This open access book offers a comprehensive view of the phenomenon of volunteer work: it examines motivational factors and questions of corporate organization and the social environment. In ...particular, this is the first book to present volunteer work in detail as a psychosocial resource and a source of well-being that should not be overused or abused. The book is based on the authors' 15 years of research into volunteer work in Europe. It provides clear instructions on designing volunteer work tasks, and on where boundaries must be respected. The findings include insights into cultural and national differences, and offer practical advice on the organization of volunteer work. This book answers questions like: How do we understand voluntary work? How essential is it that this kind of work remains unpaid and carried out by so-called laypersons with special motives? And what follows from this for the interaction between voluntary work and professionalized, paid employment? The analysis draws on perspectives from wellbeing research, organizational and industrial studies, social work, and related social sciences.
In Entitled to Nothing, Lisa Sun-Hee Park investigates how the politics of immigration, health care, and welfare are intertwined. Documenting the formal return of the immigrant as a public charge, or ...a burden upon the State, the author shows how the concept has been revived as states adopt punitive policies targeting immigrants of color and require them to pay back benefits for which they are legally eligible during a time of intense debate regarding welfare reform.Park argues that the notions of public charge and public burden were reinvigorated in the 1990s to target immigrant women of reproductive age for deportation and as part of a larger project of disciplining immigrants. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with immigrant organizations, government agencies and safety net providers, as well as careful tracking of policies and media coverage, Park provides vivid, first-person accounts of how struggles over the public charge doctrine unfolded on the ground, as well as its consequences for the immigrant community. Ultimately, she shows that the concept of public charge continues to lurk in the background, structuring our conception of who can legitimately access public programs and of the moral economy of work and citizenship in the U.S., and makes important policy suggestions for reforming our immigration system.
Pakistan, being a developing country, presents the dismal picture of maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity. The majority of maternal and neonatal deaths could be avoided if Continuum of Care ...(CoC) is provided in a structured pathway from pregnancy to birth and to the first week of life of the newborn child. This study aimed to analyse the trends of CoC at all three levels (antenatal care, skilled delivery and postpartum care) and to identify various factors affecting the continuation in receiving CoC in Pakistan during 2006 to 2012.
Secondary data analysis was performed on nationally representative data from the last two iterations of Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS), conducted during 2006/07 to 2012/13. The analysis is limited to women of the reproductive age group (15-49 years) who gave birth during the last five years preceding both surveys. This leads to a sample size of 5,724 and 7,461 respondents from PDHS 2006/07 and 2012/13 respectively. The association between CoC and several factors, including individual attributes (reproductive status), family influences, community context, as well as cultural and social values was assessed in bivariate analyses in a first step. Furthermore, odds ratios and adjusted odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals using a binary and multivariable logistic regression were calculated.
Our research presents the trends of a composite measure of CoC including antenatal care, delivery assistance and postpartum care. The largest gap in CoC was observed at antenatal care followed by delivery and postnatal care within 48 h after delivery. Results show that CoC completion rate has increased from 15% to 27% amongst women in Pakistan over time from 2006 to 2012. Women with high age at first birth, having less number of children, with higher education, belonging to richest quintile, living in Sindh province and urban areas, having high autonomy and exposure to mass media were most likely to avail complete CoC.
The findings show that women in Pakistan still lack the CoC. This calls for attention to develop and implement tailored interventions, focusing on the needs of women in Pakistan to provide CoC in an integrated manner, involving both public and private sectors by appropriately addressing the factors hindering CoC completion rates.
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CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Reference service, the idea that librarians provide direct assistance to users, has been a central function of libraries for over a century. Today’s libraries are even more complex and intimidating ...to new users than libraries of the past, and the technical and social contexts in which users experience their library’s resources add to this complexity. The availability of a friendly librarian who helps users find materials, search for information on a topic, interpret citations, identify quality information, and format bibliographies has become a standard component of what libraries do. However, changes in technologies, economics, and user populations are causing many libraries to question the need and function of traditional reference services. This book examines how library services meet user needs in the twenty-first century. Many libraries are asking key questions about reference services, such as: Should librarians be on call waiting for users or out in the community promoting the library? Should we assign staff to help users one-on-one or is it more effective to assign them to build and use tools to teach users how to find and evaluate information? Will we continue to purchase commercial reference sources or just use Wikipedia and other free resources on the web? With the proliferation of information available today, how can we help users evaluate search results and select the best resources that they can find? And how do we evaluate the effectiveness of reference services? Through contributions from the leading scholars and practitioners in the field, this volume addresses such issues and how they affect practices in public and academic libraries. In addition, it presents perspectives from the publishing community and the creators of discovery tools. Each section is enhanced by short case studies that highlight real-world practices and experiences.
Interest in high users of acute care continues to grow as health care organizations look to deliver cost-effective and high-quality care to patients. Since “super-utilizers” of acute care are ...responsible for disproportionately high health care spending, many programs and interventions have been implemented to reduce medical care use and costs in this population. This article presents a systematic review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature on evaluations of interventions to decrease prehospital and emergency care use among U.S. super-utilizers. Forty-six distinct evaluations were included in the review. The most commonly evaluated intervention was case management. Although a number of interventions reported reductions in prehospital and emergency care utilization and costs, methodological and study design weaknesses—especially regression to the mean—were widespread and call into question reported positive findings. More high-quality research is needed to accurately assess the impact of interventions to reduce prehospital and emergency care use in the super-utilizer population.
Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan Institute of Medicine; Board on the Health of Select Populations; Committee on the Assessment of Readjustment Needs of Military Personnel, Veterans, and Their Families
03/2013
eBook
Odprti dostop
As of December 2012, Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Afghanistan and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in Iraq have resulted in the deployment of about 2.2 million troops; there have been 2,222 US ...fatalities in OEF and Operation New Dawn (OND)1 and 4,422 in OIF. The numbers of wounded US troops exceed 16,000 in Afghanistan and 32,000 in Iraq. In addition to deaths and morbidity, the operations have unforeseen consequences that are yet to be fully understood.
In contrast with previous conflicts, the all-volunteer military has experienced numerous deployments of individual service members; has seen increased deployments of women, parents of young children, and reserve and National Guard troops; and in some cases has been subject to longer deployments and shorter times at home between deployments. Numerous reports in the popular press have made the public aware of issues that have pointed to the difficulty of military personnel in readjusting after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of those who have served in OEF and OIF readjust with few difficulties, but others have problems in readjusting to home, reconnecting with family members, finding employment, and returning to school.
In response to the return of large numbers of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical-health and mental-health problems and to the growing readjustment needs of active duty service members, veterans, and their family members, Congress included Section 1661 of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008. That section required the secretary of defense, in consultation with the secretary of veterans affairs, to enter into an agreement with the National Academies for a study of the physical-health, mental-health, and other readjustment needs of members and former members of the armed forces who were deployed in OIF or OEF, their families, and their communities as a result of such deployment.
The study consisted of two phases. The Phase 1 task was to conduct a preliminary assessment. The Phase 2 task was to provide a comprehensive assessment of the physical, psychologic, social, and economic effects of deployment on and identification of gaps in care for members and former members, their families, and their communities. The Phase 1 report was completed in March 2010 and delivered to the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the relevant committees of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The secretaries of DOD and VA responded to the Phase 1 report in September 2010. Returning Home from Iraq and Afghanistan: Assessment of Readjustment Needs of Veterans, Service Members, and Their Families fulfills the requirement for Phase 2.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) will expand coverage of mental health and substance use disorder benefits and federal parity protections to over 60 million Americans. The key to ...this expansion is the essential health benefit provision in the ACA that requires coverage of mental health and substance use disorder services at parity with general medical benefits. Other ACA provisions that should improve access to treatment include requirements on network adequacy, dependent coverage up to age 26, preventive services, and prohibitions on annual and lifetime limits and preexisting exclusions. The ACA offers states flexibility in expanding Medicaid (primarily to childless adults, not generally eligible previously) to cover supportive services needed by those with significant behavioral health conditions in addition to basic benefits at parity. Through these various new requirements, the ACA in conjunction with Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA) will expand coverage of behavioral health care by historic proportions.
The legitimate use of force is generally presumed to be the realm of the state. However, the flourishing role of the private sector in security over the last twenty years has brought this into ...question. In this book Deborah Avant examines the privatization of security and its impact on the control of force. She describes the growth of private security companies, explains how the industry works, and describes its range of customers – including states, non-government organisations and commercial transnational corporations. She charts the inevitable trade-offs that the market for force imposes on the states, firms and people wishing to control it, suggests a new way to think about the control of force, and offers a model of institutional analysis that draws on both economic and sociological reasoning. The book contains case studies drawn from the US and Europe as well as Africa and the Middle East.
Given the growth of the service sector, and advances in information technology and communications that facilitate the management of relationships with customers, models of service and relationships ...are a fast-growing area of marketing science. This article summarizes existing work in this area and identifies promising topics for future research. Models of service and relationships can help managers manage service more efficiently, customize service more effectively, manage customer satisfaction and relationships, and model the financial impact of those customer relationships. Models for managing service have often emphasized analytical approaches to pricing, but emerging issues such as the trade-off between privacy and customization are attracting increasing attention. The trade-offs between productivity and customization have also been addressed by both analytical and empirical models, but future research in the area of service customization will likely place increased emphasis on e-service and truly personalized interactions. Relationship models will focus less on models of customer expectations and length of relationship, and more on modeling the effects of dynamic marketing interventions with individual customers. The nature of service relationships increasingly leads to financial impact being assessed within customer and across product, rather than the traditional reverse, suggesting the increasing importance of analyzing customer lifetime value (CLV) and managing the firms customer equity.
In this article we have provided a perspective on the importance and value of youth mental health services for society and argued that advancing youth mental health services should be the number one ...priority of health services in Canada. Using the age period of 12–25 years for defining youth, we have provided justification for our position based on scientific evidence derived from clinical, epidemiological and neurodevelopmental studies. We have highlighted the early onset of most mental disorders and substance abuse as well as their persistence into later adulthood, the long delays experienced by most help seekers and the consequence of such delays for young people and for society in general. We have also provided a brief review of the current gross inadequacies in access and quality of care available in Canada. We have argued for the need for a different conceptual framework of youth mental disorders as well as for a transformation of the way services are provided in order not only to reduce the unmet needs but also to allow a more meaningful exploration of the nature of such problems presenting in youth and the best way to treat them. We have offered some ideas based on previous work completed in this field as well as current initiatives in Canada and elsewhere. Any transformation of youth mental health services in Canada must take into consideration the significant geographic, cultural and political diversity across the provinces, territories and indigenous peoples across this country.
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