Community engagement and working with government

Community engagement in health care can occur from policy to local community levels. It is consistent with democracy. A systems perspective can see consumers engaged to legitimise government agendas. Often community participation is via consultation instead of partnership or delegation. A community development approach to engagement can empower communities to take responsibility for their own health care. Understanding rural place facilitates alignment between health programs and community, assists incorporate community resources into health care and provides information about health needs. Rural communities, health services and other community organisations need skills in working together to develop effective partnerships that transfer some power from health systems. Rural engagement with national/state agendas is a challenge. Community engagement takes time and resources, but can be expected to lead to better health outcomes for rural residents.

Responding to rural skills shortages : innovations using vocational education and training

Aims & Rationale/Objectives
To locate, analyse and make accessible innovative models of health training and service delivery that have been developed in response to a shortage of skills.

Methods
Drawing on a synthesis of Australian and international literature on innovative and effective models for addressing health skill shortages, 50 models were selected for further study. Models were also identified from nominations by key health sector stakeholders. Selected models represent diversity in terms of the nature of skill shortage addressed, barriers overcome in developing the model, health care specialisations, and customer groups.

Principal Findings
Rural and remote areas have become home to a set of innovative service delivery models. Models identified encompass local, regional and state/national responses. Local responses are usually single health service-training provider partnerships. Regional responses, the most numerous, tend to have a specific focus, such as training young people. A small number of holistic state or national responses, eg the skills ecosystem approach, address multiple barriers to health service provision. Typical barriers include unwillingness to risk-take, stakeholder differences, and entrenched workplace cultures. Enhancers include stakeholder commitment, community acceptance, and cultural fit.

Discussion
Of particular interest is increasing numbers of therapy assistants to help address shortages of allied health professionals, and work to formalise their training, and develop standards of practice and policy. Other models likely to help address skill shortage amongst VET health workers focus on recruiting, supporting and training employees from a range of disadvantaged target groups, and on providing career paths with opportunities for staff to expand their skills. Such models are underpinned by nationally recognised qualifications, but each solution is targeted to a particular context in terms of the potential workforce and local need.

Rural Health Week Tasmania 2007

Aims & Rationale/Objectives
To raise the awareness of health issues in rural Tasmania, the work of rural health professionals and community volunteers

Methods
A partnership initiative between the University Department of Rural Health and the Department of Health and Human Services attracted $64,000 sponsorship from government and private sector. It established 28 regional groups which organised local activities and awards for a community volunteeer and a health professional. Regional groups were surveyed about their planning process for rural health week, the activities held, their outcomes and future intentions.

Principal Findings
Regional groups were partnerships of local organisations. Activities had a preventative focus. They included cooking, bike rides, dances, manual handling, health checks, community art, suicide prevention.Events attracted up to 300 participants. There were 48 nominations for the 2 awards, which were perceived to have raised the profile of health professionals and volunteers. Activities that attracted most participation were fun runs and health expos. Most used their understanding of community needs when deciding on activities. Only a small number relied on formal health needs analyses. Groups varied in their assessment of how well the activities they organised actually met needs. Half the group members had not worked together previously. All but 3 intend to work with others in the future. Most group members learnt more about health programs and other professionals in their community.

Implications
Raised profile of health services and role of health professionals and volunteers in rural Tasmania.
Increased range of ongoing health promoting activities. Better planned and coordinated activities.

What are seating clinicians thinking?

In response to an influx of commercially available seating product, research was undertaken to examine how clinicians, experienced in seating prescriptions make decisions when assisting their clients to choose the most appropriate seating systems for their wheelchairs. This paper will present findings from research undertaken in 2005, into the decision-making processes (known as Clinical Reasoning) used by six clinicians working in Victoria. The paper will discuss the successes and barriers these clinicians encounter when selecting ready-made products, off the shelf, to trial and what parameters arose that required custom-made products. The research findings illuminate the clinicians' considerations for successful client collaboration and the essentials for effective supplier-clinician partnerships when selecting from an overwhelming array of new products and available technologies to accommodate generally a more informed consumer base. The availability of ready-made product has altered consumer perceptions that wheelchair seating is no longer a specialized area and that all clinicians should be competent to prescribe. This paper will reveal how experience seating clinicians assess, make decisions and evaluate the client's needs when undertaking equipment trials and prescribing seating products for complex consumer needs. This is of interest to all who are involved in prescribing and supplying products for wheelchair consumers.

