scholarly journals Fostering methodological advances and technical capacity building

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
I Grant ◽  
D Plass ◽  
E von der Lippe ◽  
T Lesnik ◽  
J Idavain

Abstract Countries all over the world, and especially in Europe, are increasingly using the burden of disease approach to assess the health status of populations and to identify the main drivers of ill health. Thus, there is an increasing need for equitable capacity building on the one hand (including an improved understanding of the complex methods behind global and national burden estimates), and harmonization of methods on the other hand to keep the results comparable. Furthermore, involved researchers also strive for a platform to exchange experiences and foster collaboration. To address the current challenges in burden of disease research, our COST Action CA18218-European Burden of Disease Network will build strongly on the COST mechanisms, such as short-term scientific missions and training schools to foster and increase capacity building activities across Europe. Our Action will also serve as a technical platform where knowledge and expertise can be shared among experienced and less experienced researchers. Collaboratively, the technical platform will provide unique opportunities for developing a joint research agenda in the domain of burden of disease, for fostering methodological developments, and for developing new collaborative research. With this presentation, we aim to show how the COST Action is fostering methodological advances and technical capacity building, focusing on 1) the role and aim of short-term scientific missions including real case examples; 2) the concept and structure of the Action's training schools; and 3) examples of specific methodological activities underway as part of the Action. The session will conclude with an interaction with the audience during which the needs and expectations of the attendees will be elicited.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  

Abstract The burden of disease (BoD) approach has become one of the foundations of descriptive epidemiology. Central to this approach is the use of the Disability-Adjusted Life Year as a comprehensive and comparable summary measure of population health. Driven by the impact of the Global Burden of Disease (BoD) study, several researchers and health institutes across the world have adopted the BoD approach to assess the health impact of diseases and risk factors, supporting a more rational allocation of available resources. Despite the increasing prominence of the BoD approach, several challenges remain. The BoD methodology is complex and highly data intensive, which has led to major disparities across researchers and nations in their capacity to perform BoD studies, to interpret the soundness of available BoD estimates, or to advocate for the use of BoD methods. Often, these disparities follow geographical boundaries–for instance, over half of all published BoD studies in Europe were set in the Netherlands, Spain and UK, while only 15% were set in eastern European countries. BoD as a generally standardized approach nonetheless requires different methodological choices, and lack of harmonization in these may hamper comparisons across studies. This is further aggravated by the fact that different BoD initiatives have remained scattered–there is for instance little interaction between infectious disease, nutritional and environmental epidemiologists, even though several methodological issues transcend the boundaries of diseases and risk factors. Finally, many BoD researchers are struggling to find optimal ways to translate their findings and communicate them adequately and comprehensively to decision makers and other stakeholders. In response to these needs, several countries and BoD researchers have set up ad hoc partnerships. In 2016, the WHO Regional Office for Europe (WHO-EURO) launched a European BoD network, aiming to intensify links between WHO, IHME and the WHO-EURO member states. In 2019, our group has launched a COST Action that aims to serve as a technical platform to integrate and strengthen capacity in BoD assessment across Europe and beyond. At the moment of writing, the “burden-eu” COST Action joins over 200 participants from 38 European countries, as well as several observers from non-European countries and international organizations. In this workshop, we give an overview of the current status and initial accomplishments of the COST Action, with a focus on the key challenges that the Action aims to address - i.e., increased interaction between existing efforts, methodological advances and technical capacity building at country level, and an actionable understanding of the process underlying knowledge translation. The different sessions will include interactions with the audience to learn about the needs and expectations of the attendees, and how these can be addressed by the COST Action. Key messages The burden of disease approach is increasingly used to generate comparable and comprehensive estimates of the health impact of diseases and risk factors. The 'burden-eu' COST Action offers a technical platform for integrating and strengthening capacity in burden of disease assessment across Europe and beyond.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-176
Author(s):  
Andrew J Serpell

