Community participation and inclusion: People with disabilities defining their place

Disability-related public policy currently emphasises reducing the number of people experiencing exclusion from the spaces of the social and economic majority as being the pre-eminent indicator of inclusion. Twenty-eight adult, New Zealand vocational service users collaborated in a participatory action research project to develop shared understandings of community participation. Analysis of their narratives suggests that spatial indices of inclusion are quiet in potentially oppressive ways about the ways mainstream settings can be experienced by people with disabilities and quiet too about the alternative, less well sanctioned communities to which people with disabilities have always belonged. Participants identified five key attributes of place as important qualitative antecedents to a sense of community belonging. The potential of these attributes and other self-authored approaches to inclusion are explored as ways that people with disabilities can support the policy objective of effecting a transformation from disabling to inclusive communities.

Are rural development programmes socially inclusive? Social inclusion, civic engagement, participation, and social capital: Exploring the differences

Considerable importance is attached to social exclusion/inclusion in recent EU rural development programmes. At the national/regional operation of these programmes groups of people who are not participating are often identified as ‘socially excluded groups’. This article contends that rural development programmes are misinterpreting the social processes of participation and consequently labelling some groups as socially excluded when they are not. This is partly because of the interchangeable and confused use of the concepts social inclusion, social capital and civic engagement, and partly because of the presumption that to participate is the default position. Three groups identified as socially excluded groups in Northern Ireland are considered. It is argued that a more careful analysis of what social inclusion means, what civic engagement means, and why participation is presumed to be the norm, leads to a different conclusion about who is excluded. This has both theoretical and policy relevance for the much used concept of social inclusion.

Modelling Patient Duration of Stay to Facilitate Resource Management of Geriatric Hospitals

A fundamental aspect of health care management is the effective allocation of resources. This is of particular importance in geriatric hospitals where elderly patients tend to have more complex needs. Hospital managers would benefit immensely if they had advance knowledge of patient duration of stay in hospital. Managers could assess the costs of patient care and make allowances for these in their budget. In this paper, we tackle this important problem via a model which predicts the duration of stay distribution of patients in hospital. The approach uses phase-type distributions conditioned on a Bayesian belief network.

Using Coxian Phase-Type Distributions to Identify Patient Characteristics for Duration of Stay in Hospital

Coxian phase-type distributions are a special type of Markov model that describes duration until an event occurs in terms of a process consisting of a sequence of latent phases. This paper considers the use of Coxian phase-type distributions for modelling patient duration of stay for the elderly in hospital and investigates the potential for using the resulting distribution as a classifying variable to identify common characteristics between different groups of patients according to their (anticipated) length of stay in hospital. The identification of common characteristics for patient length of stay groups would offer hospital managers and clinicians possible insights into the overall management and bed allocation of the hospital wards.