The experiences of living with a person with an eating disorder: the impact on the carers

Using a combination of focus groups and individual in-depth interviews, the experience of living with a person with an eating disorder was explored in 24 carers. Attention was given to the progression of the disorder to understand its impact upon the family throughout the stages of the illness. Caring for a person with an eating disorder impacted upon the primary carer and the family throughout the course of the illness. Despite this, the impact on the carers was seldom acknowledged and the needs of these carers and their families were unrecognized and neglected by health professionals.

Rawls and Health Care

John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), his first major work articulating his theory of justice as fairness, was immediately recognized as a fundamental contribution to political philosophy in the twentieth century. Working within the tradition established by previous philosophers such as Kant and Locke, Rawls employed the contract theory approach. Taking it to a higher order of abstraction, he sought to determine not what the structure of social organization would be, but what the principles which governed social institutions would be under a hypothetical contracting situation. Rawls uses this contract theory approach to construct a society in which the morally irrelevant contingencies of nature and social arrangements are mitigated by principles of justice which govern the basic institutions of society. A common observation has been that Rawls left out any discussion of health care and how it might fit into his conception of a just society. Several philosophers have articulated expansions of the theory to account for health care. In the chapters that follow I will continue this tradition and consider how justice as fairness might be expanded to account for just health care allocation. In doing so, I hope to answer a particularly strong critique of the theory brought up by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and to argue for a broadened conception of health care which takes into account the complex causal relationship between society and human health.

An insight into implementing person-centred active support

This paper provides reflections on the implementation of an active support staff training programme for staff working in community residential facilities for adults with an intellectual disability. Outcomes for the people with an intellectual disability were consistent with recent research findings indicating that active support can lead to improved opportunities for participation in everyday activities within the home. We propose that the success of the training programme was largely influenced by three key elements: ensuring that there is expertise in, and support for, this approach to service provision among key service managers, provision of in vivo one-to-one practical staff training in addition to classroom-based theoretical input, and inclusion of elements of person-centred planning approaches in combination with active support. Future research should focus on how best to maximise the effectiveness of active support staff training.

The sustainability of health promotion interventions for different levels of social organization

In health promotion, enthusiasm for sustainability has frequently overshadowed critical reflection with regard to whether this aim is warranted, let alone feasible. Consequently, the not insubstantial body of literature on sustainability in health promotion is not particularly helpful to decision makers. In this paper we seek to provide some guidance for the development of sustainability for health promotion interventions, arguing that it is necessary to be able to differentiate between (i) levels of social organization which are the focus of change, (ii) the programmes and agencies which are the means employed to achieve change, and (iii) the outcomes or effects that are achieved. Furthermore, funding allocations need to be congruent with programme characteristics if one is serious about achieving sustainability.

Design management in a design-construct organization

As clients have become more aware and demanding of the construction industry, they are also less tolerant of the management of its problems and the risks involved in the delivery of major projects. Identification and allocation of risk is one of the most critical processes in the early stages of project development. Often it is the deciding factor in the selection of the building process and of the type of procurement method adopted to manage the various project risks. The emergence of different forms of procurement, and in particular, design-construct and novation, requires the design construct contractor to not only accept the risks associated with the construction of the works, but also of the design management during the design development of the project. With the increasing requirement for design-construct contractors to balance the cost management issues and design development through the various stages, the role of the design manager as information manager has evolved and expanded in importance. This paper presents a case study of design management within a design-construct organization on a large residential apartment project. It identifies and analyses issues concerned with the organization, responsibilities, relationships and stages of development in a typical design-construct project.

A platform for dynamic organization of agents in agent-based systems

In most agent-based systems, different middle agents are employed to increase their flexibility. However, there are still three issues remain unsolved. In centralized architecture with single middle agent, the middle agent itself is a bottleneck and suffers from single point failure; middle agents in distributed architecture lack capability of dynamic organization of agents; The reliability is not strong because of the single point failure and lack of effective architecture. We introduce a platform with ring architectural model to solve all above problems. In the platform, multiple middle agents are dynamically supported for solving the first problem. For solving the second problem, middle agents dynamically manage the registration and cancellation of service provider agents and application teams, each of which includes a set of closely interacting requester agents to complete an independent task. Redundancy middle agent technique is proposed for solving the third problem. All middle agents are of the feature of proliferation and self-cancellation according to the sensory inputs from their environment. For organizing the middle agents effectively, a ring architectural model is proposed. We demonstrate the applicability of the platform by its application and present experimental evidence that the platform is flexible and robust.

Codes of ethics in Sweden's largest public sector organizations : communicating the intent of the code within the organization

The aim of the study was to examine the ways that public sector organizations in Sweden communicated the intent of their codes of ethics to their employees. Primary data was obtained via a self-administered mail questionnaire distributed to a census of the top 100 organizations.

The study identified a range of methods used by organizations to integrate the ethos of codes into corporate culture. These methods included communication of the code, company induction of new staff, consequences for a breach of the code, ethical performance, an ethics ombudsman, the support of whistleblowers, a standing ethics committee, ethics education, and an ethics education committee.

Whilst many organizations have instituted ethical behaviour initiatives, activities specifically targeted at exposure, education and support for staff to perform ethically were found to be underdeveloped.

Aversive sexism and emotion regulation in a masculine organization

This study explores aversive sexism as an extension of Dovidio and Gaertner's (2004) recent notion of aversive racism. In this study, we investigate the presence of aversive sexism by examining relationships between emotional experience and emotion regulation in a masculine organization, an Australian Police Force ('APF').

Flora Fit street : a qualitative evaluation

This report summaries a qualitative evauation of the Flora Fit Street community based health living initiative.

Evaluation of Flora Fit street : a community-based living initiative. Final report

This report is an evaluation of Flora Fit Street (FFS) based in Clapham Park London. FFS was launched in June 2004 as a 12 month public private partnership between Flora and Clapham Park New Deal for Communities (NDC). Its purpose was to improve the local community’s heart health by
providing a whole range of activities, information and events that focused on increasing physical activity, improving nutrition and smoking cessation.