Payday loans are small-amount, short-term, unsecured, high-cost credit contracts provided by non-mainstream credit providers. Payday loans are usually taken out to help the consumer pay for essential items, such as food, rent, electricity, petrol, broken-down appliances or car registration or repairs. These consumers take out payday loans because they cannot — or believe that they cannot — obtain a loan from a mainstream credit provider such as a bank. In recent years there has been a protracted debate in Australia — and in several overseas jurisdictions — about how to regulate the industry. Recent amendments to the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (Cth) — referred to in this article as the 2013 reforms — are designed to better protect payday loan consumers. While the 2013 reforms provide substantially improved protection for payday loan consumers, further changes to the law may be warranted. This article raises several law reform issues which should be considered as part of the 2015 review into small amount credit contracts, including whether the caps on the cost of credit are set at the right level, whether the required content and presentation of the consumer warnings needs to be altered, whether more needs to be done to protect consumers who are particularly disadvantaged or vulnerable and whether a general anti-avoidance provision should be included in the credit legislation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
J Haagsma ◽  
M Majdan ◽  
S M Pires ◽  
R Assunção

Abstract The burden of disease landscape in Europe is currently scattered with experts from diverse professional backgrounds, ranging from experts in infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases, injuries and risk factors, to experts in more comprehensive national, regional and global burden of disease studies. Currently there is little interaction between these experts and existing burden of disease efforts. The European burden of disease network (burden-eu) COST Action aims to bring together expertise across different domains and professional backgrounds. During the course of the burden-eu COST Action, several steps will be taken to facilitate interaction between existing burden of disease efforts. First, a survey has been sent around to all members of the EU burden of disease network to map burden of disease studies that have been carried out in their country. Apart from general details about the year of the study and cause of disease categories, items of the survey included data sources, methodological approach and collaborations with institutes of other countries. In the first month, the survey has been completed for over 70 studies that have been carried out in twelve countries. Second, comparison of existing burden of disease initiatives allows for the identification of the various domains for which burden of disease has been assessed, highlight methodological differences as well as similarities, and facilitate improvements and harmonization of methods and approaches. Furthermore, the data collected from the survey will be included in a continuously updated burden of disease database that lists all past and current burden of disease activities. Lastly, burden-eu will facilitate regular meetings and workshops. Each of these steps will make it possible to move beyond the currently scattered burden of disease landscape and increase interaction between professionals and burden of disease efforts.


Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 830
Author(s):  
Temple Grandin

In the U.S., the most severe animal welfare problems caused by COViD-19 were in the pork industry. Thousands of pigs had to be destroyed on the farm due to reduced slaughter capacity caused by ill workers. In the future, both short-term and long-term remedies will be needed. In the short-term, a portable electrocution unit that uses scientifically validated electrical parameters for inducing instantaneous unconsciousness, would be preferable to some of the poor killing methods. A second alternative would be converting the slaughter houses to carcass production. This would require fewer people to process the same number of pigs. The pandemic revealed the fragility of large centralized supply chains. A more distributed supply chain with smaller abattoirs would be more robust and less prone to disruption, but the cost of pork would be greater. Small abattoirs can coexist with large slaughter facilities if they process pigs for specialized premium markets such as high welfare pork. The pandemic also had a detrimental effect on animal welfare inspection and third party auditing programs run by large meat buyers. Most in-person audits in the slaughter plants were cancelled and audits were done by video. Video audits should never completely replace in-person audits.


2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna P Durnová ◽  
Eva M Hejzlarová

In public policy scholarship on policy design, emotions are still treated as opposed to goals, and their presence is assumed to signal that things have gone wrong. We argue, however, that understanding how and for whom emotions matter is vital to the dynamics of policy designs because emotions are central to the capacity building of policy intermediaries and, with that, to the success of public policies. We examine the case of Czech single mothers in their role as intermediaries in ‘alimony policy’. Our interpretive survey provided single mothers an opportunity to express the way they experience the policy emotionally. The analysis reveals that the policy goal of the child’s well-being is produced at the cost of the mother’s emotional tensions and that policy designs defuse these emotional tensions, implicitly. These contradictory emotions expressed by mothers show us a gateway to problematising policy designs in a novel way, which reconsiders construing policy design as a technical, solution-oriented enterprise to one in which emotional tensions intervene in policy design and are essential for succeeding.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Powlen ◽  
Kelly W. Jones ◽  
Elva Ivonne Bustamante Moreno ◽  
Maira Abigail Ortíz Cordero ◽  
Jennifer N. Solomon ◽  
...  

