Search results

A total of 63 parents whose children underwent urological surgery at a tertiary referral specialist paediatric hospital were surveyed at three times points: immediately after signing consent; two to three days after surgery (at discharge); and by telephone two to three weeks after discharge. The survey was to assess parents’ perceptions of the consent process and parental recall of information given about the surgical procedure and risks. Results demonstrated that despite the majority of parents being satisfied with the consent process, operation, aftercare and the subsequent health of their child, their recall of risk information was poor, with 60 per cent of parents unable to recall any explained risks of the operation. This study pre‐dated the introduction of the national consent policies and forms, but provides evidence which supports the need for this consistent approach across the NHS which emphasises the effective communication of risks and benefits in relation to proposed treatment.

The oversight of clinical research in the UK is currently in a state of flux. Discusses the quality assurance problems that have arisen in the management of research and the protection of the rights of human participants. Contrasts clinical governance and regulatory approaches to research quality assurance and performs a critical analysis of the Department of Health (England) Research Governance Framework (RGF) to see where it falls within the continuum. Highlights the implications for UK hospitals engaged in clinical research through the presentation of a case study in implementing the RGF. Concludes by suggesting the priority areas that need to be addressed and invites further debate regarding the merits of a clinical governance or regulatory approach to research quality assurance.

Introduction: The birth of a preterm child requires hospitalization in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), which is a very stressful experience for parents. Aim: To determine the stress level of parents of preterm babies admitted to intensive and sub-intensive units in two hospitals in Northern Italy and its association with their sociodemographic variables and the clinical conditions of their newborns.

The sampling was non-probabilistic and included parents of preterm babies admitted to intensive and/or sub-intensive care for at least 10 days. Instruments: (1) information deduced from the clinical record of preterm newborns; (2) sociodemographic determinants of parents' well-being deduced from a questionnaire; (3) parental stress scale: neonatal intensive care unit (PSS:NICU), which measures the perception of parents about stressors from the physical and psychological environment of the NICU.

Results: A total of 104 parents of 59 hospitalized preterm babies participated in the study. The average parental stress level was 1.87 ± 0.837. The subscale score that got higher was parent-infant relationship subscale. Concerning the infant characteristics, the birth weight of the babies and the length of their hospitalization affected the parents' stress level. Looking at parents' sociodemographic characteristics instead, the greater predictors were gender, age and occupational social class.

The parental role alteration caused by infant premature birth and consequent hospitalization is a major stressor for parents and in particular for mothers. The variables that resulted positively associated with higher stress in parents of preterm infants hospitalized are specific parental characteristics, including not adequately or previously studied ones, and infant characteristics.

To provide a review of the winning case study from the executive development category of EFMD's Excellence in Practice Awards, 2013.

An independent review of the winning case.

Uncertainty may have become a common aspect of business life, particularly in recent years, but can such disruption transform the modern corporate culture of targets, measures and key performance indicators (KPI)? Franck Riboud, CEO of Danone thinks that it can. He proposes that Danone can only compete with big name competitors such as Nestlé, Unilever and CocaCola by “thinking outside the box”, and thus leveraging the “benefit of doubt”.

Provides insight for practitioners into a learning and development initiative of proven impact.

In recent years, many Western states have moved towards funding the asylum processing and resettlement systems of countries in the Global South. These forms of outsourced migration governance are upheld by a vast industry of state and non-state actors. This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in the Republic of Nauru to look at the people and places on the frontlines of the extractive asylum industry. Using Alexander Weheliye’s (2014) concept of ‘racialising assemblages’, the author argues that outsourced asylum regimes exacerbate the continuous subjection of Indigenous and migrant communities to toxic practices and discourses. Outsourced asylum is a contemporary practice of resource extraction (much like other forms of mining) that builds on colonial extractive projects that disproportionately target communities of colour. Ongoing processes of dispossession and displacement are occurring as people and places are rendered into resources and frontline sites for the extractive asylum industry. This chapter also shows how humanitarian and liberal democratic discourses are part of the mechanics of racialised geopolitical ordering. Racialised refugees are made into destitute victims, whereas locals become brutish villains, rather than political subjects. In attending to the politics of refusal, where Nauruans and refugees refuse ingrained racialising assemblages that deny them personhood, the author stresses the importance of intersectional advocacy that highlights the toxic effects of extractive asylum regimes on local and migrant populations alike.

