Advanced practice nurse outcomes 1990-2008: a systematic review

Advanced practice registered nurses have assumed an increasing role as providers in the health care system, particularly for underserved populations. The aim of this systematic review was to answer the following question: Compared to other providers (physicians or teams without APRNs) are APRN patient outcomes of care similar? This systematic review of published literature between 1990 and 2008 on care provided by APRNs indicates patient outcomes of care provided by nurse practitioners and certified nurse midwives in collaboration with physicians are similar to and in some ways better than care provided by physicians alone for the populations and in the settings included. Use of clinical nurse specialists in acute care settings can reduce length of stay and cost of care for hospitalized patients. These results extend what is known about APRN outcomes from previous reviews by assessing all types of APRNs over a span of 18 years, using a systematic process with intentionally broad inclusion of outcomes, patient populations, and settings. The results indicate APRNs provide effective and high-quality patient care, have an important role in improving the quality of patient care in the United States, and could help to address concerns about whether care provided by APRNs can safely augment the physician supply to support reform efforts aimed at expanding access to care.     

The relationship between purchase regularity and propensity to accelerate

Identifying random and regular-buying household segments and relating them to demographic and shopping characteristics has been the focus of many marketing studies. Missing from the marketing literature, however, is a study that relates purchase regularity to marketing mix sensitivities. Such study could provide substantive implications since it would explore a practical dimension of a segmentation scheme based on purchase regularity. In this article, we investigate the relationship between purchase regularity and propensity to accelerate through the use of a mixture Weibull model of purchase timing. Applying this perspective to purchase timing data on four product categories (ketchup, sugar, bathroom tissue, margarine), we show that in the frequently purchased categories of bathroom tissue and margarine, random buyers do not exhibit any propensity to accelerate while regular buyers do. In the occasionally purchased categories of ketchup and sugar on the other hand, random buyers exhibit at least as much propensity to accelerate their purchases as regular buyers do. Our rationale for these results is based on information-theoretic arguments suggesting that propensity to accelerate depends on the frequency at which a product category is purchased.     

Satellite TV programming

The German TV viewer catches CBS news by satellite. The Italian farmer watches a dubbed British documentary on a Dorset farming community. Harrods' shoppers see Soviet sports on TV screens on offer in this London store. A Parisian opera lover tunes into a Vienna Opera production, brought to him live via broadcast satellite and his Left Bank flat's earth station. Many of Europe's viewers stimultaneously take in a Coca-Cola ad specially conceived for the international satellite market.     

All wired up but where to go?

Through a selective review of the fluctuating prospects of new media technologies in Europe, Isabel Bass questions assumptions about the transition to an ‘information age’.     

Continuity and change in the evolution of work and human resource management

This essay is a brief review of the evolution of work and human resource management, an evolution that parallels the development of civilization. Both continuity and change are apparent in the role of work in society and in its management. There has been continuity and change down through the centuries in motivation to work, in the sense of equity, and in how work is organized. For instance, early on much of work was self-service; it is moving in that direction again. Tradition and sentiment shaped the work organization. Gradually, tradition and sentiment were replaced by rationality. Currently, we see in the sociotechnical design of work the continuity as well as a coming together of both the rational and the socioemotional aspects of work in organizations. Looking at the past may help human resource managers to frame the issues involved and the expectations of future developments.     

Dating structural changes: An illustration from financial deregulation

Recent developments in econometrics emphasize the importance of testing for structural breaks in time series analysis. The typical event study of financial economics examines abnormal stock market returns around arbitrarily established dates. The paper has two objectives. The first aim is to present an application of the switching regression methodology to date structural changes in the return-generating function of financial firms. The second objective is to assess the effectiveness of the conventional event methodology in dating regime shifts associated with regulatory changes in the financial services industry. (JEL C52, G21)     

Encouraging Entrepreneurship: Microfinance,Knowledge Support,and the Costs of Operating in Institutional Voids

This study focuses on the supplemented strategies of microfinance institutions (MFIs), in which the MFI offers nonfinancial services, such as entrepreneurship related knowledge, in addition to financial services to impoverished borrowers at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). We examine two contextual factors–foreign direct investment (FDI) and loan defaults–to better understand the relationship between providing knowledge support to encourage entrepreneurship and costs of operating at the BoP for MFIs. In contexts where FDI is low and loan defaults are high, providing knowledge support to encourage entrepreneurship aggravates the MFI's costs of operating at the BoP. However, in contexts where FDI is high and loan defaults are low, providing knowledge support to encourage entrepreneurship among impoverished borrowers does not aggravate the MFI's costs of operating at the BoP. Hence, in emerging markets where governments welcome FDI and curb loan defaults, MFIs can viably support entrepreneurship among the poor. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.