bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Insights into physician scheduling: a case study of public hospital departments in Sweden
Authors: António Ferreira Rodrigues Nogueira dos Santos Marco , Kurt Olof Eriksson Henrik 
Published: August 2014

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to describe current physician scheduling and concomitant opportunities for improvement in public hospital departments in Sweden.

Design/methodology/approach
– A total of 13 departments spread geographically across Sweden covering seven different specialties participated in the study. Data were collected through interviews with individuals involved in creating physician schedules. All departments investigated provided copies of the documents necessary for physician scheduling.

Findings
– Physician scheduling required the temporal coordination of patients, physicians, non-physician staff, rooms and equipment. A six-step process for creating physician schedules could be distinguished: capacity and demand overview, demand goal and schedule setting, vacation and leave requests, schedule creation, schedule revision, and schedule execution. Several opportunities for improvement could be outlined; e.g. overreliance on memory, lacking coordination of resources, and redundant data entering.

Research limitations/implications
– The paucity of previous studies on physician scheduling lends an exploratory character to this study and calls for a more thorough evaluation of the feasibility and effects of the approaches proposed. The study excluded the scheduling of non-physician staff.

Practical implications
– To improve physician scheduling and enable timeliness, three approaches are proposed: reinforcing centralisation, creating learning opportunities, and improving integration.

Originality/value
– This paper is among the few to investigate physician scheduling, which is essential for delivering high quality care, particularly concerning timeliness. Several opportunities for improvement identified in this study are not exclusive to physician scheduling but are pervasive in healthcare processes in general.
Health and social care workforce planning and development – an overview
Authors: Hurst Keith , Kelley Patterson Deirdre 
Published: August 2014

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues relating to getting the right health and social care staff with the right skills in the right place at the right time and at the right price.

Design/methodology/approach
– Key points arising from several master-classes with health and social care managers, supported by a literature review, generated remarkable insights into health and social care workforce planning and development (WP&D).

Findings
– Flawed methods and overwhelming data are major barriers to health and social care WP&D. Inefficient and ineffective WP&D policy and practice, therefore, may lead to inappropriate care teams, which in turn lead to sub-optimal and costly health and social care. Increasing health and social care demand and service re-design, as the population grows and ages, and services move from hospital to community, means that workforce planners face several challenges. Issues that drive and restrain their health and social care WP&D efforts are lucid and compelling, which leave planners in no doubt what is expected if they are to succeed and health and social care is to develop. One main barrier they face is that although WP&D definitions and models in the literature are logical, clear and effective, they are imperfect, so planners do not always have comprehensive tools or data to help them determine the ideal workforce. They face other barriers. First, WP&D can be fragmented and uni-disciplinary when modern health and social care is integrating. Second, recruitment and retention problems can easily stymie planners’ best endeavours because the people that services need (i.e. staff with the right skills), even if they exist, are not evenly distributed throughout the country.

Practical implications
– This paper underlines triangulated workforce demand and supply methods (described in the paper), which help planners to equalise workloads among disparate groups and isolated practitioners – an important job satisfaction and staff retention issue. Regular and systematic workforce reviews help planners to justify their staffing establishments; it seems vital, therefore, that they have robust methods and supporting data at their fingertips.

Originality/value
– This paper stock-takes the latest health and social care workforce planning and development issues.
Implementation of patient-focused care: before-after effects
Authors: Wilde-Larsson Bodil , Inde Marianne , Carlson Annika , Nordström Gun , Larsson Gerry , Rystedt Ingrid 
Published: August 2014

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to evaluate an organizationally oriented, patient-focused care (PFC) model's effects on care quality and work climate.

Design/methodology/approach
– The study has a before-after (PFC implementation) design. The sample included 1,474 patients and 458 healthcare providers in six participating wards before and after PFC implementation, plus five additional randomly chosen wards, which only featured in the post-assessment.

Findings
– No pre-post differences were found regarding care perceptions or provider work climate evaluations. Statistically significant improvements were noted among provider care evaluations. Using aggregate-level ward data, multiple regression analyses showed that high adherence to PFC principles and a positive work climate contributed significantly to variance among care quality ratings.

Research limitations/implications
– Among healthcare providers, questions related to specific PFC aspects during evenings, nights and weekends had to be dropped owing to a low response rate.

