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Health care institutions in many Western countries have developed preoperative testing and assessment guidelines to improve surgical outcomes and reduce cost of surgical care. The aims of this chapter are to (1) summarize the literature on the effect of preoperative testing on clinical outcomes, efficiency, and cost; and (2) to compare preoperative testing guidelines developed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

We reviewed the literature from 1975 to 2014 for studies and preoperative testing guidelines.

We identified 29 empirical studies and 8 country-specific guidelines for review. Most studies indicate that preoperative testing is overused and comes at a high cost. Guidelines are tied to payment only in one country studied. This is the most recent review of the literature on preoperative testing and assessment with a focus on quality of care, efficiency, and cost outcomes. In addition, this chapter provides an international comparison of preoperative guidelines.

This chapter explores Food for Change, a social entrepreneurial program created by the Houston Food Bank. Food for Change explicitly considers the interlinkages of social problems within an individual. Food for Change collaborates with educational and training organizations and healthcare providers to use supplemental food resources to address clients' needs antecedent to food insecurity. We propose a model to conceptualize how food insecurity is influenced by multiple levels of social determinants. We then describe the Food for Change program and offer lessons about the holistic nature of clients, the productivity and challenges of interorganizational collaborations to address the roots of social problems, and the forethought and courage of organizational leadership to try to create self-sufficient clients who might become liberated from their services.

With the increasing prevalence of awards for reporting fraudulent activity, it is important to learn if there are unintended consequences associated with the language offering such awards. Aside from issues regarding submitting unsubstantiated claims of fraud to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Section 922 of the Dodd–Frank Act may inadvertently encourage would-be whistleblowers to delay reporting fraud. Potential whistleblowers may choose to delay reporting due to the consideration of alternatives to external reporting, in a misguided attempt to increase the size of an award, or due to their ethical stance on the issues. Using a three-stage mixed methods (experiment, open-ended interviews, and experiment) approach, this study provides evidence that increased knowledge of statutes involving external whistleblowing may result in reporting delays. The data suggest that despite statements from the SEC forbidding this, managers may choose to delay reporting when under the threshold necessary to receive an award. In such a manner, managers may be allowing the fraud to grow to a necessary perceived level over time. As might be expected, the accountants in this study were more cautious, checking to see if internal reporting worked first. Of particular note, 16 individuals indicated that they would never report, with the motivation apparently driven by fear of job loss and/or retaliation. Lastly, the intention to delay or speed up reporting may be very different based on the perception of ethics involved in the decision.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the measures implemented to control it, collided with another public health emergency – the opioid crisis – with dire consequences. In October of 2017, the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency. That declaration has been renewed several times, including during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the latest renewal set to go into effect on July 4, 2022. The overlap of individual, environmental, and social risk factors for substance use disorder (SUD) and COVID-19 present major challenges to those working as part of the response to both pandemics. The severity of the implications of this dual pandemic – an estimated 100,000 people in the United States died from a drug overdose during the first year of the pandemic – make this an area of the pandemic response where lessons learned had to be rapidly implemented to save lives. Identifying ways in which those lessons can be expanded to other populations at risk, including those with other pre-existing mental disorders, will be important to reducing the inequitable impacts of the pandemic on mental health.

Mary V. Alfred, Ph.D. is an associate dean for Research and Faculty Affairs and professor of Adult Education and Human Resource Development in the College of Education and Human Development at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include learning and development among women of the African Diaspora, socio-cultural contexts of immigration, welfare reform and women's economic development, and issues of equity and social justice in higher education and in the workplace. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Administration with a focus in Adult Education and Human Resource Development Leadership from the University of Texas at Austin.

teachHOUSTON is a university-based secondary STEM teacher preparation program that addresses the critical need for highly qualified STEM teachers in Texas and across the country. STEM teachers are prepared through early and ongoing field-based teaching experiences and rigorous research-based instruction that integrates content and pedagogy provided by faculty members who have extensive teaching experience in public schools. teachHOUSTON serves the fourth largest city in the United States, along with its satellite communities and has many noteworthy features which are mapped in this chapter. Particular attention is paid to inquiry-based learning, student-centered instruction, and culturally responsive pedagogy as well as the improvements in the program based on the collaboration between physics and teachHOUSTON faculty.