Caffeine with a Conscience

Author(s):  
Andrew C. Wicks ◽  
Jenny Mead

Is “Fair Trade” really fair? This case examines the concept, history, and logistics of the Fair Trade movement, specifically for coffee. Fair Trade began as an attempt to ensure farmers received fair compensation for their crops and credit when needed. Fair Trade also provided opportunities to help coffee growers learn best practices and sustainable farming methods (minimal damage to the environment, for example). But Fair Trade had its critics, who claimed that ultimately the farmers did not benefit and that retailers charged more for Fair Trade products and pocketed the difference. This case examines these issues through the eyes of one coffee-drinker who has specifically chosen her caffeine venue because of the Fair Trade designation.

Author(s):  
Laura T. Raynolds ◽  
Nicholas Greenfield

Author(s):  
Michael Zentner ◽  
Richard Zink

The HUBzero platform is an infrastructure enabling online scientific communities to collaborate and share information and computational resources as they explore scientific phenomena. HUBzero has been adopted by the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE) at Purdue University to form the HUB CatalyzeCare. RCHE has formed the community REMEDI Central on their CatalyzeCare hub that has been adopted by more than 140 hospitals and records data from over 30,000 infusion pumps. Hospitals voluntarily contribute the alert streams emanating from smart intravenous pumps and their drug limit libraries to the REMEDI Central community. Infusion pumps emit an alert whenever a healthcare professional programs the pump to administer a dose to a patient outside of the bounds established by the hospital in their drug limit library. The drug limit library contains for each drug in each treatment unit (e.g. pediatrics, intensive care) a set of low and high limits for administration by bolus and continuous infusion. A practitioner’s response to an alert can be to reprogram the pump, to delay the infusion as they seek additional information from the ordering physician, or to override. Response to an individual alert can mean the difference between successful treatment, an adverse event, or even death. In the aggregate, alerts and their associated responses can represent the quality of hospital training, areas of improvement in procedures, or deficiencies in the hospital’s drug limit library. Across hospitals, the alerts and drug limit library entries provide a means of benchmarking and improvement. As part of the agreement for joining REMEDI Central, hospitals are able to benchmark against the other hospitals in the community. No hospital is anonymous. By agreement, the hospitals have determined that the value of the shared data is high enough that they willingly identify themselves. Collectively, their goal is to improve overall patient safety by creating a set of best practices regarding infusion pump alert mitigation and response. The REMEDI Central community members meet three times annually, and openly share with each other their best practices and process improvements. The REMEDI Central community is unique in that it has three key stakeholder types and provides distinct value to each. Hospital practitioners get immediate tactical feedback from REMEDI Central as it guides them on a daily basis with regard to infusion alerts. Hospital administrators gain a strategic view from being able to benchmark their practices against their peer facilities. Researchers gain access to a stream of data that would otherwise be unavailable for the purpose of developing research-based interventions in healthcare. Since practitioners are provided immediate value from their data, they are incentivized to provide their data on a regular basis. This immediate incentive is key for researchers to be able to access an up-to-date and growing database of information.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 28
Author(s):  
Koichi Ikegami

Fair Trade is drastically expanding to mainstream in the 2000s. Even in the Republic of South Africa (South Africa) has the Fair Trade Movement appeared in agricultural and food sectors. Management companies and white farms are not marginalized people, who are major target of Fair Trade movement in general. This paper intended to answer the questions why management companies and white farms are involved in Fair Trade movement. The paper argued that major players of Fair Trade in South Africa is a large commercial farm owned by white South Africans who are very sensitive to political pressure. Fair Trade movement in South Africa. South Africa is facing a difficult problem on how to reduce the poor-rich distinction in agriculture. From this context, land reform should be urgently and strongly promoted. Land reform gave impacts by way of two courses. One is the necessity of economic sustainability by introducing a concept of ‘fairness’ as appealing new added value, followed by initiating Fair Trade farms and Strategic Partnership Approach. The other is the politico-psychological pressure to secure good reputation of ‘fairness’, which was caused by social pressure of land reform and domestic policies seeking for reduction of disparities between rural-urban and agriculture-industry relationships. Although the land reform is urgent for economic sustainability, but the land reform farm failed to continue their business due to the lack of know-how and knowledge concerning farm activities and lack of good market access and the market structure to block native Africans to sell in a free way. In this point, Fair Trade is one of possible solutions.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Zentner ◽  
Richard Zink

