and private hospital management and policy makers were identified.

The purpose of this paper is to identify organizational challenges that drive enterprise content management (ECM) adoption from a process point of view.

The presented results are grounded in both the academic literature on ECM and qualitative data from two case studies.

The study identifies and discusses 21 contemporary business challenges that drive ECM adoption along the content lifecycle (e.g. regarding the creation, storage, and retrieval of content).

As the scopes of both the literature review and the case studies were limited, the presented account of ECM drivers is not considered exhaustive. The paper can, nevertheless, help researchers to further theorize about ECM adoption and investigate the role that content plays in business process management.

Practitioners are provided with empirically grounded knowledge on the drivers behind ECM adoption. They can, for example, use the results to justify and evaluate ECM investments, or determine the scopes and objectives of their ECM initiatives.

This study is important because the understanding is still vague as to what organizations strive to gain through implementing ECM and what results they can expect from the same.

This paper aims to focus on increasingly entrepreneurial approaches to urban governance in the country’s second city Cork, where neoliberal strategy has driven uneven spatial development.

This paper combines insights from literature review with new knowledge derived from interviews with key informants in the city.

Post-colonial themes provoke a consideration of how uneven power dynamics stifle social innovation in the built environment.

Assembled narratives expose opaque aspects of governance, ownership and participation, presenting opportunities for rethinking urban vacancy through placemaking.

These draw on nuanced models for tourism as a platform for a broader discourse on rights to the city.

A century after independence, Ireland is recast as a leading small European economy, away from historical framings of a rural economic backwater of the British Empire.

The model of success is based on a basket of targeted investment policies and somewhat dubious indicators for growth.

This research examined changes in Dublin’s tertiary city centre shopping streets over a 30‐year period to 2002. An observational study of the occupancy of the city’s tertiary streetscape was undertaken in the summer of 2002 and compared with historical data. Results indicate significant change over the period examined: an increased vacancy rate, a very low survival rate, a considerable incidence of non‐retail specific activities, a decline in traditional retail offerings and the emergence of new categories of retailer. The paper concludes by suggesting a proactive approach is required by present day retailers in the tertiary streets to ensure future survival.

The aim of this paper is to gather information that will be useful to practitioners who are assessing and trying to understand the difficulties of people with intellectual disabilities who may have experienced sexual abuse. In the first part of this paper the research into the effects of sexual abuse on people with learning disability is reviewed. In the second part of this paper, the major clinical implications of these findings are explored. These include the implications for abuse evaluations, identification of individuals at increased risk of disturbance, implications for treatment and provision of psychotherapeutic services.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that financial development, measured by private credit in the economy, affects exports in an inverted U-shaped manner. The authors use the new trade theory model and empirical data to analyze whether the financial system is the reason of global imbalance.

This paper builds a simple production model to connect financial development with a country’s export or outward foreign direct investment (ODI) decision. Using a panel data covering 108 countries for the period 1990-2011, the authors find strong evidence to show that when a country is at a lower financial development level, further advancements of its financial system will boost exports.

First, an inverted U-shaped relationship between exports, imports and financial development is found in the study of 108 countries over the period 1990-2011; second, ODI provides a substitute effect to exports for financially advanced countries. These findings have provided an alternative explanation to international trade imbalances and contribute constructively to the discussion regarding whether exports and financial development are positively related or not.

As a result, the findings shed some light on the issue of global current account imbalances between developing and developed countries from a new perspective.

We study here the effects of FTA on demand, consumer surplus, dealer profit, and tariff revenue depending on the degree of substitution between two goods and import competition structure in a two country’s static model. We consider monopolist dealer, and perfect competition in imports market. The base model is with a positive tariff and we compare the equilibrium with a zero tariff under FTA. The rankings in the consumer utility are such that it is i) the highest under perfect competition with FTA or without FTA, ii) second highest under monopoly with FTA, and iii) the lowest under monopoly without FTA.

The purpose of this article is to estimate the relationship between acute care consumers' satisfaction with hospital foodservices, foodservice characteristics, demographic and contextual variables.

The acute care hospital foodservice patient satisfaction questionnaire was administered to 2,347 patients from 1996‐2001. Regression analysis was conducted to measure the influence of 21 foodservice attributes and seven contextual/demographic items on overall foodservice satisfaction.

Foodservice satisfaction was strongly associated with variety, flavour, meat texture, temperature, meal taste, and menu staff (p<0.01). Consumers aged 70 years or more rated their overall satisfaction significantly lower than younger consumers (p<0.01), but no statistically significant differences in overall ratings existed for other contextual or demographic groups.

This new foodservice instrument and the methods of analysis may be generalisable, but application is likely to be context‐specific. Further applications of the instrument are required to produce greater confidence in its validity and reliability across different foodservice settings.

Global statements often used in health service satisfaction surveys (e.g. a single rating of “food quality”) provide insufficient information to allow managers to adapt foodservices to suit consumers' preferences.

Detailed information of the kind produced here is required for the formulation of managerial and sectoral policies to improve the quality of health and consumer nutrition care. The findings are noteworthy and, as far as the literature review showed, no previously published study has produced this level of detail on consumer preferences across foodservice attributes or their relationship to overall foodservice satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to note the basis for the emergence of strength-based approaches (SBA) to the treatment of sex offenders and point to Tony Ward’s Good Lives Model (GLM) as the impetus for these developments.

Next, the authors outline the elements of the GLM and of other SBAs. The features of various ways to evaluate treatment programs are discussed and this is followed by an examination of the evidence bearing on the value of the GLM and other SBAs.

The authors note that the effects of the GLM are limited to within treatment indices as, to date, there are no long-term outcome evaluations of the model on reducing recidivism. Indeed, there appears to be only one such study of an alternative SBA program.

The authors conclude that additional outcome studies are needed to evaluate the utility of the switch away from deficit-focused approaches to strength-based models of treatment.

From the 19th century onwards, glass has been used intensively in buildings. During the design process, the importance of aesthetics is very common for architects in general. The application of glass walls as part of the building’s structure has given flexibility in design together with transparency as well as aesthetics.

Structural glass systems have been used in different building types for example office, residential, educational, commercial, transportation, cultural … Beyond the high - rise and high - tech buildings, structural glass systems have been applied also to historic buildings during their conservation process. The adaption of the structural glass system and the opportunity to reuse the existing building are other important aspects to be discussed.

In this article, the literature review will be formed with a brief explanation of transparency in contemporary architecture, structural glass systems focusing on ‘suspended glass systems with pre-stressed cable trusses’ (SGSPCT) which has three application methods; 1) between floor systems 2) independent body systems 3) distance bridging systems and the reusability of existing buildings. The ‘between floor system’ which is commonly used as a contemporary solution technique for historic buildings together with its effects, will also be analysed with the help of a case study, Esma Sultan Mansion. This historic building’s present glass structure will be studied to create an alternative proposal less dependent to the existing building. Another case study will be the Ballapais Abbey. Part of this gothic building (the common room) that has collapsed in the past will be analysed. An independent glass structured annex designed with SGSPCT will be proposed giving joint details of the adaptation to the existing building. This case of study is a literature analysis based on books, internet resources, articles and architectural drawings, like plans, sections and details related to the buildings. Both case studies will be proposing an alternative glass structured annex that is focusing on gained transparency and reusability in respect to the existing historic building.