Practical implications
– An important requirement for both practice and research is to tailor PFC to various health and social care contexts.

Originality/value
– The study is large-scale before-after PFC model review, where patient and provider data were collected using well-established measurements.
Out of sight, out of mind? Supplier spatial proximity in French public procurement
Authors: Mamavi Olivier , Nagati Haithem , T. Wehrle Frederick , Pache Gilles 
Published: August 2014

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of spatial proximity on supplier selection in the French public sector. While French public procurement legislation forbids consideration of supplier location in the procurement process, public contractors may still rely on spatial proximity for complex transactions necessitating mutual adjustments with suppliers.Design/methodology/approach– Using French Official Journals (BOAMP), the authors compiled 565,557 transactions completed on three public procurement markets between 6,182 contractors and 26,570 suppliers, over a period of six years (between 2006 and 2011). The authors conducted a two-level hierarchical linear auto-regression analysis and a feature evaluation analysis for all transactions.Findings– The paper finds significant variation between the transactions on different markets: a negative effect of spatial proximity on the number of contract notices in the public market and a positive effect of spatial proximity on the number of notices in the services and supplies markets. The difference lies in the levels of mutual adjustment required to optimally manage the relationship between public contractor and supplier.Research limitations/implications– The research is based on an econometric analysis conducted uniquely in the French context, which calls into question the external validity of the results obtained. The study also rests on segmentation into three aggregate markets, which might be considered too general.Originality/value– Rather than analyze public contractors’ perceptions of the importance of the criterion of spatial proximity, the paper examines 565,557 actual transactions. The results point to the emergence of a new type of relationship with certain suppliers, which should lead public contractors to integrate relationship management competencies, in addition to legal and economic competencies, in the organization of calls for tenders.
Administrative reforms and performance of local public policies
Authors: Santos Curto Helena , Dias Álvaro 
Published: August 2014

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between administrative reform in Portugal and the impacts on the dependence of local governments in the face of budgetary resources of state and local municipal revenue collection, which is understood as a form, among others, participation civil society in local public policies.

Design/methodology/approach
– The study opts for an exploratory analysis using the grounded theory approach, including the use of data relating to local government structures and partnerships with the private sector, based on the main lines of the public administration reform. The data were supplemented by documentary analysis, including legislative documents and papers in specialized area of administrative decentralization and civil society participation in local public policies.

Findings
– The paper provides empirical insights about how the increased participation of civil society in local public policies is associated with less reliance on state budgets and a greater number of local managerial structures.

Research limitations/implications
– Due to the chosen research approach, the results cannot be generalized. A comparative study between several countries could bring several interesting insights.

Social implications
– The paper includes implications for economic and social development of new public policies in the context of administrative reforms.

Originality/value
– This paper makes several theoretical and empirical contributions on this research field specially about local public manager's decisions for financial resources transfers within the active policy of sustainable local development.
Cointegration-causality analysis between terrorism and key macroeconomic indicators
Authors: Ismail Aisha , Amjad Shehla 
Published: August 2014

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is two folds: first, to analyze the long-run relationship between terrorism and key macroeconomic indicators (GDP growth, GDP per capita, inflation and unemployment) and second, to determine the direction of causality between these variables in Pakistan.

Design/methodology/approach
– The relationship between terrorism and various macroeconomic indicators is analyzed by applying Johansen cointegration analysis. Furthermore, the causality between terrorism and macroeconomic indicators is tested by applying Toda Yamamoto Granger causality test.

Findings
– The results show that there exists a long-run relationship between terrorism and key macroeconomic indicators. Furthermore, the results suggest that there exists a bi-directional causality between terrorism and inflation. The causality between GDP per capita, unemployment, GDP growth and terrorism is unidirectional.

Originality/value
– There is a lack of research work conducted to analyze the long-run relationship and direction of causation between terrorism and various macroeconomic indicators specifically for Pakistan. The current paper fills the gap in the literature by using sophisticated econometric techniques and recent data set to provide the evidence of the relationship between terrorism and various macroeconomic indicators.
The effects of information regarding sustainability issues and behavioral self-management instruction on college students’ energy conservation
Authors: Mosher Hilary R. , Desrochers Marcie 
Published: August 2014

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of sustainability information and strategies to change pro-environmental (pro-e) behavior with introductory environmental science laboratory students.

