Safer construction : the development of a guide to best practice

In Australia, an average 49 building and construction workers have been killed at work each year since 1997-98. Building/construction workers are more than twice as likely to be killed at work, than the average worker in all Australian industries. The ‘Safer Construction’ project, funded by the CRC-Construction Innovation and led by a task force comprising representatives of construction clients, designers and constructors, developed a Guide to Best Practice for Safer Construction. The Guide, which was informed by research undertaken at RMIT University, Queensland University of Technology and Curtin University, establishes broad principles for the improvement of safety in the industry and provides a ‘roadmap’ for improvement based upon lifecycle stages of a building/construction project. Within each project stage, best practices for the management of safety are identified. Each best practice is defined in terms of the recommended action, its key benefits, desirable outcomes, performance measures and leadership. ‘Safer Construction’ practices are identified from the planning to commissioning stages of a project. The ‘Safer Construction’ project represents the first time that key stakeholder groups in the Australian building/construction industry have worked together to articulate best practice and establish an appropriate basis for allocating (and sharing) responsibility for project safety performance.

Best Practice Guide : Clients

The Guide contains the distilled findings from a major, two-year research project to explore those factors considered by industry practitioners to be critical to the successful adoption of ICT, both within their firms and between their firms and their trading partners. In the context of this project Critical Success Factors (CSFs) have been defined as, “Those things that absolutely, positively must be attended to in order to maximise the likelihood of a successful outcome for the stakeholder, defined in the stakeholder’s terms.” The guide includes: o Perceived benefits of ICT use across the head contractors’ sector o Types and levels of ICT used across the sector o Self-assessment tool o CSFs for high-level ICT users, including o Best Practice Profiles o Action Statements The material contained in this Guide has been generated following a number of principles: o For a given situation there is not a single ‘right answer’, but a number of solutions that have to be evaluated using a range of relevant factors. o Since there are as many solutions as there are ‘solvers’, factors for evaluation will ‘emerge’ from collective wisdom.

Best Practice Guide : Consultants

The Guide contains the distilled findings from a major, two-year research project to explore those factors considered by industry practitioners to be critical to the successful adoption of ICT, both within their firms and between their firms and their trading partners. In the context of this project Critical Success Factors (CSFs) have been defined as, “Those things that absolutely, positively must be attended to in order to maximise the likelihood of a successful outcome for the stakeholder, defined in the stakeholder’s terms.” The guide includes: o Perceived benefits of ICT use across the consultants’ sector o Types and levels of ICT used across the sector o Self-assessment tool o CSFs for medium- and high-level ICT users, including o Best Practice Profiles o Action Statements o Barriers to ICT use for low-level users o Action Statements The material contained in this Guide has been generated following a number of principles: o For a given situation there is not a single ‘right answer’, but a number of solutions that have to be evaluated using a range of relevant factors. o As there are as many solutions as there are ‘solvers’, factors for evaluation will ‘emerge’ from collective wisdom.

Best Practice Guide : Head Contractors

The Guide contains the distilled findings from a major, two-year research project to explore those factors considered by industry practitioners to be critical to the successful adoption of ICT, both within their firms and between their firms and their trading partners. In the context of this project Critical Success Factors (CSFs) have been defined as, “Those things that absolutely, positively must be attended to in order to maximise the likelihood of a successful outcome for the stakeholder, defined in the stakeholder’s terms.” The guide includes: o Perceived benefits of ICT use across the head contractors’ sector o Types and levels of ICT used across the sector o Self-assessment tool o CSFs for medium- and high-level ICT users, including o Best Practice Profiles o Action Statements The material contained in this Guide has been generated following a number of principles: o For a given situation there is not a single ‘right answer’, but a number of solutions that have to be evaluated using a range of relevant factors. o Since there are as many solutions as there are ‘solvers’, factors for evaluation will ‘emerge’ from collective wisdom.

Best Practice Guide : Subcontractors

The Guide contains the distilled findings from a major, two-year research project to explore those factors considered by industry practitioners to be critical to the successful adoption of ICT, both within their firms and between their firms and their trading partners. In the context of this project Critical Success Factors (CSFs) have been defined as, “Those things that absolutely, positively must be attended to in order to maximise the likelihood of a successful outcome for the stakeholder, defined in the stakeholder’s terms.” The guide includes: o Perceived benefits of ICT use across the subcontractors’ sector o Types and levels of ICT used across the sector o Self-assessment tool o CSFs for medium- and high-level ICT users, including o Best Practice Profiles o Action Statements o Barriers to ICT use for low-level users o Action Statements The material contained in this Guide has been generated following a number of principles: o For a given situation there is not a single ‘right answer’, but a number of solutions that have to be evaluated using a range of relevant factors. o As there are as many solutions as there are ‘solvers’, factors for evaluation will ‘emerge’ from collective wisdom.