Protected areas (PAs) are under immense pressure to safeguard much of the world’s remaining biodiversity and can be strained by unpredicted events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding the extent of the pandemic on PA inputs, mechanisms, and conservation outcomes is critical for recovery and future planning to buffer against these types of events. We use survey and focus group data to quantify the impact of the pandemic on Mexico’s PA network and outline the pathways that led to conservation outcomes. On average, across 62 PAs, we find substantial changes in management capacity, monitoring, and tourism, and a slight increase in non-compliant activities. Our findings highlight the need to increase short-term relief efforts and long-term livelihood diversification initiatives for communities dependent on tourism, who were most vulnerable during the pandemic. Increased management support, including technical capacity and financial resources, could also better sustain management activities in future shocks.


1962 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teivo Pentikäinen

The Ministry of Social Affairs, which acts i.a. as the supervising office in Finland, has given instructions regarding the normal reserves of insurance companies. A summary of these and some comments are given here as far as they concern motor-vehicle insurance. The instructions as far as they concern the subject referred to in the following in the items 2-6, 9 and 10, were compiled by a committee, presided over by Mr. I. Ketola, M. Sc, which availed itself of the experience of several Finnish insurance companies.In order to give a review of the system as a whole many items, which are mathematically trivial and well-known, are briefly explained.The conventional principle of “pro rata parte temporis” is followed, which leads to the well-known reserve where P is the premium income of the company. This provides that the days when the premiums fall due are approximately equally distributed over the year (which can be checked from the premium sums of the different months in the book-keeping) or at least have no cluster points in the second half of the year and that the cost of the collecting of premiums is not less than 0.2 P. A more accurate calculation takes into account i.a. temporary short term policies etc.In casu-reserve. All unpaid claims (except those mentioned later) due to accidents which occured before the end of the account year, are listed and rated one by one. Doubtful cases, e.g. where the cause of the accident is still under litigation, are calculated in accordance with the “worst” alternative.


2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Phamela D Tampubolon ◽  
David Paul Elia Saerang ◽  
Agus Toni Poputra

Amid competition is so rapid and uncertain economic conditions, every company is required to be more efficient in order tobe more efficient in orderto survive and all of it can not be separated from the role of management.  Management measure which is occupied to measure the success or failure of the company is profit. To produce an efficient profit differential accounting information requires management to select the best course of action among alternatives available. The purpose of this study is to analyze the application of differential accounting information in the decision to buy or make your own semi-finished products on UD. Berkat Anugerah. This study uses a descriptive research method. The result of the analysis of research conducted on UD. Berkat Anugerah seen from the cost accounting showed diferential role in the short-term decision making, where the company should buy semi-finished products from third party cost incurred due to lower than producing its own.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Jaroslava Dědková ◽  
Otakar Ungerman

The border areas are influenced by the cross-border visitation of tourists, which is usually of a short-term character. These are shopping, exploring natural attractions, commuting to work, visiting friends and relatives, attending cultural and social events, and transit transport. In the course of 2018-2019 a joint research of EF TUL and UE Wroclaw was carried out to determine the quality of tourism services in the Czech - Polish border area. The aim of the research was to find out how respondents perceive and evaluate the quality of services. Almost 1000 respondents on the Czech and Polish side evaluated transport services, accommodation services, sports and recreational services, catering services and the position of information centers. The paper presents the results of this research.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
soumya banerjee

Modelling and forecasting port throughput enables stakeholders to make efficient decisions ranging from management of port development, to infrastructure investments, operational restructuring and tariffs policy. Accurate forecasting of port throughput is also critical for long-term resource allocation and short-term strategic planning. In turn, efficient decision-making enhances the competitiveness of a port. However, in the era of big data we are faced with the enviable dilemma of having too much information. We pose the question: is more information always better for forecasting? We suggest that more information comes at the cost of more parameters of the forecasting model that need to be estimated. We comparemultiple forecasting models of varying degrees of complexity and quantify the effect of the amount of data on model forecasting accuracy. Our methodology serves as a guideline for practitioners in this field. We also enjoin caution that even in the era of big data more information may not always be better. It would be advisable for analysts to weigh the costs of adding more data: the ultimate decision would depend on the problem, amount of data and the kind of models being used.


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