Linking nursing workload and performance indicators in ambulatory care

More and more ambulatory care organizations are using nursing report cards to monitor and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of nursing care in the ambulatory setting. Nurse staffing levels is usually one of the items included in a nursing report card and the one most scrutinized by ambulatory care administrators. One strategy employed by the nursing leadership at the South Texas Veterans Healthcare System to justify nurse staffing levels is linking administrative staffing monitors with nurse-sensitive outcomes via workload and performance indicators. Through this approach, nurse leaders are able to justify nurse staffing level changes, needed technology changes, process improvements, and/or workflow needs to administrators with positive results and support.     

Disaster relief routing: Integrating research and practice

Disaster relief presents many unique logistics challenges, with problems including damaged transportation infrastructure, limited communication, and coordination of multiple agents. Central to disaster relief logistics is the distribution of life-saving commodities to beneficiaries. Operations research models have potential to help relief agencies save lives and money, maintain standards of humanitarianism and fairness and maximize the use of limited resources amid post-disaster chaos. Through interviews with aid organizations, reviews of their publications, and a literature review of operations research models in transportation of relief goods, this paper provides an analysis of the use of such models from the perspective of both practitioners and academics. With the complexity of disaster relief distribution and the relatively small number of journal articles written on it, this is an area with potential for helping relief organizations and for tremendous growth in operations research.     

Learning and development opportunities as a tool for the retention of volunteers: a motivational perspective

The growing reliance on volunteers in Australia has heightened the need for non‐profit organisations to retain these valuable resources. However, the current literature on volunteer retention is limited. One potential way volunteers can be retained is by providing learning and development opportunities (LDOs). This study investigates the relationship between volunteer perceptions of LDOs, their motivations for volunteering, and retention. Analyses revealed significant main effects for LDOs and volunteer motivations on retention and several interactive effects demonstrating that LDOs can have differential effects on retention depending on the reasons for volunteering.     

Gender gaps across the earnings distribution for full-time employees in Britain: Allowing for sample selection

This paper investigates gender differences across the log wage distributions of British employees working full-time in 2005. The raw gender wage gap shows a tendency to increase across the distribution with a glass ceiling effect indicated. A strong relationship between high skilled, white-collar occupations and carrying out managerial duties with the glass ceiling effect is indicated in the data. After allowing for positive selection into full-time employment by British women, a substantially larger gender earning gap is found: the selection corrected gender wage gap is close to twice the raw gap across most of the earnings distribution. This selection corrected gap is found to be predominantly related to women receiving lower rewards for their characteristics than men. Indeed, the results suggest the gender earnings gap would all but disappear across the earnings distribution if women working full-time received the same returns to their characteristics as men working full-time in Britain do.     

How Should An Accumulative Toxic Substance be Banned?

The harmful effects on human health or ecosystems of many toxic substances depend on their cumulative concentration in the carrying medium (water, soil, or air), not just on the annual deposition rates of the substances. Accumulative toxic substances pose challenges to regulatory policy that are not faced when controlling pollutants whose damaging effects are though to depend primarily on annual emission flows. An increasingly common response is to phase out offending uses or production of the substance. In this paper we take as given the goal of phasing out an accumulative pollutant and examine different ways this could be done using a simple, partial-equilibrium dynamic model. We focus on phaseout measures in which the cumulative production and release of the offending substance over the transition period is fixed. Once this cumulative volume is reached, users must convert to a known but higher-cost substitute that is assumed to be benign. The key to the analysis is the observation that the quota on cumulative production makes production of the toxic substance during the transition analogous to extraction of an exhaustible resource with a higher-cost, nonexhaustible ‘backstop’ technology. Using this framework, we first describe the cost-effective outcome when the ‘sunset’ date is chosen to maximize product market surplus subject to the cumulative production constraint. This outcome is compared to one in which the regulator fixes the sunset date, and one in which the regulator limits annual production as well as cumulative production out of concern for acute exposure effects. Finally, we discuss the kinds of market-based policy instruments that would be appropriate for supporting a cost-effective outcome.     

Protecting the privacy of personal information in employee benefit plans

The United States is not the only country dealing with privacy of health information. In the absence of clear legislative direction, this paper focuses on the common privacy principles that underlie Canadian privacy legislation and recommends a plan of action. The objective is to give plan administrators and trustees sufficient transition time to develop and implement the appropriate privacy strategies, thereby minimizing both the potential burden of compliance and the potential risks of noncompliance.