Search results

Increased demand and the pressure to reduce health-care costs have led to longer waiting time for patients to make appointments and during the day of hospital visits. The purpose of this study is to identify opportunities to reduce waiting time using lean techniques and discrete-event simulation (DES).

A five-step procedure is proposed to facilitate the effective utilization of lean and DES to improve the performance of the Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Outpatient Clinic at Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi. While lean techniques were applied to reduce the potential sources of waste by aligning processes, a DES model was developed to validate the proposed solutions and plan patient arrivals under dynamic conditions and different scenarios.

Aligning processes resulted in an efficient patient flow reducing both waiting times. DES played a complementary role in verifying lean solutions under dynamic conditions, helping to plan the patient arrivals and striking a balance between the waiting times. The proposed solutions offered flexibility to improve the clinic capacity from the current 176 patients up to 479 (without violating the 30 min waiting time policy) or to reduce the patient waiting time during the visit from the current 33 min to 4.5 min (without violating the capacity goal of 333 patients).

Proposing and validating lean solutions require reliable data to be collected from the clinic and such a process could be laborious as data collection require patient and resource tracing without interfering with the regular functions of the clinic.

The work enables health-care managers to conveniently conduct a trade-off analysis and choose a suitable inter-arrival time – for every physician – that would satisfy their objectives between resource utilization (clinic capacity) and average patient waiting time.

Successful implementation of lean requires a supportive and cooperative culture from all stakeholders involved.

This study presents an original and detailed application of lean techniques with DES to reduce patient waiting times. The adopted approach in this study could be generalized to other health-care settings with similar objectives.

The study aims to investigate the mediating roles of leadership identification and organizational identification linking abusive supervision to employees' turnover intention.

Using a self-administer survey design, data were collected from 229 nursing workforce employed in hospitals located in Karachi.

The research findings show that abusive supervision has a considerably positive influence on turnover intention. The findings also show that abusive supervision negatively affects nurses' leadership identification and organizational identification. Leadership identification and organizational identification were found to be negatively related to nurses' turnover intention. Finally, leadership identification and organizational identification were found to parallelly mediate the relationship between abusive supervision and turnover intention.

This study helped uncover the previously unknown parallel mediating mechanism of organizational identification and leadership identification. Additionally, abusive supervision was found to negatively affect employees' leadership identification.

The purpose of this paper is to reduce the gap in understanding the complexity of barriers, their modifiers and how these barriers and their modifiers result in malpractices and missed good practices in post-earthquake reconstruction contexts. This paper provides insights to the often asked question: why the lessons learnt from one earthquake event are not actually learnt and many of the mistakes around housing reconstruction are repeated?

The paper is based on the review of the literature of the top deadliest earthquakes in the developing countries and the two case studies of the 2005 Kashmir and 2015 earthquake in Pakistan.

Multifarious barriers, their modifiers, malpractices and missed good practices are deeply interwoven, and endemic and include weak financial standing, lack of technical know-how, vulnerable location, social and cultural preference, affordability and availability of materials, over-emphasis on technical restrictions, inefficient policies, lack of clarity in institutional roles, monitoring and training.

The study is desk based.

A better understanding of barriers can help disaster-related organisations to improve the planning and implementation of post-earthquake housing reconstruction.

The study contributes to the understanding concerning various social and cultural preferences that negotiate the Build Back Better (BBB) process.

The study offers a distinctive perspective synthesising the literature and the two case studies to sharpen the understanding of the complexity of barriers to BBB.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a key enabler of big data and it is critical toward a new age of firm's architecture and proper decision-making for the industry. IoT adoption by the hospitality and tourism (H&T) industries is still rare and with contrasting evidence. The purpose of this study is to highlight the concept of IoT, its benefits, its challenges and its applications in the hospitality industry.

This study presents an in-depth and critical review of the 78 articles published on IoT in hospitality, spanning more than seven years (from 2015 to March 2022). The eligible 78 articles were collected from the “Web of Science database” and H&T Social Sciences Citation Index-listed journals.

This systematic review exhibits that IoT in hospitality has advanced in the past seven years. IoT has brought many advantages and challenges in hospitality. However, hospitality IoT research is scarce, necessitating a profound and more thorough investigation of many significant matters.

This systematic review provides significant implications and recommendations for hospitality sectors, IoT developers and manufacturers, governments and policymakers. This review ends with an in-depth research agenda with several research questions and a framework to achieve theoretical and empirical advances in future IoT research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the current research is one of the first to systematically and critically review IoT with its concept, benefits, challenges and applications in a hospitality context. This major review provides a comprehensive idea of the focus of the past studies and what must be concentrated in future research.

