Forecasting the future risk of Barmah Forest Virus disease under climate change scenarios in Queensland, Australia

BACKGROUND Mosquito-borne diseases are climate sensitive and there has been increasing concern over the impact of climate change on future disease risk. This paper projected the potential future risk of Barmah Forest virus (BFV) disease under climate change scenarios in Queensland, Australia. METHODS/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We obtained data on notified BFV cases, climate (maximum and minimum temperature and rainfall), socio-economic and tidal conditions for current period 2000-2008 for coastal regions in Queensland. Grid-data on future climate projections for 2025, 2050 and 2100 were also obtained. Logistic regression models were built to forecast the otential risk of BFV disease distribution under existing climatic, socio-economic and tidal conditions. The model was applied to estimate the potential geographic distribution of BFV outbreaks under climate change scenarios. The predictive model had good model accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Maps on potential risk of future BFV disease indicated that disease would vary significantly across coastal regions in Queensland by 2100 due to marked differences in future rainfall and temperature projections. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE We conclude that the results of this study demonstrate that the future risk of BFV disease would vary across coastal regions in Queensland. These results may be helpful for public health decision making towards developing effective risk management strategies for BFV disease control and prevention programs in Queensland.

Greener workplace : understanding senior management's adoption decisions through the Theory of Planned Behaviour

Human Resources (HR) policies and practices have changed due to global environmental instability. These policies and practices are key factors for successful environmental management. Using the Theory of Planned Behaviour, this article aims to understand the critical factors which influence senior management’s decision to adopt ‘green’ HR practices. Data were collected from 210 organisations in Australia using two separate surveys. Survey one, which was addressed directly to HR managers and directors, contained questions relating to HR policies (the dependent variables), while survey two, which was addressed directly to CEOs and senior managers, contained questions about environmental-related attitudes, subjective norms and perceived control (the independent variables). Results indicated that senior management’s environmental-related attitudes, subjective norms from stakeholders and perceived green resource readiness influenced their decision to adopt green HR initiatives. However, attitudes and green resource readiness in particular had greater impacts than subjective norms. Limitations, implications and future research are also outlined.

Perioperative medication management: expanding the role of the preadmission clinic pharmacist in a single centre, randomised controlled trial of collaborative prescribing

Objectives Current evidence to support non-medical prescribing is predominantly qualitative, with little evaluation of accuracy, safety and appropriateness. Our aim was to evaluate a new model of service for the Australia healthcare system, of inpatient medication prescribing by a pharmacist in an elective surgery preadmission clinic (PAC) against usual care, using an endorsed performance framework. Design Single centre, randomised controlled, two-arm trial. Setting Elective surgery PAC in a Brisbane-based tertiary hospital. Participants 400 adults scheduled for elective surgery were randomised to intervention or control. Intervention A pharmacist generated the inpatient medication chart to reflect the patient's regular medication, made a plan for medication perioperatively and prescribed venous thromboembolism (VTE) prophylaxis. In the control arm, the medication chart was generated by the Resident Medical Officers. Outcome measures Primary outcome was frequency of omissions and prescribing errors when compared against the medication history. The clinical significance of omissions was also analysed. Secondary outcome was appropriateness of VTE prophylaxis prescribing. Results There were significantly less unintended omissions of medications: 11 of 887 (1.2%) intervention orders compared with 383 of 1217 (31.5%) control (p<0.001). There were significantly less prescribing errors involving selection of drug, dose or frequency: 2 in 857 (0.2%) intervention orders compared with 51 in 807 (6.3%) control (p<0.001). Orders with at least one component of the prescription missing, incorrect or unclear occurred in 208 of 904 (23%) intervention orders and 445 of 1034 (43%) controls (p<0.001). VTE prophylaxis on admission to the ward was appropriate in 93% of intervention patients and 90% controls (p=0.29). Conclusions Medication charts in the intervention arm contained fewer clinically significant omissions, and prescribing errors, when compared with controls. There was no difference in appropriateness of VTE prophylaxis on admission between the two groups.

The Current State of BPM Education in Australia : Teaching and Research Challenges

As business processes, services and relationships, are now recognized as key organizational assets, the demand for the so-called boundaryspanning roles and process-aware professionals is continuing to grow. The world-wide demand for these roles will continue to increase, fueled by the unprecedented interest in Business Process Management (BPM) and the other emerging cross-functional disciplines. This, in turn, creates new opportunities, as well as some unforeseeable challenges for BPM education, both in university and industry. This paper reports on an analysis of the current BPM offerings of Australian universities. It presents a critical review of what is taught and how it is taught, and identifies a series of gaps and concerns. Explanations and recommendations are proposed and a call made for BPM educators worldwide, for urgent action.

