scholarly journals Perspective: Hope for Health Equity

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 117 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Rust, MD, MPH

<p class="Default">Times like these test the soul. We are now working for health equity in a time of overt, aggressive opposition. Yet, hope in the face of overwhelming obstacles is the force that has driven most of the world’s progress toward equity and justice. Operationalizing real-world hope requires an affirmative vision, an expectation of success, broad coalitions taking action cohesively, and frequent measures of collective impact to drive rapid-cycle improvement.</p><p class="Default"><em>Ethn Dis. </em>2017;27(2):117-120; doi:10.18865/ed.27.2.117</p>

Author(s):  
Marc J. Stern

Chapter 9 contains five vignettes, each based on real world cases. In each, a character is faced with a problem and uses multiple theories within the book to help him or her develop and execute a plan of action. The vignettes provide concrete examples of how to apply the theories in the book to solving environmental problems and working toward environmental sustainability in a variety of contexts, including managing visitors in a national park, developing persuasive communications, designing more collaborative public involvement processes, starting up an energy savings program within a for-profit corporation, and promoting conservation in the face of rapid development.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 532-532
Author(s):  
Rozalyn Anderson

Abstract Faculty will focus on the biology of aging as a contributor to the vulnerability in COVID-19. Faculty will present the latest concepts and insights that will advance our ability to confront this global outbreak. Our goal for this session is to connect with the concept of Geroscience and how ideas from aging biology research can be incorporated to improve outcomes and informed practice. Although the emphasis is on biology, the goal is to provide insight in a manner that is readily accessible to researchers across the aging spectrum that they might translate these ideas in the face of a very real-world challenge.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. S578-S579
Author(s):  
J. Mallet ◽  
G. Fond ◽  
Y. Le Strat ◽  
P. Llorca ◽  
C. Dubertret

2021 ◽  
Vol 3(164) ◽  
pp. 143-165
Author(s):  
Piotr Stanisz

The purpose of the present study is to analyse the restrictions on the freedom of religious worship introduced by the Polish executive authorities in the face of the spreading COVID-19 epidemic. The analysis aims to answer questions not only concerning the conformity of these actions with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland and statutory laws, but also pertaining to the issue of the level of preparation of Polish law for an epidemic. In reference to these questions, the author concludes that the introduction of restrictions on the freedom to manifest religion by acts of worship in the regulations issued by the Minister of Health and the Council of Ministers exceeds the bounds of statutory authorisation and is inconsistent with the Polish Constitution. According to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, passing a law remains the only admissible way of introducing restrictions on the freedom of manifestation of religion, and there are no exceptions to this rule even in states of emergency. On the other hand, the author also points out that if the effectiveness of combating this kind of epidemic really depends on possibility of introducing the above-mentioned restrictions without a long legislative process, it means that Polish executive authorities have been confronted by the constitutional legislator and the legislature with a choice between being efficient and acting in conformity with the Constitution and statutory laws. Therefore, the article postulates that it is necessary to make deep changes to the current law. Elaborating a broad concept of these changes requires further analysis, and the relevant discussion needs to take into account the experience gained so far in combating the coronavirus epidemic, the importance of freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and the solutions adopted in other countries. A clear and balanced, as well as properly sequenced and democratically justified specification of the rules that should be followed by the executive when introducing restrictions related to the spread of the epidemic, even with regard to such important values as the freedom to manifest religion through acts of worship, is undoubtedly more appropriate than formally ruling out the possibility of taking action that may turn out necessary in the future.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaimie Krems ◽  
Keelah Williams ◽  
Douglas Kenrick ◽  
Athena Aktipis

Friendships can foster happiness, health, and reproductive fitness. But friendships end—even when we might not want them to. A primary reason for this is interference from third parties. Yet little work has explored how people meet the challenge of maintaining friendships in the face of real or perceived threats from third parties, as when our friends inevitably make new friends or form new romantic relationships. In contrast to earlier conceptualizations from developmental research, which viewed friendship jealousy as solely maladaptive, we propose that friendship jealousy is one overlooked tool of friendship maintenance. We derive and test—via a series of 11 studies (N = 2918) using hypothetical scenarios, recalled real-world events, and manipulation of on-line emotional experiences—whether friendship jealousy possesses the features of a tool well-designed to help us retain friends in the face of third-party threats. Consistent with our proposition, findings suggest that friendship jealousy is (1) uniquely evoked by third-party threats to friendships (but not the prospective loss of the friendship alone), (2) sensitive to the value of the threatened friendship, (3) strongly calibrated to cues that one is being replaced, even over more intuitive cues (e.g., the amount of time a friend and interloper spend together), and (4) ultimately motivates behavior aimed at countering third-party threats to friendship (“friend guarding”). Even as friendship jealousy may be negative to experience, it may include features designed for beneficial—and arguably prosocial—ends: to help maintain friendships.