Multi-level rural community engagement in health

Community participation in health is consistent with notions of democracy. A systems perspective of engagement can see consumers engaged to legitimise government agendas. Often community participation is via consultation instead of partnership or delegation. A community development approach to engagement can empower communities to take responsibility for their own health care. Understanding rural place facilitates alignment between health programs and community, assists in incorporating community resources into health care and provides information about health needs. Rural communities, health services and other community organisations need skills in working together to develop effective partnerships that transfer some power from health systems. Rural engagement with national/state agendas is a challenge. Community engagement takes time and resources, but can be expected to lead to better health outcomes for rural residents.

Boundary crossers, communities, and health : exploring the role of rural health professionals

Boundary crossers understand the culture and language of community and health service domains and have the trust of both. Rural health professionals living within the communities they serve are ideally placed to harness community capacity so as to influence community-level determinants of health. We analyse five case studies of rural health professionals acting as boundary crossers against indicators of capacity for communities and external agents such as health services working in partnership. A more explicit evidence base for inclusion of community health development in the jobs of rural health professionals is needed.

Interactional infrastructure in rural communities : matching training needs and provision

This paper reports some of the main lessons learnt from a collaborative project titled Generating jobs in regional Tasmania: a social capital approach investigating how two small rural Tasmanian communities could better match local training needs with training provision. The project was conducted within the context of the wider social, economic and demographic changes affecting the two rural communities and their ongoing efforts to manage such change. The paper provides a profile of the two communities with particular attention to their local education, training and employment infrastructure. Three research questions in terms of improving the contributions of leadership, partnerships and social capital are addressed. Development and utilisation of social capital, particularly in the form of interactional infrastructure (defined as opportunities and structures for interaction in a community) that brought together the range of stakeholders, appeared the key to successfully matching needs with provision.

How community development programmes can foster re-engagement with learning in disadvantaged communities : leadership as process

Family and community capacity building projects in Tasmania are attempting to address the disadvantage of communities marginalised by socio-economic and other influences. Collaborations between the projects, community members and groups, and education and training organisations, have resulted in a leadership process which has fostered reengagement with learning in these disadvantaged communities. This study uses an ethnographic research methodology to examine the experiences of a number of new students or trainees, and the partnerships and collaborations which evolved between community development programmes, community members and groups, and educational and training organisations. Such collaborations may develop into dynamic leadership processes, enhancing social capital formation — thereby fostering genuine community development — while also facilitating re-engagement with learning.

Bridging the gap : competencies students should focus on during their cooperative experience to enhance employability

Cooperative education programmes aim to prepare students for the workplace by developing both generic and specific competencies that will enhance  employability. Researchers have investigated the competencies relevant to business, science and technology graduates (Coll & Zegward, 2006; Hodges & Burchell, 2003). However, there is little published research on the perceptions of the skills or graduate competencies that employers desire of sport and recreation graduates entering the workforce.

The aims of the study were to identify key competencies needed by third year sport and recreation degree students entering their cooperative placement as well as to identify the difference between student and graduate competencies. An online survey of sport and recreation industry supervisors was conducted. For comparison the survey was also completed by academic supervisors from AUT University. Supervisors were asked to rate the importance of specific competencies (adapted from Coll & Zegward, 2006) for the cooperative student and for the graduate.

To enhance employability in the sport and recreation industry, academic programmes within a university need to ensure that students are provided with opportunities to facilitate the development of competencies including the ability and willingness to learn, the use of initiative and personal organisational skills. Cooperative education experiences should be designed to provide opportunities for students to develop in the areas of relationship building as well as teamwork and cooperation in order to increase their likelihood of employment as graduates. It is important to identify and communicate to the tertiary education providers the needs of the industry in order to create successful cooperative education partnerships.

NGOs, enterprise and rural development

Non-Government Welfare Organisations (NGOs) in rural areas have traditionally relied upon the state for a large part of their revenue which in turn provides the state with the capacity to impose strict monitoring and evaluation. However the tightening of state funding has either forced NGOs to stretch their own resource to the limit or to become more enterprising and innovative in their desire to provide people with access to an ever increasing range of community-based services and opportunities for connection with their local communities. The term that is often used for these new approaches is ‘social enterprise’ that has been defined as a business with primarily social objectives whose surpluses are principally reinvested for that purpose in the business or the community, rather than being driven by the need to maximise profit for shareholders and owners’ . It is most often seen as an interface between public and private sector, being part of neither but engaging closely with both through partnerships, stakeholding and joint ventures as well as through complex trading and contracting relationships.

