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This paper seeks to provide an overview of the concept of training needs analysis (TNA), current practice, models and the impact that training needs analysis currently has on nurses in public hospitals in Australia. Thus, the paper should aid future research in the area of TNA of nurses through helping researchers to clarify the conceptual boundaries of training needs of nurses; providing a theoretical framework that could help researchers in framing their research efforts in the area; and establishing a research agenda and identifying the impact this research will potentially have on Human Resource managers in hospitals across Australia.

This paper examines the TNA process by examining literature regarding the importance and benefits of TNA, issues relating to TNA and current practice and models. This paper then looks at how TNA applies to, and is currently practised within, the healthcare industry, specifically amongst a group of nurses. This paper also addresses how TNA tools relate to healthcare workers, particularly nurses, within Australia and how it may be able to improve the current TNA process for nurses in Australia.

The specific contribution of the current paper is in developing a logical model of TNA for nurses employed in healthcare organizations in Australia. In so doing insights are drawn from a number of discreet literature bases.

Research in this area has been carried out primarily in the UK, in the USA, and in other countries. Unfortunately, TNA for nurses in Australia is very much an under‐researched topic. Equally, there is scant research available into the importance and benefits of conducting appropriate TNA for nurses in Australia. The research that has been conducted involving training needs of nurses in Australia has not been focused on a TNA using a psychometrically valid tool, nor has the research considered the factors that may influence the training needs of particular nurses or organizations.

There is growing interest in the economic evaluation of public health prevention initiatives and increasing government awareness of the societal costs of conduct disorder in early childhood. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the cost-effectiveness of the Incredible Years (IY) BASIC parenting programme compared with a six-month waiting list control.

Cost-effectiveness analysis alongside a pragmatic randomised controlled trial of a group-parenting programme. The primary outcome measure was the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), a measure of child behaviour.

The IY programme was found to have a high probability of being cost-effective, shifting an additional 23 per cent of children from above the clinical concern to below the cut-off on the SDQ compared to the control group, at a cost ranging from £1612-£2418 per child, depending on the number of children in the group.

The positive findings of this study have led to ongoing implementation of the IY programme and is therefore an example of commitment to evidence-based service provision and investment in prevention initiatives.

National and local policy supports the involvement of patients at all levels in the design, delivery and improvement of health services. Whilst existing approaches to support involvement have been described and disseminated, including the 4Pi National Involvement Standards, their application in quality improvement is rarely reported. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A quality improvement initiative within a mental health trust was developed with a multi-disciplinary team, including those with professional experience of delivering or improving care and those with lived experience. The aim of the initiative was to improve the physical health of inpatients within an acute mental health unit. This case study aims to describe how the integration of concepts from the 4Pi National Involvement Standards (Principles, Purpose, Presence, Process and Impact) provided a framework for engaging and involving service users. The case study also aims to describe how co-design was included within the 4Pi approach and supported the development of a tool to aid improving physical healthcare.

The 4Pi National Involvement Standards provided a guiding framework for the involvement of service users within a quality improvement initiative. Value of the approach was realised through the co-design of a tool developed by service users, along with healthcare professionals, to facilitate discussion and support shared-decision making about inpatients’ physical health.

Identifying “ways that work” for service user involvement is crucial to move beyond the policy rhetoric or tokenistic involvement. Involvement in quality improvement initiatives can bring benefits both to services and the service users themselves.

Whilst the 4PI approach is recognised as a useful framework for involvement, few examples exist of its practical applications within a quality improvement setting.

The purpose of this study is to examine the usage of non-financial information related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues from the perspective of sell-side analysts (SSAs) and buy-side analysts (BSAs) employed in Poland-based financial institutions.

The authors conducted a survey among financial analysts with the use of the computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) method and an online questionnaire. The adopted methods included purposeful, quota sampling and snowball sampling.

Results indicate that financial analysts make use of CSR disclosures very rarely and attribute little importance to such information. Despite the limited use of CSR information and negative assessments of its quality, respondents are in favor of making a more frequent use of CSR disclosures. Finally, except for an analyst’s attitude toward the “comparability in time” information characteristic, results do not indicate any significant differences between SSAs’ and BSAs’ responses.

The limited number of questionnaires prevented the use of more sophisticated statistical methods and the formulation of conclusions that could apply to the entire population. In addition, although the adopted CATI method provides a number of advantages, it also has its limitations – interviews had limited time and the questions along with the answers had to take into account the respondents’ limited perception ability.

