The conceptualisation of operational risk management models

Operational risk is evolving as a specialist field of risk management that must be practiced within all organisations, but currently has a particular relevance to banks. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has circulated a consultative paper which, if adopted by nation-state bank supervisors, will impose an operational risk capital charge on banks as part of a new Capital Accord. The definition of operational risk is wide-ranging and creates some unique issues related to the development of appropriate risk management models. This paper conceptualises two distinct operational risk management models; being a predictive model that will result in a known outcome upon its implementation, and a pre-emptive operational risk management model which prepares an organisation in the event that a future risk occurrence results in a disruption to critical business operations.

An experiment using ICT to investigate pure voting power

We present an experiment to evaluate the accuracy of power indices by measuring the political power embodied in blocks of votes per se. The experiment incorporates several players interacting in lCT chat rooms under supervision. The chat rooms and the selection process reduce or eliminate other political forces leaving logroIIing as the primary political force.

An experimental investigation of pure voting power

We evaluate the accuracy of power indices by experimentally measuring the political power embodied in blocks of votes per se.  The experiment incorporates several players interacting in online chat rooms under supervision.  The chat rooms and the selection process reduce or eliminate extraneous political forces leaving logrolling as the primary political force.  Results show that two standard power indices reflect voting power while other power indices and proportionality do not.

Changing work and OHS: the challenge of labour hire employment

The expansion of labour hire employment from traditional clerical placements to a range of blue collar occupations raises concerns about the level of occupational safety risks labour hire workers encounter. Overseas evidence points to a higher incidence and severity of injury for such workers. Is this pattern of injury replicated in Australia? This paper explores this issue through an analysis of workers’ compensation claims in Victoria, and preliminary investigation into case histories of 220 injured Victorian labour hire employees. Overseas research findings in relation to injury are confirmed through aggregate data analysis. The paper then provides a preliminary examination of agency-related employment factors such as the extent and nature of training and supervision provided by the host, and the timing of injuries in relation to commencement with the host. The evidence suggests both agency and host employers need to be more proactive in overcoming the vulnerability experienced by these workers.

Establishing best-practice principles for the teaching of group design projects

As student-to-staff ratios escalate, increasing numbers of undergraduate architects are finding the reduction of ‘one-to-one’ studio supervision an impediment to learning. Group design projects are becoming a widespread solution to this problem. However, little analysis has been undertaken as to their effectiveness both in terms of student assessment and as a design teaching methodology.
The two hundred years of apprentice/master tradition that underpins the atelier studio system is still at the core of much present day architectural design education. Yet this tradition today poses uncertainties for a large number of co-ordinating lecturers faced with current changes in the nature of tertiary education and its funding structure. In particular, with reductions in staff/student contact time, in sessional funding sources and in the relative weighting of design-based subjects with respect to other subject areas, many design teachers are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain an atelier system that has shaped both their learning and, more pointedly, their teaching. If these deficiencies remain unchecked and design-based schools are unable to implement strategies that successfully overcome the resource intensive one-to-one teaching program, then architecture may prove to be an untenable course structure for many institutions.
Rather then spreading their time thinly, many co-ordinating lecturers are setting group projects in order to review less assignments but at greater depth. However, while this learning model better reflects design teams in practice, this approach may pose other pedagogical and assessment questions. What is clear is the urgent need for structured research into the teaching and assessment problems experienced by design teachers, and for a readily adoptable pedagogy for group design projects. At Deakin University, research is underway aimed at establishing best-practice principles for group design projects by analysing students’ performance and recording and implementing their feedback to adjustments made to the pedagogical fundamentals of assessment, group configuration, and program structure. There are after two years of preliminary studies already clear indications of what changes can be made to these to encourage more effective team learning. This paper will present the findings of these studies.

Burnout in the caring nurse: learning resilient behaviours

This paper reviews current literature to offer a discussion related to burnout, an issue that affects the entire healthcare sector, including nurses and patients. Literature suggests a correlation between moral distress and burnout in nurses. These issues are considered to be current and affect recruitment and retention of nurses. The authors propose supporting nurses by using knowledge of resilient behaviours as a means of transcending burnout and workplace stress. The authors believe that this process can be achieved through existing hospital professional development processes, for example supervision, reflective practice, in-service education and other forms of professional development.