Design/methodology/approach
– A one-group pretest posttest study was used to evaluate a two-hour workshop in which 30 participants were instructed in sustainability education and behavior change strategies. Participants implemented self-management strategies and tracked their energy use every week for two weeks following the pro-e training.

Findings
– A significant difference between participants’ baseline and Week 2 energy use assessments was found. The results suggest that the pro-e training increased participants’ energy conservation behavior for their targeted device. Moreover, participants decreased their energy usage for other measured electronic devices, suggesting generalization of treatment effects.

Research limitations/implications
– A sizable savings in energy was realized across all participants and devices (approximately 300 hours). However, there was no control group in this one-group pretest posttest study and the effect of reactivity cannot be discounted.

Practical implications
– This research suggests that behavior change strategies may be effective at improving pro-e behaviors. The relative ease and low cost of delivering the instruction, and minimal effort on the part of the participant to make behavior changes, provides a solid foundation from which to disseminate sustainability education.

Originality/value
– This paper describes a preliminary evaluation of a behavior change approach to teach students about how to change their pro-e behaviors. Limited prior research has examined self-management to alter pro-e behavior.
The choice of the necessary: class, tastes and lifestyles
Authors: Deeming Christopher 
Published: August 2014

Purpose– Our attitudes, values and tastes are shaped by our position in social space. At least, that was the argument Pierre Bourdieu set out in his seminal work,La Distinction. The purpose of this paper is to consider Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction and his argument that working-class families exhibit cultural attitudes and tastes for social necessity.Design/methodology/approach– Attitudinal data relating to social necessity are taken from a national social survey of the British population. The results provide a rich source of data for exploring classed attitudes towards necessity in contemporary Britain.Findings– Bourdieu's original claims for working-class “choice of the necessary” and working-class “taste for necessity” are based on his observations grounded in social survey evidence drawn from 1960s French society. Analysis of contemporary British social survey and attitudinal data also reveals sharp contours and differences in attitudes and tastes according to class fractions. These are evident in classed tastes and preferences for food, clothes, the home and social life.Social implications– Within the Bourdieusian theoretical framework, we understand that the tastes of necessity are preferences that arise as adaptations to deprivation of necessary goods and services.La Distinctionand Bourdieu's approach to unmasking inequalities and structures in social space continue to be relevant in contemporary Britain. More generally, study findings add to the growing evidence that casts some doubt on current arguments concerning “individualisation”, claiming that social class has ceased to be significant in modern societies.Originality/value– This paper sheds fresh light on the empirical validity and continuing theoretical relevance of Bourdieu's work examining the role of social necessity in shaping working-class culture. Bourdieu argues that the real principle of our preferences is taste and for working-class families, this is a virtue made of necessity.
Valuing green building certificates as real options
Authors: Vimpari Jussi , Junnila Seppo 
Published: August 2014

Purpose– The purpose of this study is first to evaluate whether real options analysis (ROA) is suitable for valuing green building certificates, and second to calculate the real option value of a green certificate in a typical office building setting. Green buildings are demonstrated as one of the most profitable climate mitigation actions. However, no consensus exists among industry professionals about how green buildings and specifically green building certificates should be valued.Design/methodology/approach– The research design of the study involves a theoretical part and an empirical part. In the theoretical part, option characteristics of green building certificates are identified and a contemporary real option valuation method is proposed for application. In the empirical part, the application is demonstrated in an embedded multiple case study design. Two different building cases (with and without green certificate) with eight independent cash flow valuations by eight industry professionals are used as data set for eight valuation case studies and analyses. Additionally, cross-case analysis is executed for strengthening the analysis.Findings– The paper finds that green certificates have several characteristics similar to real options and supports the idea of using ROA in valuing a green certificate. The paper also explains how option pricing theory and discounted cash flow (DCF) method deal with uncertainty and what shortcomings of DCF could be overcome by ROA. The results show that a mean real option value of 985,000 (or 8.8 per cent premium to the mean property value) was found for a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum certificate in the Finnish property market. The main finding of the paper suggests that the contemporary real option valuation methods are appropriate to assess the monetary value and the uncertainty of a green building certificate.Originality/value– This is the first study to argue that option-pricing theory can be used for valuing green building certificates. The identification of the option characteristics of green building certificates and demonstration of the ROA in an empirical case makes questions whether the current mainstream investment analysis approaches are the most suitable methods for valuing green building certificates.
Implementation of the START:AV in a secure adolescent service
Authors: A. Sher Marilyn , Gralton E. 
Published: August 2014

Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to establish gaps in training, involve staff in the implementation process by incorporating their views on what is helpful and what can be improved, as well as provide information that might be helpful to other sites who are considering implementing the START:AV.