The results of this study suggest that CSR disclosures have limited usage for financial analysts, at least in the Polish context. Further, not only do respondents rarely make use of CSR disclosures but they also give low assessments to their quality. This implies that the concept of CSR remains relatively far from becoming a priority; hence, some measures and incentives may be necessary.

The paper adds to a relatively small number of studies that have dealt with the issue of non-financial information and its usefulness for SSAs and BSAs in Central and Eastern Europe.

This study examines the internationalization effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, specifically aiming to identify and compare the CSR reporting practices of large US multi-national corporations (MNCs) and their Polish subsidiaries.

Based on content analysis and using a disclosure index, the authors examined the CSR information posted on, or linked to, the corporate websites of a sample of 60 US-based MNCs and their subsidiaries operating in Poland.

The findings indicate that US companies, despite operating in a less regulated environment, had more extensive disclosure than their Polish subsidiaries and covered more CSR-related topics. CSR disclosures within the US subsample were analogous in volume and detail. By contrast, only about half of Polish companies provided CSR disclosures, which were more diverse in volume and in the types of activities disclosed. The authors did not find a significant positive correlation between the CSR disclosures of the two subsamples.

The study contributes to the literature on internationalization processes and sustainability practices. It provides insights into the CSR reporting of companies located in Central and Eastern European countries. The findings also have implications for policymakers in incentivizing the enhancement of the reporting disclosure practices of companies.

This paper aims to examine resource allocation behaviors of US and Taiwanese managers to help multinational firms understand the potential for divergence in resource allocations under different contextual conditions by managers from different national cultures.

The experimental design was developed as a 2 (national culture) × 2 (degree of project completion) × 2 (nature of market information) factorial design. The first two were between-subject factors. Because we would investigate subjects’ responses to both favorable and unfavorable conditions, the nature of market information was designed as a within-subject factor. Also, to avoid an order effect, half of the subjects first received favorable information and then unfavorable information, and the other half received the market information in the opposite order. Questionnaires were distributed randomly to subjects.

The results show that Taiwanese managers are less willing than US managers to continue a project in the presence of favorable information, but that both groups are equally willing to continue the project when receiving unfavorable information. Furthermore, Taiwanese managers allocate more funds than US managers do when the project is near completion. The authors use uncertainty avoidance and individualism to explain the different judgment and decision behaviors of these two cultural groups.

In this study, the authors examine only two contextual factors in resource allocation contexts. There are other important contextual factors associated with national culture that should be scrutinized, such as risks involved in each project, incentive plans related to performance evaluation and information asymmetry between central managers and division managers. It would be interesting for future studies to examine these factors in conjunction with different dimensions of national culture.

This study provides empirical evidence of the impact of different aspects of national culture (i.e. uncertainty avoidance and collectivism/individualism) on managerial resource allocation in light of different degrees of project completion and different types of market information. The results of our experiment add to both practice and theory of management. The findings of this study help top-level managers better understand the effects of national culture on division managers’ resource allocations. Hence, it may be possible to design incentive schemes and decision aids to mitigate the divergence in judgments and decision-making that can be attributed to cultural differences. This study also contributes to the management literature by extending our knowledge of complex managerial resource allocation decisions by incorporating the role of national culture with contextual factors.

Young men and women dominate different niches of science education in Australia, but how this divide varies between university and post-secondary vocational education and training (VET) is not well understood. Therefore, I compare courses in both sectors to assess if the male–female gap at later stages of education mirrors adolescent career plans and subject choices made in secondary school. Multinomial logistic regressions estimated on data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (Y06) illustrate the extent to which the gender divides in secondary and post-secondary education correspond with one another. Y06 started with the 2006 Australian Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Each year until 2013, a nationally representative sample of youth, who were nearly 16 years old in 2006, reported their schooling and work experiences. I find that Australian women rarely specialise in physics, engineering and technology (PET); in contrast, they dominate the life sciences. While post-secondary science is segregated by gender everywhere, the disparity within VET is much deeper due to a large share of PET enrolments. VET students, who come from modest socio-economic backgrounds and have less academic success at school, learn in more segregated environments than their university peers. This analysis suggests that gender divides will be particularly hard to close within post-secondary VET, even if schools succeed in eradicating gender differentials in students’ career aspirations, science performance, self-concept and choices of science subjects.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.