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The purpose of this study is to describe the design and validation of a three-dimensional (3D)-printed phantom of a uterus to support the development of uterine balloon tamponade devices conceived to stop post-partum haemorrhages (PPHs).

The phantom 3D model is generated by analysing the main requirements for validating uterine balloon tamponade devices. A modular approach is implemented to guarantee that the phantom allows testing these devices under multiple working conditions. Once finalised the design, the phantom effectiveness is validated experimentally.

The modular phantom allows performing the required measurements for testing the performance of devices designed to stop PPH.

PPH is the leading obstetric cause of maternal death worldwide, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. The proposed phantom could speed up and optimise the design and validation of devices for PPH treatment, reducing the maternal mortality ratio.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the 3D-printed phantom represents the first example of a modular, flexible and transparent uterus model. It can be used to validate and perform usability tests of medical devices.

Integrated care (IC) is mainly studied from the perspectives of organisations or employees. However, less research is focussed on how patients themselves experience person-centred (PC) IC in practice. This context-specific, small-scale study examines what PC-IC means to older patients who went through joint replacement surgery (JRS).

The data consists of ten in-depth interviews of older patients, focussing on their experiences of care during their patient journey related to joint knee or hip replacement surgery. The data were analysed with thematic analysis.

Three central dimensions of PC-IC for older patients were identified: information sharing, continuity of care and compassionate encountering. Human validation and compassionate encountering were experienced as important aspects of PC-IC. Compassionate encountering was concretised through professionals’ very small everyday practices, which made the patient feel comfortable and respected. Instead, probably due to the medical and quite straight-forward nature of the joint replacement care process, patients seem to be pleased to trust the expertise of professionals and did not necessarily expect an active role or participation in the decision-making.

This Finnish case study focusses on the patients’ authentic perceptions of what is central to person-centred IC in the specific context of JRS.

This paper analyses how firm births and deaths are influenced by previous firm births and deaths in related and unrelated sectors. Competition and multiplier effects are used as the theoretical lens for this analysis.

This paper uses 2008–2016 Irish business demography data pertaining to 568 NACE 4-digit sectors within 20 NACE 1-digit industries across 34 Irish county and sub-county regions within 8 NUTS3 regions. A three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimation is used to analyse the impact of past firm deaths (births) on future firm births (deaths). The effect of relatedness on firm interrelationships is explicitly modelled and captured.

Findings indicate that the multiplier effect operates mostly through related sectors, while the competition effect operates mostly through unrelated sectors.

This paper's findings show that firm interrelationships are significantly influenced by the degree of relatedness between firms. The raw data used to calculate firm birth and death rates in this analysis are count data. Each new firm is measured the same as another regardless of differing features like size. Some research has shown that smaller firms have a greater propensity to create entrepreneurs (Parker, 2009). Thus, it is possible that the death of differently sized firms may contribute differently to multiplier effects where births induce further births. Future research could seek to examine this.

These findings have implications for policy initiatives concerned with increasing entrepreneurship. Some express concerns that public investment into entrepreneurship can lead to “crowding out” effects (Cumming and Johan, 2019), meaning that public investment into entrepreneurship could displace or reduce private investment into entrepreneurship (Audretsch and Fiedler, 2023; Zikou et al., 2017). This study’s findings indicate that using public investment to increase firm births could increase future firm births in related and unrelated sectors. However, more negative “crowding out” effects may also occur in unrelated sectors, meaning that public investment which stimulates firm births in a certain sector could induce firm deaths and crowd out entrepreneurship in unrelated sectors.

This paper is the first in the literature to explicitly account for the role of relatedness in firm interrelationships.

Introduction: The birth of a preterm child requires hospitalization in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), which is a very stressful experience for parents. Aim: To determine the stress level of parents of preterm babies admitted to intensive and sub-intensive units in two hospitals in Northern Italy and its association with their sociodemographic variables and the clinical conditions of their newborns.