The importance of using open-ended questions when interviewing children

In addition to making reference to best practices, already known, concerning the conduct of interviews with child victims of sexual abuse, the author describes some of the questions of development that must be made and the four benefits of free narrative. Despite the qualities of this type of approach, surveys show that professionals do not get the research, as a rule, free of narrative descriptions by children and that interviews tend to contain the short answer questions, with few breaks and an excessive number of closed questions and trick.According to trainers, experts in this field, there should be greater recognition of the interview as a forensic specialist skills and promote themselves to more effective supervision and monitoring of the forensic interview at work.

Key stakeholders' expectations of educational outcomes from Australian critical care nursing courses: a Delphi study

Background
Educational preparation for critical care nursing in Australia varies considerably in terms of the level of qualification resulting in a lack of clarity for key stakeholders about student outcomes.

Objectives
The study aim was to identify and reach consensus regarding the desired learning outcomes from Australian post-registration critical care education programs as demonstrated through the graduate's knowledge, skills and attitudes.

Design
A Delphi technique was used to establish consensus between educators, managers, clinicians and students regarding learning outcomes expected of graduates with a Graduate Certificate, Graduate Diploma and Master level qualification in critical care nursing.

Participants
A total of 164 critical care nurses (66 clinicians, 48 educators, 32 managers and 18 students) participated and 99 questionnaires were returned in the first round (response rate 60%). Fifty-seven questionnaires were returned for Round 2 (response rate 58%).

Methods
Learning outcomes were obtained from the Australian College of Critical Care Nurses Competency Standards for Specialist Critical Care Nurses. Some statements included more than one characteristic, and these were split to create learning outcomes with one characteristic per item. A survey of Australian higher education providers of critical care education provided additional learning outcomes, for a total of 73 learning outcomes for the first Delphi round.

Results
Findings suggest that patient comfort, safety, professional responsibility and ethical conduct are deemed most important for all three levels of educational preparation. There was a lack of emphasis on clinical practice issues for all levels. Participants placed higher emphasis on learning outcomes related to complex decision-making, leadership, supervision, policy development and research for Graduate Diploma and Master level programs.

Conclusion
The findings have implications for curriculum development and the profession with regards to the level of educational preparation required of critical care nurses and suggest that further work is required before clear recommendations can be made for desired educational outcomes from critical care nursing programs in Australia.

Leadership, culture and employee deceit : the case of the National Australia Bank

The National Australia Bank (NAB), one of Australia's largest banks, announced losses in 2004 of AUD$360 million due to unauthorised foreign currency trading activities by four employees who incurred and deceptively concealed the losses. The NAB had in place risk limits and supervision to prevent trading desks ever reaching positions of this magnitude. However, the risk management policies and procedures proved ineffective. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the deceit, via a content analysis of official investigative reports and other published documents, to determine the extent to which the Bank's culture and leadership may have influenced the rogue traders' behaviour. The findings suggest that cultural issues, and the role played by the Bank's leaders, were influential in creating a profit-driven culture that ultimately impacted the Bank's foreign exchange operating activities.

Emotional toil: psychosocial care in rural settings for patients with cancer

Aim. This paper is a report of a study to identify experienced rural nurses' perceptions of key issues related to the provision of effective psychosocial care for people with cancer in rural settings.

Background. A cancer diagnosis has a major impact on psychological and emotional wellbeing, and psychosocial support provided by nurses is an integral part of ensuring that people with cancer have positive outcomes. Although, ideally, people with cancer should be managed in specialist settings, significant numbers are cared for in rural areas.

Methods. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, three focus groups were conducted in 2005 with 19 nurses in three hospitals in rural Victoria, Australia.

Findings. Participants indicated that a key issue in providing psychosocial care to patients with cancer in the rural setting was their own 'emotional toil'. This Global Theme encapsulated three Organizing Themes– task vs. care, dual relationships and supportive networks – reflective of the unique nature of the rural environment. Nurses in rural Australia are multi-skilled generalists and they provide care to patients with cancer without necessarily having specialist knowledge or skill. The fatigue and emotional exhaustion that the nurses described often has a major impact on their own well-being.

