How to operate a university institute as a radiological emergency service?

The Institute of Radiation Physics (IRA) is attached to the Department of Medical Radiology at the Vaud University Hospital Center (CHUV) in Lausanne. The Institute's main tasks are strongly linked to the medical activities of the Department: radiotherapy, radiodiagnostics, interventional radiology and nuclear medicine. The Institute also works in the fields of operational radiation protection, radiation metrology and radioecology. In the case of an accident involving radioactive materials, the emergency services are able to call on the assistance of radiation protection specialists. In order to avoid having to create and maintain a specific structure, both burdensome and rarely needed, Switzerland decided to unite all existing emergency services for such events. Thus, the IRA was invited to participate in this network. The challenge is therefore to integrate a university structure, used to academic collaborations and the scientific approach, to an interventional organization accustomed to strict policies, a military-style command structure and "drilled" procedures. The IRA's solution entails mobilizing existing resources and the expertise developed through professional experience. The main asset of this solution is that it involves the participation of committed collaborators who remain in a familiar environment, and are able to use proven materials and mastered procedures, even if the atmosphere of an accident situation differs greatly from regular laboratory routines. However, this solution requires both a commitment to education and training in emergency situations, and a commitment in terms of discipline by each collaborator in order to be integrated into a response plan supervised by an operational command center.

Cultural Biases in Public Service Delivery : Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach

What determines the share of public employment, at a given size of the State, in countries of similar levels of economic development? While the theoretical and empirical literature on this issue has mostly considered technical dimensions (efficiency and political considerations), this paper emphasizes the role of culture and quantifies it. We build a representative database for contracting choices of municipalities in Switzerland and exploit the discontinuity at the Swiss language border at identical actual set of policies and institutions to analyze the causal e↵ect of culture on the choice of how public services are provided. We find that French-speaking border municipalities are 50% less likely to contract with the private sector than their German-speaking adjacent municipalities. Technical dimensions are much smaller by comparison. This result points out that culture is a source of a potential bias that distorts the optimal choice for public service delivery. Systematic differences in the level of confidence in public administration and private companies potentially explain this discrepancy in private sector participation in public services provision.