The sampling was non-probabilistic and included parents of preterm babies admitted to intensive and/or sub-intensive care for at least 10 days. Instruments: (1) information deduced from the clinical record of preterm newborns; (2) sociodemographic determinants of parents' well-being deduced from a questionnaire; (3) parental stress scale: neonatal intensive care unit (PSS:NICU), which measures the perception of parents about stressors from the physical and psychological environment of the NICU.

Results: A total of 104 parents of 59 hospitalized preterm babies participated in the study. The average parental stress level was 1.87 ± 0.837. The subscale score that got higher was parent-infant relationship subscale. Concerning the infant characteristics, the birth weight of the babies and the length of their hospitalization affected the parents' stress level. Looking at parents' sociodemographic characteristics instead, the greater predictors were gender, age and occupational social class.

The parental role alteration caused by infant premature birth and consequent hospitalization is a major stressor for parents and in particular for mothers. The variables that resulted positively associated with higher stress in parents of preterm infants hospitalized are specific parental characteristics, including not adequately or previously studied ones, and infant characteristics.

Adolescent pregnancy stands as a societal challenge, compelling young individuals to prematurely discontinue their education. Conversely, an expansion of high school education can potentially diminish rates of adolescent pregnancy, given that educational attainment stands as the foremost risk factor influencing sexual initiation, the use of contraceptive methods during initial sexual encounters and fertility. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the implementation of the public educational policy introducing full-time schools (FTS) for high schools in the state of Ceará, Brazil, on early pregnancy rates.

Using the difference-in-differences method with multiple time periods, we measured the average effect of this staggered treatment on the treated municipalities.

The main result indicates a reduction of 0.849 percentage points in the teenage pregnancy rate. Concerning dynamic effects, the establishment of FTS in treated municipalities results in a 1.183–1.953 percentage point decrease in teenage pregnancy rates, depending on the timing of exposure. We explored heterogeneous effects within socioeconomically vulnerable municipalities, yet discerned no impact on this group. Rigorous tests confirm the robustness of the results.

This paper aims to contribute to: (1) the consolidation of research on the subject, given the absence of such research in Brazil to the best of our knowledge; (2) the advancement and analysis of evidence-based public policy and (3) the utilization of novel longitudinal data and methodology to evaluate adolescent pregnancy rates.

This study aims to analyze to what extent distance education is feasible and efficient with the limited technological infrastructure in Egypt. The study answers this question from the perspective of households' preparedness level regarding possessing information and communication technologies (ICTs). In addition, it assesses whether the pattern of students' ICT ownership is influenced by disability- and socioeconomic-based inequality in education and whether the pattern of ICT ownership exacerbates such biases.

A three-stage probit model with double sample selection (PMDSS) was applied to estimate the factors likely to influence ICT possession, considering the selection process for school enrollment and education continuation. The authors utilized nationally representative data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey 2018.

About 40% of students aged 12–25 did not have ICTs. Most socioeconomically poor households, particularly those living in Upper Egypt, were the least likely to obtain ICTs and rely on distance education. In addition, female students, particularly those with disabilities, had the lowest chance of benefitting from distance learning.

The persistent structural deprivation of school enrollment and educational progression has led to the positive selection of well-off children in education, which is extended to ICT possession and internet use. Without addressing these structural biases, the study suggests that distance education will likely exacerbate educational inequalities.

The study analyzed the extent to which Egyptian families were prepared in 2018 regarding ICT possessions for distance education for their children, particularly those with disabilities. Furthermore, it investigated whether access to distance learning was influenced by disability- and socioeconomic-based inequalities in education.

This paper investigates the consequences of job insecurity among hotel employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data were obtained from the employees of two five-star chain hotels in Turkey. The study hypotheses were tested via structural equation modeling.

The research findings demonstrate that job insecurity exacerbates job tension. Job tension erodes employees’ trust in organization and aggravates their propensity to leave work early and be late for work. As hypothesized, job tension mediates the effect of job insecurity on organizational trust and the abovementioned outcomes.

This study adds to the hospitality literature by assessing the interrelationships of job insecurity, job tension, organizational trust and nonattendance intentions.