Management of over-the-counter insomnia complaints in Australian community pharmacies: A standardized patient study

Objective To evaluate the current management of over-the-counter (OTC) insomnia complaints in Australian community pharmacies using standardized patient methodology. Methods Trained standardized patients visited a sample of 100 randomly selected South East Queensland community pharmacies in June 2011. The standardized patients enacted two OTC insomnia scenarios: a direct product request (DPR) (n = 50) and a symptom-based request (SBR) (n = 50). Results of the interactions were documented immediately after each visit and evaluated using the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia's WHAT STOP GO protocol as a standard comparison. Key findings Of all DPRs, 30% were handled entirely by the pharmacist, 70% of staff enquired about specific symptoms and 28% investigated the cause of insomnia. No staff investigated the frequency of product use. The DPR scenario resulted in a 92% supply of the requested doxylamine product (Restavit). In the SBR scenario, 18% of requests were handled entirely by the pharmacist, 58% of staff enquired about specific symptoms and 44% investigated the cause of insomnia. Staff recommended medicated products (38%), or herbal (78%) or non-drug techniques (18%). Investigation into smoking and alcohol intake was not undertaken in DPR or SBR interactions, while questioning on caffeine intake was undertaken in 2 and 14% of cases respectively. There were no significant differences found in the handling of sleep requests by pharmacists compared to pharmacy assistants. Conclusion The standardized patient methodology was a successful way to assess the community pharmacy counselling provided with OTC sleep requests and suboptimal staff responses were found when compared with recommended practice standards.

Calligraphy and causation : two obstetric management cases

Child born with gross hydrocephalus - cerebral palsy - questions surrounding obstetrician's notes - ultrasound not ordered - illegible handwriting - importance of legible, accurate and detailed medical records - causation - child born with congenital varicella syndrome (CVS) - chicken pox - forseeability of risk.

Can Business Continuity Management Create Reliability in Airports? (Issues from Theory into Practice)

The advances made within the aviation industry over the past several decades have significantly improved the availability, affordability and convenience of air travel and have been greatly beneficial in both social and economic terms. Air transport has developed into an irreplaceable service being relied on by millions of people each day and as such airports have become critical elements of national infrastructure to facilitate the movement of people and goods. As components of critical infrastructure (CI), airports are integral parts of a national economy supporting regional as well as national trade, commercial activity and employment. Therefore, any disruption or crisis which impacts the continuity of operations at airports can have significant negative consequences for the airport as a business, for the local economy and other nodes of transport infrastructure as well as for society. Due to the highly dynamic and volatile environment in which airports operate in, the aviation industry has faced many different challenges over the years ranging from terrorist attacks such as September 11, to health crises such as the SARS epidemic to system breakdowns such as the recent computer system outage at Virgin Blue Airlines in Australia. All these events have highlighted the vulnerability of airport systems to a range of disturbances as well as the gravity and widespread impact of any kind of discontinuity in airport functions. Such incidents thus emphasise the need for increasing resilience and reliability of airports and ensuring business continuity in the event of a crisis...

The emergence of Leptospira borgpetersenii serovar Arborea as the dominant infecting serovar following the summer of natural disasters in Queensland, Australia 2011

The following research reports the emergence of Leptospira borgpetersenii serovar Arborea as the dominant infecting serovar following the summer of disasters and the ensuing clean up in Queensland, Australia during 2011. For the 12 month period (1 January to 31 December) L. borgpetersenii serovar Arborea accounted for over 49% of infections. In response to a flooding event public health officials need to issue community wide announcements warning the population about the dangers of leptospirosis and other water borne diseases. Communication with physicians working in the affected community should also be increased to update physicians with information such as clinical presentation of leptospirosis and other waterborne diseases. These recommendations will furnish public health officials with considerations for disease management when dealing with future disaster management programs.

A parcel-scale assessment tool to measure sustainability through urban ecosystem components : the MUSIX model

In recent years a number of urban sustainability assessment frameworks are developed to better inform policy formulation and decision-making processes. This paper introduces one of these attempts in developing a comprehensive assessment tool—i.e., Micro-level Urban-ecosystem Sustainability IndeX (MUSIX). Being an indicator-based indexing model, MUSIX investigates the environmental impacts of land-uses on urban sustainability by measuring urban ecosystem components in local scale. The paper presents the methodology of MUSIX and demonstrates the performance of the model in a pilot test-bed—i.e., in Gold Coast, Australia. The model provides useful insights on the sustainability performance of the test-bed area. The parcel-scale findings of the indicators are used to identify local problems considering six main issues of urban development—i.e., hydrology; ecology; pollution; location; design, and; efficiency. The composite index score is used to propose betterment strategies to guide the development of local area plans in conjunction with the City's Planning Scheme. In overall, this study has shown that parcel-scale environmental data provides an overview of the local sustainability in urban areas as in the example of Gold Coast, which can also be used for setting environmental policy, objectives and targets.

‘Our’ community : corporate social responsibility, neoliberalisation, and mining industry community engagement in rural Australia

This paper addresses contemporary neoliberal mobilisations of community undertaken by private corporations. It does so by examining the ways in which the mining industry, empowered through the legitimising framework of corporate social responsibility, is increasingly and profoundly involved in shaping the meaning, practice, and experience of ‘local community’. We draw on a substantial Australian case study, consisting of interviews and document analysis, as a means to examine ‘community-engagement’ practices undertaken by BHP Billiton’s Ravensthorpe Nickel Operation in the Shire of Ravensthorpe in rural Australia. This engagement, we argue, as a process of deepening neoliberalisation simultaneously defines and transforms local community according to the logic of global capital. As such, this study has implications for critical understandings of the intersections among corporate social responsibility, neoliberalisation, community, and capital.