Drawing on job demands-resources theory, this paper aims to investigate the impact of workplace spirituality on mindfulness and the subsequent effects of mindfulness on open innovation mindset and job embeddedness. Additionally, it examines the mediating role of mindfulness between workplace spirituality and key outcomes, including open innovation mindset and job embeddedness. Lastly, the study investigates the moderating role of self-efficacy in the relationship between workplace spirituality and mindfulness.

The research utilized multiple sampling techniques to collect data from employees across numerous sectors. A total of 197 viable responses were collected. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the proposed hypotheses.

The results indicate that workplace spirituality has a positive impact on mindfulness, which in turn increases employees’ job embeddedness and an open innovation mindset. Additionally, it was found that mindfulness mediates the relationship between workplace spirituality and both job embeddedness and open innovation mindset. Surprisingly and unexpectedly, the results indicate a negative moderating impact of self-efficacy between workplace spirituality and mindfulness.

Cultivating a sense of purpose and meaningful work, alongside mindfulness programs and recruitment practices focused on cultural fit, can enhance both employee retention and innovation.

Little to no research exists that clarifies how workplace spirituality impacts employees’ job embeddedness and an open innovation mindset. Notably, the mediating role of mindfulness remains unexplored. This study is among the first to explore the mediating role of mindfulness between workplace spirituality and outcomes such as job embeddedness and an open innovation mindset. Additionally, the moderating role of self-efficacy between workplace spirituality and mindfulness is almost absent in the existing literature. Lastly, the unexpected findings on the role of self-efficacy in this study open fresh avenues for future research.

Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) in nanofluids is crucial in boundary layer flow as it enables the manipulation of fluid motion through magnetic fields, which leads to improved stability and efficiency. This study aims to introduce a model and solutions for the boundary layer flow of a ternary hybrid nanofluid past a permeable shrinking sheet, integrating both magnetohydrodynamic and slip effects.

The model is firstly expressed as partial differential equations and subsequently converted into ordinary differential equations (ODEs) through a similarity transformation technique. A finite difference scheme with the Lobatto IIIa formula in MATLAB is applied to numerically solve the ODEs, where the respective outcomes provide insights into the skin friction coefficient, Nusselt number, velocity profiles and temperature profiles.

The results highlight the significance of enhancing magnetohydrodynamic effects and first-order velocity slip to reduce skin friction, improve heat transfer, delay boundary layer separation, increase flow velocity and lower fluid temperature. In addition, the stable numerical solution is scrutinized using response surface methodology (RSM) to validate and optimize flow control. The RSM optimization confirms that higher suction, magnetohydrodynamic effects and first-order slip levels are essential for minimizing skin friction and maximizing heat transfer simultaneously.

The presented model together with the numerical and statistical results can be used as a guidance to control the flow and heat transfer that occur within a related practical application, especially in engineering and industrial activities such as cooling technologies, energy harvesting or fluid transport in nanotechnology, where precise control of heat transfer and fluid dynamics is essential for optimizing performance and reducing energy consumption.

Due to extensive industrial activities, the manufacturing sector is deteriorating the environment through resource depletion and rising pollution levels which led to a significant transition toward green supply chain practices (GSCP). Therefore, internal and external GSCP and green training (GT) gaining momentous attention. This study aims to explore the interconnections among the internal and external GSCP, GT, green innovation (GI), pro-environmental behavior (PEB), competitive advantage (CA), green knowledge sharing (GKS), green self-efficacy (GSE), environmental and financial performance (EP) and (FP).

To check the hypothesized model, researchers used cross-sectional data based on survey questionnaires which were gathered from Pakistani manufacturing firms. The theoretical framework was validated through the utilization of partial least square structural equation modeling.

The findings suggest that internal and external GSCP and GT are correlated with GI, PEB, CA, EP and FP. Additionally, this study discovers that PEB and GI act as intermediaries among internal and external GSCP, GT and CA. GKS positively moderates the connection among internal and external GSCP, and GT, GI, and PEB. Similarly, GSE also serves as a moderator among between PEB and GI.

This study is a significant contribution to the literature by studying potential mediators and moderators that improve the association among outlined constructs. Moreover, findings suggest that firms should adopt an integrated and holistic green approach to combat environmental deterioration, maintain environmental integrity and attain sustainable development.

There is a scarcity of studies concerning the holistic framework of interrelated constructs studied in this research and it is the pioneer research to offer insights with an innovative model and empirical evidence.