Practitioner Empowerment, Older Adult Mistreatment, and Dementia

ABSTRACT Although some studies have revealed practitioner disempowerment in cases of older adult mistreatment, this experience is poorly understood. In addition, dementia and contextual influences further complicate cases; yet, little is known about the experience of practitioners with this complexity. This critical inquiry, based on Critical social theory, critical consciousness, and professional agency, aimed to address these gaps. Fifty-one practitioners from diverse health care and social service disciplines from rural and urban communities in Northeastern Ontario participated in interviews, journals, and focus groups. Analysis of data revealed the need for empowerment within a perpetual cycle of non-resolution, to refocus on legal clarity and intervention versus the current legal complexity and education focus, and to develop adequate infrastructure to support interprofessional efforts. The infusion of this knowledge into policy, practice, and research has great potential to improve outcomes for older adults with dementia who are mistreated in their homes.

An asymptotic property of branching-type overloaded polling networks

Remerova et al. [Random fluid limit of an overloaded polling model, Adv. Appl. Probab., 2014, 46, 76–101] studied the fluid asymptotics of the joint queue length process for an overloaded cyclic polling system with multigated service discipline by exploiting the connection with multi-type branching processes. In contrast to the heavy traffic behaviors, the cycle time of the overloaded polling system increases by a deterministic times over times under passage to the fluid dynamics and the fluid limit preserves some randomness. The present paper aims to extend the overloaded asymptotics in Remerova et al. [Random fluid limit of an overloaded polling model, Adv. Appl. Probab., 2014, 46, 76–101] to the corresponding polling system with general branching-type service disciplines and customer re-routing policy. A unifying overloaded asymptotic property is derived. Due to the exhaustiveness, the property is a natural extension of the classical polling model with multigated service discipline in Remerova et al. [Random fluid limit of an overloaded polling model, Adv. Appl. Probab., 2014, 46, 76–101] and provides new exact results that have not been observed before for rerouting policy. Additionally, a stochastic simulation is undertaken for the validation of the fluid limit and the optimization of the gating indexes to minimize the total population is considered as an example to demonstrate the usefulness of the random fluid limit.

On Queues with Priority Determined by Feedback

Customers arrive to a two-priority queueing system according to a marked Poisson process. Both waiting rooms have infinite capacity. Customers are served one at a time according to FIFO discipline on priority basis: those in waiting line 1([Formula: see text]) are given priority over the ones in line 2([Formula: see text]). The service time is class-dependent phase type. After completion of service, high priority ([Formula: see text]) customers may feed back for service according to a Bernoulli process. Feed back customers are sent to the low priority ([Formula: see text]) queue. When at a service completion epoch of a [Formula: see text] customer, if there is none left behind in [Formula: see text] line, then the server goes to serve [Formula: see text] class. For the two-priority queueing system, we assume that [Formula: see text] customers are not allowed an additional feed back. Both preemptive and non-preemptive service disciplines are analysed. Waiting time distribution of both type of customers are derived. As a special case, the situation where there is no external entry to the [Formula: see text] line is discussed.

Lessons from abroad: Rebalancing accountability and pedagogy in the Irish social care sector through the use of effective leadership

A concern is emerging in Ireland that social care managers and staff are moving too far away from the ‘care’ in social ‘care’ work. In this paper a discussion of the impact of the bureaucratic procedures and regulation within the social work and social care work sectors is presented along with an exploration of leadership approaches. It is argued that certain leadership approaches, in particular pedagogical leadership, could not only help social care managers to negotiate the complex issues they are facing but also facilitate putting the ‘care’ back into social ‘care’ work. Pedagogical leadership is globally supported across a variety of human service disciplines: it facilitates the creation of a learning culture within the workplace where social care managers facilitate conversations with their teams to encourage reflection, critical thinking and contributions to the professional wisdom required for quality service. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the dialogue within leadership practice for social care professionals. This discourse is necessary if lessons are to be learned from past experiences in this country and others about how to balance the need for care, learning and compassion with accountability.

Resource Allocation Algorithm Modeling in Queuing System Based on Quantization

The work relevance is determined by the urgent need to design and study queuing systems (QS). The selection and justification of resource management laws - the standby and service disciplines are very important here. The main aim of the study is to develop a QS simulation model with non-priority cyclic service RR (round robin) discipline, to compare the performance of the system under different control algorithm resources: RR and FCFS (first come-first served). To develop a simulation model the system of dynamic and event-driven modeling Matlab + Simulink and SimEvents libraries were used. 5 parallel processes were consistently allocated in RR time quantum algorithm. To imitate FCFS algorithm the round-robin size was set equal to 1. The testing of the developed QS model confirmed a correctness of its work. By varying the flow in the short and long (performance time) processes, it was shown that an advantage of RR algorithm over FCFS is observed, if a share of long processes is not more than 20 - 30%.