Best Practice Guide : Generic Overview

The construction industry is a key national economic component. It tends to be at the forefront of cyclic changes in the Australian economy. It has a significant impact, both directly and indirectly, on the efficiency and productivity of other industries. Moreover it affects everyone to a greater or lesser extent; through its products whether they are manifested in the physical infrastructure that supports the operation of the economy or through the built environment that directly impacts on the quality of life experienced by individuals. In financial terms the industry makes one of the largest contributions to the Australian economy, accounting for 4.7 per cent of GDP 1 which was worth over $30B in 20012. The construction industry is comprised of a myriad of small firms, across several important sectors including, o Residential building, o Commercial building, o Building services, o Engineering, o Infrastructure o Facilities Management o Property Development Each sector is typified by firms that have distinctive characteristics such as the number of employees, size and value of contracts, number of jobs, and so forth. It tends to be the case that firms operating in commercial building are larger than those involved in residential construction. The largest contractors are found in engineering and infrastructure, as well as in the commercial building sub-sectors. However all sectors are characterised by their reliance upon sub-contractors to carry out on-site operations. Professionals from the various design consultant groups operate across all of these sectors. This description masks one of the most significant underlying causes of inefficiency in the construction industry, namely its fragmentation. The Construction Industry chapter of the 2004 Australian Year Book3, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics unmasks the industry’s fragmented structure, typified by the large number of operating businesses within it, the vast majority of which are small companies employing less than 5 people. It identifies over 190,000 firms, of which over 90 percent employ less than 5 people. At the other end of the spectrum, firms employing 20 or more people account for fractionally more than one percent of businesses in the industry.

Memoirs of a trainer : The search for a balance between quality and best practice

The field of research training (for students and supervisors) is becoming more heavily regulated by the Federal Government. At the same time, quality improvement imperatives are requiring staff across the University to have better access to information and knowledge about a wider range of activities each year. Within the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), the training provided to academic and research staff is organised differently and individually. This session will involve discussion of the dichotomies found in this differentiated approach to staff training, and begin a search for best practice through interaction and input from the audience.

Factors influencing oncology nurses' approaches to accommodating cultural needs in palliative care

Aims and objectives: The purpose of this study is to explore the social construction of cultural issues in palliative care amongst oncology nurses. ---------- Background: Australia is a nation composed of people from different cultural origins with diverse linguistic, spiritual, religious and social backgrounds. The challenge of working with an increasingly culturally diverse population is a common theme expressed by many healthcare professionals from a variety of countries. ---------- Design: Grounded theory was used to investigate the processes by which nurses provide nursing care to cancer patients from diverse cultural backgrounds. ---------- Methods: Semi-structured interviews with seven Australian oncology nurses provided the data for the study; the data was analysed using grounded theory data analysis techniques. ---------- Results: The core category emerging from the study was that of accommodating cultural needs. This paper focuses on describing the series of subcategories that were identified as factors which could influence the process by which nurses would accommodate cultural needs. These factors included nurses' views and understandings of culture and cultural mores, their philosophy of cultural care, nurses' previous experiences with people from other cultures and organisational approaches to culture and cultural care. ---------- Conclusions: This study demonstrated that previous experiences with people from other cultures and organisational approaches to culture and cultural care often influenced nurses' views and understandings of culture and cultural mores and their beliefs, attitudes and behaviours in providing cultural care. ---------- Relevance to clinical practice: It is imperative to appreciate how nurses' experiences with people from other cultures can be recognised and built upon or, if necessary, challenged. Furthermore, nurses' cultural competence and experiences with people from other cultures need to be further investigated in clinical practice.

Critical review of Queensland's Crime and Misconduct Commission Inquiry into abuse of children in foster care : social work's contribution to reform

This paper profiles Queensland's recent Crime and Misconduct Commission Inquiry into the abuse of children in foster care. The authors welcome the outcome as an opportunity to highlight the problems encountered by child protection jurisdictions in Australia and internationally, and they applaud some of the Inquiry's findings. However, the paper argues that the path to reform is hampered by insufficient accountability by government and management, and an inadequate challenge to the ideologies underpinning contemporary child protection policy and practice. The authors conclude with a call to value and assert social work's contribution to child protection systems so as to vastly improve outcomes for children and families.

