Embedding consumer culture in health and social care education – a university office's perspective

Health and social care services are changing – and this change is radical. Service user and carer involvement has been a key aspect of health and social care policy for a number of years. In terms of the National Health Service (NHS), this has been significantly strengthened by the report ‘High Quality Care for All’. The NHS will no longer be a monolith dictating what services it offers. It is beginning to take seriously the views of its consumers: the patients, service users and carers. The NHS is starting to put the patient experience at the centre of everything it does, and its regulators are asking for evidence of public and patient involvement. This process may yet prove to be one of the NHS' greatest challenges as it transforms to prioritize the consumer viewpoint. Social care, though further down the line in relation to involvement, is now responding to the relatively new personalization agenda. This paper will consider what the university sector can do to embed the consumer and service culture within the education of health and social care professionals. It looks at the challenges of involvement and required culture change, highlighting the key points to address in the early and middle stages of involvement from a university office's perspective. It includes examples of consumer involvement in teaching, assessment and the selection of students and how their input is starting to make a difference. Finally, the paper outlines what is needed in a development office to establish and support effective service user and carer involvement on health and social care courses in higher education. The article concludes by acknowledging that there is much more work that needs to be done in this field to embed the work of a development office, but that early steps have been promising.     

Dilemmas in the management of temporary work agency staff

Temporary jobs account for an increasing proportion of new engagements in the UK labour market, with temporary work agencies or 'labour market intermediaries' occupying a central role in the regulation of entry into some organisations. Such evolving arrangements have been found to have their contradictions, even for the host organisation. This article explores the internal and external pressures to use a temporary work agency as a means of recruiting labour at host organisations. It considers some of the HRM issues that stem from the use of such workers, including the tendency to devolve HRM to the managers of such agencies operating within the host organisation. Central to this article is a consideration of the potential sustainability of organisations' use of temporary agency workers, engaging with this concern from the perspective of organisational cost‐effectiveness.     

Valuing and Pricing Retail Leases with Renewal and Overage Options

We consider retail leases with landlord overages options, with tenant renewal options, with both and with neither. We illustrate how the ratio of initial expected sales to the sales threshold can be manipulated to equate the value of the landlord overage options to that of the tenant renewal option at the same initial rent. Not only are the values equal, but the cumulative distributions of potential IRRs on the two leases are nearly identical, suggesting that these leases are equally attractive to risk-averse investors and thus that the same risky discount rate can be used in valuing the leases. In contrast, the appropriate risky discount rate for the overage lease is calculated to be 75–160 basis points greater than that for the renewal lease.     

Real Estate Rental Payments: Application of Stock-Inventory Modeling

This paper analyzes the rental term structure taking into account the opportunity costs faced by the tenant for varying lease lengths. The analysis involves the application of a multi-period stock inventory model. The implication of the model is that the term structure of rents is determined by a clientele effect that can bias the occupancy value derived from using rational-expectations in the term structure relationship. The model does, however, reveal the characteristic stock-inventory U-shaped function that will determine the optimal lease length for a given tenant.     

The Corn Laws and English wheat prices, 1815–1846

The British Corn Laws of the nineteenth century are the classic example of a trade barrier. This paper evaluates their importance to English society by analyzing the effects of the Corn Laws on wheat markets. Import supply elasticities are estimated for all of England's major grain supply markets, using data on prices, quantities, and freight costs from each country. A partial equilibrium trade arbitrage model is then constructed. In the absence of the Corn Laws, prices would have been 9 percent lower and consumption about 1.5 percent greater. The Corn Laws were, therefore, of great social and economic importance as England moved into the period of industrialization.     

GENERIC PROMOTION OF BEEF: MEASURING THE IMPACT OF THE US BEEF CHECKOFF

Generic promotions of commodities are growing in importance. In the US, commodity industry assessments or checkoffs (i.e. a per unit levy or tax) are used to underwrite domestic and international promotions by commodity groups. The US beef checkoff is one of the largest of these new national commodity programmes. Evaluation of the economic impact of the beef promotion is an essential part of the beef checkoff. A model for evaluating the US beef programmes is estimated and the methodology is applicable to other commodity models that include advertising and promotion expenditures. The beef analysis shows a positive and significant return to the beef industry, with an average of approximately $5 for each $1 invested for the quarters 1987:1 through 1991:2.     

A Note on Selecting a Response Measure for Financial Distress

Since 1966, researchers have examined financial distress prediction models to determine the usefulness of accounting information to lenders. These researchers primarily used legal bankruptcy as the response variable for economic financial distress, or included legal bankruptcy with other events in dichotomous prediction models. However, theoretical models of financial distress normally define financial distress as an economic event, the inability to pay debts when due (insolvency). This study uses a loan default/accommodation response variable as a proxy for the inability to pay debts when due. The purpose of this note is to empirically test whether or not using the inability of a firm to pay debts when due, loan default/accommodation, as a response measure produces different results than using legal bankruptcy as the response measure. The study's empirical results show that legal bankruptcy and loan default/accommodation financial distress prediction models produce different statistical results, thus suggesting that the responses measure different constructs. A loan default/accommodation model also fits the data better than a bankrupt model. Our results suggest that a loan default/accommodation response may be a more appropriate measure to determine which accounting information is most useful to lenders in evaluating a firm's credit risk.     

Rainwater harvesting in the UK: Socio-technical theory and practice

There is currently a window of opportunity in the UK, with respect to promoting sustainable water management (SWM). Periods of alternating drought and flooding have brought water management issues to the fore of UK media coverage and policy development. Unchallenged reliance on the historic legacy of piped infrastructure is declining, as its resilience and adaptability in the face of climate change become increasingly questioned. Despite its prevalence in other countries and a recent surge in sales, rainwater harvesting (RWH) has yet to transition from niche to mainstream in the UK. This paper provides an overview of the development of a strategic framework for enabling RWH to transition from novel to mainstream, informed by a number of evidence bases and devised using insight gained through the application of a number of theories. Identified strategic areas for action include (i) Technical Relevance (product development); (ii) Social Receptivity (capacity building) and (ii) Institutional Commitment (support services).     

Decision support for disaster management

Disaster response and recovery are crucial phases of disaster management. Decision-support systems used in disaster management must cope with the complexity and uncertainty involved with the scheduling and assignment of differentially-skilled personnel and assets to specific tasks. Operational constraints—such as workload and labor requirements, precedence constraints, resource availability, and critical deadlines among others—make timely and appropriate task assignment and sequencing difficult. Failure to assign personnel in an efficient and effective manner may result in unnecessary fatalities and significant additional loss of property as well as damaging the reputation of the disaster management organizations. Therefore, this paper proposes a decision-support system for disaster response and recovery using hybrid meta-heuristics.