Conclusion. In the rural context, it is proposed that clinical supervision may be an important strategy to support clinicians who face emotional exhaustion as part of their cancer nursing role.

Critical incident analyses : a practice learning tool for students and practitioners

The development of critical skills in social work students and practitioners has been a major focus of social work education and training in recent years. Critical incident analysis has developed as a tool to aid critical reflection in practice, in health and social work. This paper provides an overview of the use of the tool in these fields. It then reports on a demonstration project which sought to examine how critical incident analysis might be used as a form of assessment and as a supervisory tool by social work students and practice teachers. An evaluation of the project is provided. Completion of critical incident analyses using the framework was found to provide a structured approach to critical reflection. It assisted the integration of theory and practice and the examination of value issues. Students and practice teachers identify its use in supervision and its potential as an assessment tool. The paper concludes with a discussion on the potential uses of critical incident analyses, with particular attention given to its use to develop anti-oppressive practice.

Assessment frameworks : a critical reflection

Increasing widespread requirements that assessment practice conforms to generic guidelines contained in assessment frameworks has been contentious and critiques offered on individual frameworks have been assumed to apply to the concept of assessment frameworks more generally. After comparing four assessment frameworks currently being used in the UK, this paper argues that although some generalizations can be made, for the most part, they are highly individual documents in terms of range and depth of content, the extent to which they are evidenced and the quality of that evidence and implicit expectations as to the skill bases of assessors. Furthermore, the introduction of assessment frameworks is not in itself a panacea to ensure good practice. Even with the most comprehensive frameworks, social workers will still need comprehensive training in assessment and supervision of their practice.

Framing the discourses of harm and loss: a case study of power relations, mobile phones, and children in Australia

The current penetration of mobile phones in Australia is 92% and it records one of the world’s highest rates of ownership among children under 18. The paper reviews the literature on mobile phones and Australian children and examines the various discourses dominating the public debates; the systematic frames used in these discourses; and whose interests are served in the process. The frames discussed fall under the optimistic (gains); pessimistic (losses, costs or harms); pluralistic (technology per se is neutral but how it is used matters); historical development (skills learnt and the importance of using mobiles); futuristic predictions (promises and dangers for the future); current uses (connectivity, convergence and interactivity); and the techno-realist view (as a mixed blessing) views of technology. Taking the critical perspective and borrowing from Joshua Meyrowitz, the paper illustrates how mobile phones have eroded parental power over how, when, where and with whom their children communicate, surpassing adult supervision, intervention or knowledge, while at the same time, becoming a ‘digital leash’ for parents to re-establish their control an d an ‘umbilical cord’ for their off spring to remain connect! ed with parents, at all times.

Using decision-tree to automatically construct learned-heuristics for events classification in sports video

Automatic events classification is an essential requirement for constructing an effective sports video summary. It has become a well-known theory that the high-level semantics in sport video can be “computationally interpreted” based on the occurrences of specific audio and visual features which can be extracted automatically. State-of-the-art solutions for features-based event classification have only relied on either manual-knowledge based heuristics or machine learning. To bridge the gaps, we have successfully combined the two approaches by using learning-based heuristics. The heuristics are constructed automatically using decision tree while manual supervision is only required to check the features and highlight contained in each training segment. Thus, fully automated construction of classification system for sports video events has been achieved. A comprehensive experiment on 10 hours video dataset, with five full-match soccer and five full-match basketball videos, has demonstrated the effectiveness/robustness of our algorithms.

The conceptualisation of operational risk management models

Operational risk is evolving as a specialist field of risk management that must be practiced within all organisations, but currently has a particular relevance to banks. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has circulated a consultative paper which, if adopted by nation-state bank supervisors, will impose an operational risk capital charge on banks as part of a new Capital Accord. The definition of operational risk is wide-ranging and creates some unique issues related to the development of appropriate risk management models. This paper conceptualises two distinct operational risk management models; being a predictive model that will result in a known outcome upon its implementation, and a pre-emptive operational risk management model which prepares an organisation in the event that a future risk occurrence results in a disruption to critical business operations.