The Use of Ecological Design to Achieve Sustainable Development in Queensland, Australia

This series of technical papers arose out of the action by a private entrepreneur to initiate a process beyond mere regulatory compliance in order to achieve best environmental practice at proposed large new visitor gateways to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Because of the complexity of issues involved at such urbanized downstream sites, the range of topics covered is wide – though still only those considered at this juncture to be of management priority. Included on this platform is one introductory paper reviewing the history of environmental management in the field in Queensland, and three papers which seek to appreciate the main techniques by which government contributes to the solutions viz. through the national park, threatened species list, and environmental impact assessment. The history paper was designed to allow the present series to be considered in broad context as well as performance to date. The work emphasizes that much of the fertile land that must be sustained nowadays lies in the province of the private sector, and that the initiative to create any new cost-effective paradigm in ecologically-sustainable practices lies mostly in their hands. In all instances, this strategic approach to large-scale property planning is through ecological design – using field case studies around the immediate biophysical catchment of the development, with attendant focus on the associated legal catchment (the actual development site) and the social catchment (the effective land managers). The first of these has given rise to a document termed a Regional Landscape Strategy, its implementation planned in concert with an Environmental Impact Assessment of the site and with a Strategic Regional Initiative (still being tested in the field) for community engagement. The first document takes into account the aspirations of government as expressed in its broad-scale regional plans.

A common ‘outlawness’ : criminalisation of Muslim minorities in the UK and Australia

Since mass immigration recruitments of the post-war period, ‘othered’ immigrants to both the UK and Australia have faced ‘mainstream’ cultural expectations to assimilate, and various forms of state management of their integration. Perceived failure or refusal to integrate has historically been constructed as deviant, though in certain policy phases this tendency has been mitigated by cultural pluralism and official multiculturalism. At critical times, hegemonic racialisation of immigrant minorities has entailed their criminalisation, especially that of their young men. In the UK following the ‘Rushdie Affair’ of 1989, and in both Britain and Australia following these states’ involvement in the 1990-91 Gulf War, the ‘Muslim Other’ was increasingly targeted in cycles of racialised moral panic. This has intensified dramatically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’. The young men of Muslim immigrant communities in both these nations have, over the subsequent period, been the subject of heightened popular and state Islamophobia in relation to: perceived ‘ethnic gangs’; alleged deviant, predatory masculinity including so-called ‘ethnic gang rape’; and paranoia about Islamist ‘radicalisation’ and its supposed bolstering of terrorism. In this context, the earlier, more genuinely social-democratic and egalitarian, aspects of state approaches to ‘integration’ have been supplanted, briefly glossed by a rhetoric of ‘social inclusion’, by reversion to increasingly oppressive assimilationist and socially controlling forms of integrationism. This article presents some preliminary findings from fieldwork in Greater Manchester over 2012, showing how mainly British-born Muslims of immigrant background have experienced these processes.

The environmental enigma : why do producers professing stewardship continue to practice poor natural resource management?

Despite a wide acceptance that primary producers in Australia subscribe to a stewardship ethic, land and water degradation remains an ongoing problem. Recent calculations suggest that the economic cost of Australia's environmental degradation is amounting to more than $A3.5 billion a year with an estimated cost of managing (not overcoming) problems of salinity, acidification, soil erosion totalling $A60 billion over the next decade. This paper argues that stewardship itself is an unsatisfactory concept when looking to landholders to respond to environmental problems, for rarely does the attitude of stewardship translate into behaviours of improving natural resource management practices on private land. Whilst there is some acceptance of the environmental problem among primary producers, a number of external constraints may also impede the uptake of conservation-orientated practices. In light of the prevailing accounts of poor adoption of sustainable practices a number of policy options are reviewed in this paper, including formal regional partnerships, regulatory frameworks and market-based measures. It is concluded that the contentious nature of some of these new opportunities for change will mean that any moves aimed at reversing environmental degradation in Australia will be slow.

Climate Change and the Resilience of Commodity Food Production in Australia

The current view of Australian state and national governments about the effects of climate change on agriculture is that farmers – through the adoption of mitigation and adaptation strategies – will remain resilient, and agricultural production will continue to expand. The assumption is that neoliberalism will provide the best ‘free market’ options for climate change mitigation and adaptation in farming. In contrast, we argue that neoliberalism will increase the move towards productivis (‘high-tech’) agriculture – the very system that has caused major environmental damage to the Australian continent. High-tech farming is highly dependent upon access to water and fossil fuels, both of which would appear to be the main limits to production in future decades. Productivist agriculture is a system highly reliant upon fertilizers and fuels that are derived from the petrochemical industry, and are currently increasing in cost as the price of oil increases.