Design/methodology/approach
– The current study is the first to examine a START:AV implementation and survey a multi-disciplinary team on their views about implementation in a medium secure service for adolescents in the UK. The survey was adapted from the one used by Collins et al. (2008). Once surveys were received the qualitative information was collated to explore themes, and frequency analysis was undertaken on the quantitative information.

Findings
– The staff survey on the implementation of the START:AV highlighted a number of strengths and challenges. There was significant support for the START:AV in relation to it being a dynamic assessment to measure change, that focuses equally on strengths and vulnerabilities, making the process individualised. Users of the START:AV reported that the process of rating the START:AV as a team improved communication, teamwork, generated discussion and improved the detailed understanding of the patient being rated. Staff felt it was generally straightforward to use in terms of strengths and vulnerability ratings, but some difficulties emerged regarding making finer distinctions in ratings as well as completing risk formulations, highlighting further training needs. There was also some confusion about differentiating between certain strengths and vulnerabilities, leading to “double ratings”. Other difficulties highlighted centred on time and increasing workload.

Research limitations/implications
– The main limitation of the study relates to the low response rate to the survey (31 per cent).

Practical implications
– Recommendations for implementation and evaluation of new risk assessment procedures are made.

Originality/value
– The current study is the first to examine a START:AV implementation and survey a multi-disciplinary team on their views about implementation in a medium secure service for adolescents in the UK.
Economic freedom and bank efficiency: does ownership and origins matter?
Authors: Sufian Fadzlan , Shah Habibullah Muzafar 
Published: August 2014

Purpose– The paper aims to explore the impact of economic freedom on the efficiency of the Malaysian banking sector.Design/methodology/approach– The analysis is confined into two stages. In the first stage, the bias-corrected data envelopment analysis method is used to compute the efficiency of individual banks. Then bootstrap regressions are used to examine the impact of economic freedom on bank efficiency, while controlling for the potential impacts of contextual variables.Findings– It was found that greater freedom to start new businesses tend to impede the efficiency of banks operating in the Malaysian banking sector. The results indicate that restrictions on the activities of which banks could undertake exert negative impact on their efficiency levels. The empirical findings seem to support for official regulation and supervision of banks by setting the limits on activities which banks could undertake. In addition evidence supporting for government interventions in the foreign exchange and money markets was found.Originality/value– The purpose of the present paper is to extend the earlier works on the performance of the banking sector in a developing economy and establish empirical evidence on the impact of economic freedom. Although empirical evidence which examines the performance of banking sectors is abundant in the literature, to the best of our knowledge, virtually nothing has been published to address the impact of economic freedom.
The Investment Dealers Association of Canada’s enforcement record
Authors: Lokanan Mark 
Published: August 2014

Purpose– The purpose of this study is to analyze the aggravating and mitigating factors considered by the Investment Dealer Association (IDA)’s (Now IIROC) hearing panels when determining penalties.Design/methodology/approach– To conduct this research, Quicklaw’s database Securities Regulation Tribunal Decisions were searched for all decisions made by the IDA between January of 2003 and June of 2008. This paper analyzes the 238 cases that were found.Findings– The findings revealed that the IDA’s hearing panels were more likely to identify mitigating rather than aggravating factors when considering the appropriate penalties to be imposed on registrants. Perhaps this was because the hearing panels were more preoccupied with identifying mitigating factors that would, in turn, lead to less severe penalties for their members. The aggravating factors identified and considered were fewer in number than the aggravating factors identified but not considered by the hearing panels when imposing penalties.Research limitations/implications– IIROC needs to take stock of this study and encourage hearing panels to seriously take into consideration the factors listed in their sanction guidelines and apply them methodologically to each case.Originality/value– Despite the widespread use of self-regulatory organization (SROs) to regulate various occupations, SROs remain an understudied institution. This is the first study of its kind that looks at the aggravating and mitigating factors used by an SRO’s hearing panel in administrative hearings.