Such broad definitions however do not give much guidance to how particular NGOs can shift to a social enterprise model and still remain within their chosen missions. It is the very processes of re-imagining and reforming their enterprise that is a vital element in moving to a successful social enterprise practice. Accordingly this project focuses on two NGOs in different parts of the world (Brophy Family and Youth Services in Warrnambool. Australia and Aberdeen Foyer in Aberdeen, Scotland) that have developed (and are developing) new ways of approaching their roles as service providers and early intervention agents for youth in their local areas. Since both organisations have faced (and are facing) issues associated with depleting state allocated resources they are attempting to break new ground in the ways in which they redevelop their work with youth. Both agencies are leading the way in developing a broader approach that draws together disparate element of a social enterprise model. The project analyses the processes used by these two agencies to develop as social enterprises and how likeminded agencies can use the model for capability enhancement.

Relating practice to theory in indigenous entrepreneurship : a pilot investigation of the Kitsaki partnership portfolio

In Canada and elsewhere around the world, Indigenous Peoples are struggling to rebuild their "nations" and improve the socioeconomic circumstances of their people. Many see economic development as the key to success. This is certainly true for Indigenous people in Canada (the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit, collectively called Aboriginal or Indigenous people). Among them, participation in the global economy through entrepreneurship and business development is widely accepted as the key to economy building and nation "re-building." As elaborated in the next section, the demand is that this participation must be on their own terms for their own purposes, and traditional lands, history, culture, and values play a critical role. There is an intriguing symmetry between the modernity of the desire for global business competence and competitiveness and the insistence upon the distinctive importance of cultural heritage in developing new enterprise. The way that the two superficially contrasting concepts of innovation and heritage are combined in the field of Indigenous entrepreneurship has been expounded by Hindle and Lansdowne.1

Recognizing the challenges they face in attempting to compete in the global economy on their own terms, Indigenous people are increasingly developing enterprises in the form of partnerships of all types among themselves and with non-Indigenous enterprises. As both a form and a context of business organization, the partnership or alliance model is particularly fraught with the need to blend the old with the new, heritage with innovation. This study is a preliminary investigation of the Kitsaki initiative of the Lac La Ronge Indian band. In it we:

* explore several ventures involved in the partnership, asking key operatives for their opinions about the factors that explain success and failure;

* distill the explanations into as few, all-embracing factors as possible;

* relate the findings to the emerging theory of Indigenous entrepreneurship, with particular reference to the suggested paradigm of Indigenous entrepreneurship developed by Hindle and Lansdowne (2002);

* project the results of the investigation into suggestions for a more structured program of future research.

Aggressive tax planning : differentiating those playing the game from those who don't

The study reported in this paper examined a group of Australian taxpayers who have expressed a preference for a creative and aggressive tax agent. The study attempted to understand how high-risk taxpayers and high-risk practitioners form their partnerships by examining aggressive taxpayers' attitudes and perceptions of the Australian tax system. Data were taken from 2040 Australian taxpayers who had responded to a national survey on tax issues. Results from a series of independent sample t-tests revealed that there are a number of important differences between 'aggressive' and 'non-aggressive' taxpayers. Finally, a logistic regression analysis was used to determine which variables most effectively differentiated aggressive taxpayers from non-aggressive taxpayers. The findings are discussed in a regulatory context and possible solutions for how tax authorities might deal with this high-risk group of taxpayer are suggested.