Unequal social conditions that provide people with unequal opportunities to live healthy lives are considered unjust and associated with “health inequity”. Governing power is impacting people's lives through laws, policies and professional decisions, and can be used intentionally to combat health inequity by addressing and changing people's living- and working conditions. Little attention is paid to how these ways of exercising governing power unintentionally can structure further conditions for health inequity. In this paper, the authors coin the term “governance determinants of health” (GDHs). The authors' discussion of GDHs potential impact on health inequity can help avoid the implementation of governing strategies with an adverse impact on health equality. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objective.

The authors identify Governance Determinants of Health, the GDHs. GDHs refer to governance strategies that structurally impact healthcare systems and health equality. The authors focus on the unintended, blind sides of GDHs that maintain or reinforce the effects of socioeconomic inequality on health.

The power to organize healthcare is manifested in distinct structural approaches such as juridification, politicalization, bureaucratization and medical standardization. The authors explore the links between different forms of governance and health inequalities.

The authors' discussion in this article is innovative as it seeks to develop a framework that targets power dynamics inherent in GHDs to help identify and avoid GDHs that may promote unequal access to healthcare and prompt health inequity. However, this framework has limitations as the real-world, blurred and intertwined aspects of governing instruments are simplified for analytical purposes. As such, it risks overestimating the boundaries between the separate instruments and reducing the complexity of how the GDHs work in practice. Consequently, this kind of theory-driven framework does not do justice to the myriad of peoples' complex empirical practices where GDHs may overlap and intertwine with each other. Nevertheless, this framework can still help assist governing authorities in imagining a direction for the impacts of GDHs on health equity, so they can take precautionary steps to avoid adverse impacts.

The authors develop and explore – and demonstrate – the relevance of a framework that can assist governing authorities in anticipating the impacts of GDHs on health inequity.

Innovation ecosystems (IEs) have attracted the attention of policymakers and researchers because of their potential to positively affect territories, creating shared value. However, due to the fragmentation of IEs, how this happens in different IEs has been explored only partially. This research aims to bridge this gap, aiming to support policymakers in understanding how to foster shared value in diverse IEs.

The paper identifies, based on the literature, two “drivers of aggregation” of IE's actors as key dimensions characterizing shared value in IEs, namely physical proximity and dominant issue. If these are combined, three archetypes emerge: Hub- and Chain-Driven, Place-Driven, Competence- and Issue-Driven IEs.Then, elements useful for understanding shared value creation in these archetypes are framed and studied in real cases.

Results reveal that aggregation drivers affect shared value creation, which differ among archetypes: in Competence- and Issue-Driven IEs alignment is challenged by the low physical proximity, which in Place-Driven IEs is high, but not enough to grant shared value; in Hub- and Chain-Driven IEs, the hub is the orchestrator, representing both a driver and a risk.

Differences in shared value creation processes relate to the set-up of the IE, which has relevant implications for policy definition. In Competence- and Issue-Driven IEs, policies at diverse levels align in funding and promoting the IE; in Place-Driven IEs, policies support anchors' development on-site; in Hub- and Chain-Driven IEs, policies, sometimes absent, should foster partnerships for projects for the territory, IE's enlargement and resilience.

This paper aims to present new evidence from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) showing the extent to which obstetric (e.g. abnormal birth weight, confinement at birth, severe abnormality of pregnancy, etc.) and early childhood and family factors (illegitimate child, unwanted conception, family overcrowding, etc.) have predictive effects on psychopathic traits measured later in life at age 48 years.

Data collected in the CSDD are analysed. This is a prospective longitudinal study of 411 London men from age 8 to age 61 years.

The results suggest that none of the obstetric problems were predictive of adult psychopathy. However, some other early childhood factors were significant. Unwanted conception (by the mother) was significantly associated with high psychopathy. The likelihood of being an unwanted child was higher when the mother was younger (19 years or less), and when the child was illegitimate. The poor health of the mother and living in an overcrowded family were also significant in predicting psychopathy in adulthood, as well as both psychopathic personality (F1) and psychopathic behaviour (F2).

These findings suggest the influence of very early emotional tensions and problematic social background in predicting psychopathic traits in adulthood (at age 48 years). They also emphasise the importance of investigating further the very early roots of psychopathic traits.