Author(s):  
Daniel Riccio ◽  
Andrea Casanova ◽  
Gianni Fenu

Face recognition in real world applications is a very difficult task because of image misalignments, pose and illumination variations, or occlusions. Many researchers in this field have investigated both face representation and classification techniques able to deal with these drawbacks. However, none of them is free from limitations. Early proposed algorithms were generally holistic, in the sense they consider the face object as a whole. Recently, challenging benchmarks demonstrated that they are not adequate to be applied in unconstrained environments, despite of their good performances in more controlled conditions. Therefore, the researchers' attention is now turning on local features that have been demonstrated to be more robust to a large set of non-monotonic distortions. Nevertheless, though local operators partially overcome some drawbacks, they are still opening new questions (e.g., Which criteria should be used to select the most representative features?). This is the reason why, among all the others, hybrid approaches are showing a high potential in terms of recognition accuracy when applied in uncontrolled settings, as they integrate complementary information from both local and global features. This chapter explores local, global, and hybrid approaches.


Author(s):  
Peter A. C. Smith

The audit profession has been facing reassessment and repositioning for the past decade. Enquiry has been an integral part of an audit; however, its reliability as a source of audit evidence is questioned. To legitimize enquiry in the face of audit complexity and ensure sufficiency, relevance, and reliability, the introduction of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) into theory and practice has been recommended by a number of authors. In this paper, a variant on previous VSM-based audit work is introduced to perfect auditing assessment of accountability and compliance. This variant is termed the “VSM/NVA variant” and is applicable when the VSM model is in use for an audit. This variant is based on application of Network Visualization Analysis (NVA) to a VSM-modeled organization. Using NVA, “decision leaders” can be identified and their socio-technical relevance to VSM systems explored. This paper shows how the concepts of decision leaders and their networks can enrich and clarify practical applications of audit theory and practice. The approach provides an enhanced real-world understanding of how various VSM systems and network layers of an organization coalesce, and how they relate to the aims of the VSM model at micro and macro levels.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Augustsson ◽  
Kate Churruca ◽  
Jeffrey Braithwaite

Abstract Background Updating, improving and spreading the evidence base for healthcare practices has proven to be a challenge of considerable magnitude – a wicked, multi-dimensional problem. There are many interlinked factors which determine how, why and whether any particular implementation effort or intervention succeeds. Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), strongly grounded in systems ideas and complexity science, offers a structured, yet flexible process for dealing with situations that are perceived as problematical and in need of improvement. The aim of this paper is to propose the use of SSM for managing change in healthcare by way of addressing some of the complexities. The aim is further to illustrate examples of how SSM has been used in healthcare and discuss the features of the methodology that we believe can be harnessed to improve healthcare. Discussion SSM is particularly suited for tackling real world problems that are difficult to define and where stakeholders may have divergent views on the situation and the objectives of change. SSM engages stakeholders in a learning cycle including: finding out about the problematical situation, i.e. the context in which the problem exists, by developing a rich picture of the situation; defining it by developing conceptual models and comparing these with the real world; taking action to improve it by deciding on desirable and feasible improvements; and implementing these in an iterative manner. Although SSM has been widely used in other sectors, it has not been extensively used in healthcare. We make the case for applying SSM to implementation and improvement endeavours in healthcare using the example of getting clinicians at the hospital level to use evidence-based guidelines. Conclusion Applying SSM means taking account of the multi-dimensional nature of care settings, and dealing with entrenched and unique contexts, cultures and socio-political ecosystems – precisely those that manifest in healthcare. There are gains to be made in appreciating complexity and facilitating contextualization of interventions, and by approaching improvements in an iterative learning cycle.


2015 ◽  
Vol 233 (4) ◽  
pp. 571-578 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Fond ◽  
◽  
L. Boyer ◽  
M. Favez ◽  
L. Brunel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document