Closing the gap? Building surveyors in Oceania

Purpose – The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has implemented a policy to expand its influence around the world. Quantity or construction surveyors had an established presence and history of working overseas, offering their services particularly in the Middle- and Far-East. Property surveyors found the transition to working in European Union (EU) countries relatively straightforward and numerous UK property consultancies have European, Asian, North American and Oceanic offices. Furthermore UK-based firms establishing partnerships with overseas real estate firms expanded significantly over the past decade. Building surveying (BS) is a different case. Small numbers work in commonwealth countries but it is limited and in many countries professional and academic qualifications are not recognised. This paper aims to consider the extent of the barriers and opportunities facing RICS chartered building surveyors (CBS) in Oceania (taken as Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji) and whether the gap is closing.
Design/methodology/approach – A desktop study reviewed the political, economic and sociological issues that affect the employment opportunities and professional services CBS offer throughout the world. Six opportunities and ten barriers were put to the RICS Oceania Building Surveying Faculty to ascertain their perceptions of these barriers and opportunities. No previous study had identified barriers and opportunities in Oceania for the BS and this research adopted a census survey of RICS practitioners currently employed in the region and the results form the most comprehensive picture of the current position.
Findings – Many respondents felt that stronger links and/or mergers with the different Oceania professional property and surveying bodies would open a large field of opportunities to the CBS. Some provided comments on future business opportunities, for example “leaky buildings,”"dilapidations/‘ make good’ work”, and seemed to be in general agreement that, as businesses came to know the benefits of protecting themselves from rogue tenants (and landlords) by using the services of a CBS, then opportunities would continue to rise. The principal barrier is communicating those skills and the value they add.
Research limitations/implications – The limitations that affected this research were time constraints and communicating with surveyors in Oceania, to whom the authors were not permitted direct access. The research methodology methods were, with hindsight, not ideal for the type and range of data that the researchers sought.
Originality/value – The research will be of use to building surveyors and providers of building-surveying education in Oceania.

The emergence of the global workplace : opportunities and barriers for building surveyors in Oceania

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) the professional body representing surveyors in the UK, has implemented a policy to globalise in order to meet the challenges and opportunities the global marketplace was creating for its members as well as protecting and serving its interests (RICS, 1999). Quantity surveyors had a presence and history of employment outside the UK, particularly in the Middle and Far East. Real estate surveyors found the transition to working in European Union (EU) countries relatively straightforward and numerous UK real estate organisations have European, Asian, North American and Oceanic offices. Additionally UK based firms establishing partnerships with overseas real estate firms expanded significantly over the previous decade. Building Surveying is different. Small numbers worked in commonwealth countries but in most countries their professional and academic qualifications were not recognised. With the changes implemented by the RICS, this paper examines the barriers and opportunities facing RICS Chartered Building Surveyors (CBS) in Oceania (taken as Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji).

A desk top study reviewed the political, economic and sociological variables affecting employment opportunities and professional services which were put to the RICS Oceania Building Surveying Faculty. No previous study had been undertaken to identify the specific barriers and opportunities in Oceania for the BS and this research adopted a census survey of RICS practitioners currently employed in the region and the results form the most comprehensive picture of the current position. The findings are that some of the opportunities and barriers will change in significance over time. The main barriers to growth were perceived as lack of support from a Euro focussed RICS and the difficulties associated with being perceived as outsiders. Opportunities were perceived as emerging in new areas of professional services such as sustainability and energy efficiency.

Corporate sustainability : greenwash or a path to sustainable capitalism?

The problems of unsustainable development and the increased-awareness of corporate power in the global era have contributed to an agenda of corporate citizenship. This thesis explores the meanings and practices that fall under the banner of the triple bottom line of corporate citizenship through forty-two in-depth interviews with representatives from the corporate sector and NGO sector (including trade unions) in Australia. This purposive sample includes a specific range of corporate industries and NGO types, all of which have involvement with various areas of sustainability. Interviewees described their feelings and experiences in relation to the concept of the triple bottom line, the potential and limitations of this type of sustainability and the purpose and impacts of partnerships between NGOs and the corporate sector. On the basis of this research, this thesis argues that corporate citizenship is at best, a set of initiatives for making minor adjustments to the way companies perform their day-to-day operations and at worst, a program for improving corporate image rather than performance and for shifting the agenda of sustainable development toward corporate interests. While radical steps are required to achieve a sustainable society and environment, the terms of corporate citizenship offer very limited opportunities for change. The self-regulatory and market based model of citizenship does not challenge the impact of consumerism or the legitimacy of particular industry types and their products, except where threats are perceived to the longevity of the companies involved. Furthermore, while the exploitation of the environment and society has occurred as a result of corporate self-interest, corporate citizenship is justified on the same basis. The self-interest rationale and the tyranny of the economic bottom line in particular, substantially limit the fields of responsibility that can be included in the citizenship paradigm. While there are undoubtedly some well-intentioned corporate representatives who are working toward attaining a more sustainable corporate culture, the discourse is primarily used to shift the sustainable development agenda toward corporate paradigms and interests.