The HUBzero platform is an infrastructure enabling online scientific communities to collaborate and share information and computational resources as they explore scientific phenomena. HUBzero has been adopted by the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE) at Purdue University to form the HUB CatalyzeCare. RCHE has formed the community REMEDI Central on their CatalyzeCare hub that has been adopted by more than 140 hospitals and records data from over 30,000 infusion pumps. Hospitals voluntarily contribute the alert streams emanating from smart intravenous pumps and their drug limit libraries to the REMEDI Central community. Infusion pumps emit an alert whenever a healthcare professional programs the pump to administer a dose to a patient outside of the bounds established by the hospital in their drug limit library. The drug limit library contains for each drug in each treatment unit (e.g. pediatrics, intensive care) a set of low and high limits for administration by bolus and continuous infusion. A practitioner’s response to an alert can be to reprogram the pump, to delay the infusion as they seek additional information from the ordering physician, or to override. Response to an individual alert can mean the difference between successful treatment, an adverse event, or even death. In the aggregate, alerts and their associated responses can represent the quality of hospital training, areas of improvement in procedures, or deficiencies in the hospital’s drug limit library. Across hospitals, the alerts and drug limit library entries provide a means of benchmarking and improvement. As part of the agreement for joining REMEDI Central, hospitals are able to benchmark against the other hospitals in the community. No hospital is anonymous. By agreement, the hospitals have determined that the value of the shared data is high enough that they willingly identify themselves. Collectively, their goal is to improve overall patient safety by creating a set of best practices regarding infusion pump alert mitigation and response. The REMEDI Central community members meet three times annually, and openly share with each other their best practices and process improvements. The REMEDI Central community is unique in that it has three key stakeholder types and provides distinct value to each. Hospital practitioners get immediate tactical feedback from REMEDI Central as it guides them on a daily basis with regard to infusion alerts. Hospital administrators gain a strategic view from being able to benchmark their practices against their peer facilities. Researchers gain access to a stream of data that would otherwise be unavailable for the purpose of developing research-based interventions in healthcare. Since practitioners are provided immediate value from their data, they are incentivized to provide their data on a regular basis. This immediate incentive is key for researchers to be able to access an up-to-date and growing database of information.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Heather Walker

<p>A development initiative at its core, fair trade endeavors to provide better trading conditions for disadvantaged producers in the world market system, such as smallholder coffee farmers, who face a volatile market and prices that have yet to recover from a deep price crisis in the early 2000s. With the onset of labeling and certification, fair trade entered the mainstream by the late 1990s, and has continued to demonstrate strong growth in sales. Moreover, new producer organizations are becoming certified in an expanding number of countries, and fair trade coffee is expanding beyond its traditionally dominant productive center in Latin America.  To explore how fair trade is established, and interacts with, new producer contexts, a case study was performed with five fair trade certified coffee cooperatives in Aceh, Indonesia, all of whom have gained certification within the last 10 years, was performed. This thesis sought to understand the particularities behind how fair trade reached Aceh, what factors influenced its implementation, and how coffee producers experience their participation in the fair trade movement. Further, particular attention was paid to the practice and formation of the cooperatives’ structures and policies; fair trade requires that coffee farmers are organized into democratically owned and governed cooperatives, an institution relatively unpracticed in Indonesia.</p>


2019 ◽  
pp. 9-37
Author(s):  
Anna Horodecka ◽  
Magdalena Śliwińska

Contemporary research exploring the Fair Trade movement does not provide a clear answer whether the overall impact of Fair Trade is positive or negative and what are the real motives of Fair Trade consumers. In the paper we investigate whether the assumptions of selected heterodox schools (feminist, ecological and humanist) fit better to the reality of the Fair Trade movement than those of the neoclassical theory. Although ‘better fitness’ does not necessarily mean ‘better explanation’, the mismatch with reality may constitute an obstacle in identifying a crucial aspect of the researched phenomenon (i.e. Fair Trade), harming explanation of its existence and development.


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