Survey of canteens and food services in Victorian schools

Objective: To examine the characteristics of food services in Victorian government primary and secondary schools.

Design and methods: A cross-sectional postal survey of all high schools and a random sample of one quarter of primary school respondents in Victoria. A `School Food Services and Canteen' questionnaire was administered by mail to the principal of each school.

Subjects: Respondents included principals, canteen managers and home economics teachers from 150 primary and 208 secondary schools representing response rates of 48% and 67%, respectively.

Main outcome measures: Responses to closed questions about school canteen operating procedures, staff satisfaction, food policies and desired additional services.

Data analyses: Frequency and cross-tabulation analyses and associated χ²-tests.

Results: Most schools provided food services at lunchtime and morning recess but one-third provided food before school. Over 40% outsourced their food services, one-third utilised volunteer parents, few involved students in canteen operations. Half of the secondary schools had vending machines; one in five had three or more. Secondary school respondents were more dissatisfied with the nutritional quality of the food service, and expressed more interest in additional services than primary respondents. Schools with food policies wanted more service assistance and used volunteer parents, student and paid canteen managers more than schools without policies.

Conclusion: Most schools want to improve the nutritional quality of their food services, especially via school food policies. There is a major opportunity for professional organisations to advocate for the supply of healthier school foods.

Building brand identity : Does it pay? An investigation into cultural and recreational services

This conceptual paper aims to contribute to current services branding literature by conceptualising the relationship between brand identity and critical antecedents and empirically verifying whether the creation of a strong brand identity results in the ultimate pay off in terms of improved organisational performance. A conceptual model is developed in the context of the cultural and recreational services sector and central constructs and subsequent propositions are discussed.

Improving the coordination of care for low back pain patients by creating better links between acute and community services

This paper reports on the development of a care-pathway to improve service linkages between the acute setting and community health services in the treatment of low back pain. The pathway was informed by two processes: (1) a literature review based on best-practice guidelines in the assessment, treatment and continuity of care for low back pain patients; and (2) consultation with staff and key stakeholders. Stakeholders from both the acute and community sectors comprised the Working Group, who identified central areas of concern to be addressed in the care-pathway, with the goal of preventing chronicity of low back pain and reducing emergency department presentations. The main outcomes achieved include: the development of a new care-coordinator role, which would support a greater focus on integration between acute and community sectors for low back pain patients; identifying the need to screen at-risk patients; implementation of the SCTT (Service Coordination Tool Templates) tool as a system of referral across the acute and community settings; and agreement on the need to develop an evidence-based self-management program to be offered to low back pain patients. The benefits and challenges of implementing this care pathway are discussed.

Delivering categorized news items using RSS feeds and web services

In the past decade the massive growth of the Internet brought huge changes in the way humans live their daily life; however, the biggest concern with rapid growth of digital information is how to efficiently manage and filter unwanted data. In this paper, we propose a method for managing RSS feeds from various news websites. A Web service was developed to provide filtered news items extracted from RSS feeds and these were categorized based on classical text categorization algorithms. A client application consuming this Web service retrieves and displays such filtered information. A prototype was implemented using Rapidminer 4.3 as a data mining tool and SVM as a classification algorithm. Experimental results suggest that the proposed method is effective and saves a significant amount of user processing time.