Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of a study considering the application of the Mental Capacity Act and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS). Practitioners from a range of professions were recruited to provide their views of how to respond to a variety of scenarios. GPs, nurses, social workers, physio/occupational therapists and care assistants were recruited to participate.

This study used the Delphi method to elicit participant views and generate consensus of opinion. The Delphi method recommends a large sample for heterogeneous groups, and round one had 98 participants from six different professional groups.

Participants did not respond consistently to the scenarios, but disagreed most significantly when patient decisions conflicted with clinical advice, and when to conduct a capacity assessment. These responses suggest that clinical responses vary significantly between individuals (even within settings or professions), and that the application of Mental Capacity Act (MCA) is complicated and nuanced, requiring time for reflection to avoid paternalistic clinical interventions.

Previous studies have not used a Delphi method to consider the application of MCA/DoLS. Because of this methods focus on developing consensus, it is uniquely suited to considering this practice issue. As a result, these findings present more developed understanding of the complexity and challenges for practitioner responses to some relatively common clinical scenarios, suggesting the need for greater clarity for practitioners.

This article aims to alert readers to the procurement and acquisition activities of police agencies, to the risks that these entail, and to mechanisms for their effective management.

The article explores the ways in which acquisition by police is conducted and regulated. It examines these relationships between police and the private sector from the perspective of their benefits, such as costs and efficiency gains, and the risks they entail, including overdependency, corruption and lack of accountability.

Shopping by the public police is on the increase. Through procurement and outsourcing, police harness resources needed to cope with increasing demands on their services. Increased police activity in the marketplace, driven by changing ideological, economic and pragmatic considerations, represents a fundamental structural shift in policing. The article identifies appropriate institutional and procedural safeguards, and raises questions about the implications of commercial relationships for the future of public policing.

This article makes a contribution by flagging the increased reliance of police on externally provided goods and services, and by suggesting ways in which the procurement process can be managed to ensure both accountability and value for money.

This paper studies the profit efficiency of a sample of large U.S. commercial banks and explores how this performance varies with selected measures of bank risk reflecting aspects of credit risk, liquidity risk, and insolvency risk. We use a standard profit function and the stochastic frontier approach, and compare two standard functional forms – Cobb‐Douglas and translog – to assess the tradeoff between precision and parsimony. We find that profit efficiency is sensitive to credit risk and insolvency risk but not to liquidity risk or to the mix of loan products.

Whether they're growing, downsizing, restructuring, or just trying to survive, today's organizations are struggling to sail through the “storms of change.” What's more, the management waters don't promise to be any smoother in the 1990s. So the stormy seas theme of this year's Planning Forum conference in San Francisco seemed most appropriate. In this review I will try to relate the insights from the sessions I attended to the theme of coping with change.

This paper examines accounting harmonisation and determinants explaining accounting measurement policy choice decisions by Asia‐Pacific listed manufacturing companies. Using Thomas' (1991) theoretical framework, four contingent variables (country of reporting, company size, profitability and debt leverage) are examined as possible determinants of firms' accounting choices concerning non‐current asset valuation measurement base, goodwill and depreciation. 130 listed manufacturing companies' annual reports were examined from Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. This study involves two phases. The first phase evaluates accounting harmonisation measurement indices in comparison with the extant literature. An important innovation is the operationalisation of Archer et. al. (1995) between‐country and within‐country C indices. Computed comparability indices indicated variations in the level of harmony across the five countries for all three accounting measurement practices. The second phase employed logistic regression to examine possible determinants of accounting policy choice decisions. Such a combined research approach should lead to a better understanding of de facto accounting harmonisation and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast the structure, regulation, and performance of banks in the EU and G‐10 countries. This enables one to identify any significant differences in the structure of banking in the nineteen separate countries comprising these two groups. The regulatory, supervisory, and deposit‐insurance environment in which banks operate in each of these countries is also compared and contrasted. This enables one to identify any significant differences in the regulatory environment that may help explain the structure of banking in the various countries. Beyond this, the effect of the overall structural and regulatory environment on individual bank performance is investigated in order to evaluate the appropriateness of existing regulations in individual countries and any proposals for reforming them. Hence, an exploratory empirical analysis based upon a sample of banks in the different countries is conducted to assess the effect of the different “regulatory regimes” on the performance of individual banks, controlling for various bank‐specific and country‐specific factors that may also affect bank performance. In this way, the paper attempts to contribute to an assessment of the appropriate balance between market and regulatory discipline to ensure that banks have sufficient opportunities to compete prudently and profitability in a competitive and global financial marketplace. In the process of conducting such an assessment, the paper necessarily provides information as to whether the U.S. is “out‐of‐step” with banking developments in other industrial countries.