Best Practice

The overall theme for the 4th Biennial International Network of Indigenous Health Knowledge and Development (INIHKD)Conference was ‘Knowing Our Roots: Indigenous Medicines, Health Knowledges and Best Practices’. Conference activities were grouped around the following broad themes: •Building of Indigenous research capacity, partnerships and workforce; •Sharing of innovative, traditional and contemporary Indigenous knowledges, especially with respect to culturally-grounded interventions and evidenced-based “best and promising practices”; •Identification of successful Indigenous health policy solutions; and •Sharing of ethical, Indigenous-based research protocols and methodologies. This keynote plenary presentation focused on 'best practice' in research asking the questions: What kind of research will I do? What kind of research will I be? What is the contribution that I will make? what will be my legacy?

Constructing leadership in child care : epistemological beliefs and transformational leadership

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Australia are currently a focus of social and economic policy. However, early childhood leadership in Australia is yet to develop a clear identity that will enable the field to develop to its full potential. In this paper we investigate a unique theoretical framework for constructing leadership identity, based on transformational leadership and epistemological beliefs. Using semistructured interviews, 15 childcare directors from a large metropolitan area in Australia were asked to describe their beliefs about knowing in the context of their leadership practices. The findings showed that leaders (n = 5) who espoused predominantly evaluativist beliefs about knowing were more likely to describe transformational leadership behaviours in the context of childcare leadership. A number of leaders held mixed beliefs (n = 9) about knowing and described their leadership practice in ways that reflected both transactional and transformational leadership styles. Finally, one leader described predominantly objectivist epistemological beliefs and transactional beliefs about leadership. These preliminary findings show that there seems to be a relationship between core epistemological beliefs and beliefs about leadership practices and offers a new way to characterise leadership in ECEC in Australia.

Re-engineering project planning processes : a best practice model for managing project phase integration issues

Competitive markets are increasingly driving new initiatives for shorter cycle times resulting in increased overlapping of project phases. This, in turn, necessitates improving the interfaces between the different phases to be overlapped (integrated), thus allowing transfer of processes, information and knowledge from one individual or team to another. This transfer between phases, within and between projects, is one of the basic challenges to the philosophy of project management. To make the process transfer more transparent with minimal loss of momentum and project knowledge, this paper draws upon Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) philosophies to develop a Best Practice Model for managing project phase integration. The paper presents the rationale behind the model development and outlines its two key parts; (1) Strategic Framework and (2) Implementation Plan. Key components of both the Strategic Framework and the Implementation Plan are presented and discussed.

Workflow support for scheduling in surgical care processes

Real-world business processes rely on the availability of scarce, shared resources, both human and non-human. Current workflow management systems support allocation of individual human resources to tasks but lack support for the full range of resource types used in practice, and the inevitable constraints on their availability and applicability. Based on past experience with resource-intensive workflow applications, we derive generic requirements for a workflow system which can use its knowledge of resource capabilities and availability to help create feasible task schedules. We then define the necessary architecture for implementing such a system and demonstrate its practicality through a proof-of-concept implementation. This work is presented in the context of a real-life surgical care process observed in a number of German hospitals.

Rural and Urban Differentials in Primary Care Management of Chronic Heart Failure: New Data from the CASE Study

Objective: To determine whether primary care management of chronic heart failure (CHF) differed between rural and urban areas in Australia. Design: A cross-sectional survey stratified by Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Areas (RRMA) classification. The primary source of data was the Cardiac Awareness Survey and Evaluation (CASE) study. Setting: Secondary analysis of data obtained from 341 Australian general practitioners and 23 845 adults aged 60 years or more in 1998. Main outcome measures: CHF determined by criteria recommended by the World Health Organization, diagnostic practices, use of pharmacotherapy, and CHF-related hospital admissions in the 12 months before the study. Results: There was a significantly higher prevalence of CHF among general practice patients in large and small rural towns (16.1%) compared with capital city and metropolitan areas (12.4%) (P < 0.001). Echocardiography was used less often for diagnosis in rural towns compared with metropolitan areas (52.0% v 67.3%, P < 0.001). Rates of specialist referral were also significantly lower in rural towns than in metropolitan areas (59.1% v 69.6%, P < 0.001), as were prescribing rates of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (51.4% v 60.1%, P < 0.001). There was no geographical variation in prescribing rates of β-blockers (12.6% [rural] v 11.8% [metropolitan], P = 0.32). Overall, few survey participants received recommended “evidence-based practice” diagnosis and management for CHF (metropolitan, 4.6%; rural, 3.9%; and remote areas, 3.7%). Conclusions: This study found a higher prevalence of CHF, and significantly lower use of recommended diagnostic methods and pharmacological treatment among patients in rural areas.