This chapter compares a ‘deific decree’ insanity case with constitutional originalism debates as a way to understand the boundaries of the legal person and the nature of law. The criminal defendant who claims innocence on the ground that ‘God told me to’ does not embody a conflict between law and religion, but a conflict between law’s demand for intersubjectivity and the subjectivity of a ‘higher truth known only to me’. In the same way, the originalist interpreter of the constitution rejects precedent in favour of a higher truth that need not be ‘like’ anything before. One approach to broaching this conflict between law and revelation is to understand law’s domain as temporal and incomplete – to imagine a humble rather than absolute law. On this view, the person is also not ‘absolute subjectivity’, but is compelled by legal fidelity to treat like alike and therefore under an obligation to imagine a ‘me’ as ‘we’. Or, to put it another way, to bring the person and the law into relationship is to reject a ‘revelatory’ interpretation of ‘original’ or ‘divine’ law in favour of an incompletely intersubjective common law that links me to we through customs and time. At the same time, by acknowledging law’s incompleteness, we can see unreasonable revelation sometimes as a possibility and not always as an insanity.

Strategies to enable alternative urban food systems cannot be developed alone by those involved with the production and distribution aspects of food systems. It is important for architects, landscape designers and planners to be part of the process of conceiving and implementing innovative food-system thinking. Environmentally focused building standards and models for sustainable communities can easily incorporate farmers' markets, greenhouses, edible landscapes, permeable paving, green roofs, community gardens, and permaculture and other food-related strategies that complement energy generation and conservation, green roofs, living walls, and other approaches that have been more commonly part of sustainable built-environment initiatives.

Recently, architecture faculty and students at Ryerson University in Toronto and at a number of other universities have been exploring the intersection of these disciplines and interests. This paper will show how Ryerson tackled agricultural and food issues as design challenges in projects that included first-year community investigations, student-run design competitions, third-year studio projects and complex final-year thesis projects. These projects that dealt with food issues proved to be excellent entry points for addressing a range of design challenges including social inclusion, cultural context, community design and sustainable building practices.

This paper aims to provide an overview over the development of historical research into advertising from the early twentieth century. Its main purposes are to interest marketing scholars and business historians in the history of advertising, help scholars that are unfamiliar with the field in choosing an appropriate theoretical and methodological angle, and provide a critique of a range of methods and theoretical approaches being applied in advertising historical research.

The research design of this paper is based on historiographical analysis and method critique. It surveys the advertising historical literature of the three decades between 1980 and 2010, and it compares and contrasts dominant research methodologies and theoretical paradigms that have been used by historians and advertising researchers.

Much advertising historical research is based on a specific set of theoretical paradigms (“Modernization”, “Americanization”, and “Semiotics”), without being aware of the manifest impact they have on the narratives and understandings that historians create. Identifying these paradigms and outlining their impact will help marketing historians and advertising researchers to avoid the pitfalls associated with particular paradigms.

This paper subjects the modern historiography of advertising to a methodological and narratological analysis. It uses this analysis to propose new and somewhat more critical directions in advertising historical research.

“Since films attract an audience of millions, the need and appetite for information about them is enormous.” So said Harold Leonard in his introduction to The Film Index published in 1941. The 1970's has produced more than enough — too much — food to satisfy that appetite. In the past five years the number of reference books, in this context defined as encyclopedias, handbooks, directories, dictionaries, indexes and bibliographies, and the astounding number of volumes on individual directors, complete histories, genre history and analysis, published screenplays, critics' anthologies, biographies of actors and actresses, film theory, film technique and production and nostalgia, that have been published is overwhelming. The problem in film scholarship is not too little material but the senseless duplication of materials that already exist and the embarrassing output of items that are poorly or haphazardly researched, or perhaps should not have been written at all.

Toxic real estate has been used as a negative phrase to describe non‐performing assets on a firm's balance sheet. Today there is another form of “TOXIC” real estate that needs management's attention, i.e. physical workplaces that are harmful to employees on a day‐in and day‐out basis. Particularly when productivity of workforce is now central to business competitiveness, it is timely to explore the interface between physical and social environments as many of the social/psychological impacts on employees have not been recognized or calibrated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the links between physical workplace and social behaviour.

In this conceptual paper, current literature relating to corporate real estate and environmental psychology are reviewed to investigate the links between physical workplace and social behaviour. The findings are synthesised to present a framework for understanding the cause of toxicity in the workplace and a self‐auditing preventive strategy.

This article argued that there is a link between physical workplace and the social behaviour of employees. Arising from toxic workplaces, two dysfunctional social behaviours are highlighted, i.e. bullying and destructive leadership. The paper then presents a logical plan to monitor and remediate these “TOXIC” conditions in the physical environment.

This paper is original in its angle to which social behaviour is juxtaposed against physical environment. In particular, by examining the negative interface, it informs managers of the risks to avoid and therefore identifies the baseline for which the physical workplace must be managed. It also makes a practical contribution by its development of a self‐auditing framework to avoid toxic workplaces.