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This study investigates core framing techniques utilized by two anti-illegal immigration social movement organizations, the Minuteman Project, Inc. and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, both volunteer civil border patrol groups operating along the U.S.–Mexican border. Theoretically, this paper is informed by Robert Benford and David Snow's work on collective action framing. Using a case study approach, document analysis is employed to explore how four types of framing techniques (diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, motivational action framing, and credibility framing) are implemented by each group via information presented on their websites. The findings of this investigation suggest that these groups implement each of the four framing techniques in question, with the bulk of their focus resting in the diagnostic frame. Through the examination of these groups via the framing perspective, it is also found that the groups emphasize the importance of place, that is, the U.S.–Mexican border itself. The case analyses thus further framing theory by highlighting the roles that “geographic and place framing” also play. The Minuteman Project, Inc. and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps are relatively new groups that have mobilized within the past few years. Sociologically, relatively few scholars have studied these particular groups within the larger anti-illegal immigration movement. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of how the groups utilize framing to construct their messages, missions, and goals to the public. Doing so contributes to an interesting and emerging type of civil border patrol movement and also adds to the body of work devoted to the importance of social movement framing.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and review the range and quality of international epidemiological and observational studies reporting impacts of psychiatric disorders on labour force activity. This information is needed to explore the relative priority of different diagnostic groups for more intensive forms of vocational rehabilitation.

The authors provide an overview of the current literature. A systematic review of papers measuring labour force variables and psychiatric disorders across a range of countries is conducted. These results are compared to OECD background unemployment rates during the same period. The results for each diagnostic category included are aggregated and compared to the other diagnostic categories.

The proportions of people employed decreased with the more severe disorder categories, indicating that severe psychiatric illnesses are contributing to employment struggles for people with these illnesses, across countries.

This review is exploratory and shows that there is little consistency in reporting of labour force variables. Future research should endeavour to utilise internationally agreed definitions of labour force activity.

This conclusion is relevant to matching community residents with psychiatric disorders to the more intensive and costly forms of vocational rehabilitation.

To our knowledge, no previous review has examined diagnostic categories of psychiatric disorders by labour force activity internationally while taking into account background unemployment. This review found an employment gradient related to severity of diagnostic category that will be of interest to clinicians and policy makers.

The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework that would enable the effective application of time based competition (TBC) and work in process (WIP) concepts in the design and management of effective and efficient patient processes.

This paper discusses the applicability of time‐based competition and work‐in‐progress concepts to the design and management of healthcare service production processes. A conceptual framework is derived from the analysis of both existing research and empirical case studies.

The paper finds that a patient episode is analogous to a customer order‐to‐delivery chain in industry. The effective application of TBC and WIP can be achieved by focusing on through put time of a patient episode by reducing the non‐value adding time components and by minimizing time categories that are main cost drivers for all stakeholders involved in the patient episode.

The paper shows that an application of TBC in managing patient processes can be limited if there is no consensus about optimal care episode in the medical community.

In the paper it is shown that managing patient processes based on time and cost analysis enables one to allocate the optimal amount of resources, which would allow a healthcare system to minimize the total cost of specific episodes of illness. Analysing the total cost of patient episodes can provide useful information in the allocation of limited resources among multiple patient processes.

This paper introduces a framework for health care managers and researchers to analyze the effect of reducing through put time to the total cost of patient episodes.

Nurse navigators (NNs) coordinate patient care, improve care quality and potentially reduce healthcare resource use. The purpose of this paper is to undertake an evaluation of hospitalisation outcomes in a new NN programme in Queensland, Australia.

A matched case-control study was performed. Patients under the care of the NNs were randomly selected (n=100) and were matched to historical (n=300) and concurrent (n=300) comparison groups. The key outcomes of interest were the number and types of hospitalisations, length of hospital stay and number of intensive care unit days. Generalised linear and two-part models were used to determine significant differences in resources across groups.

The control and NN groups were well matched on socio-economic characteristics, however, groups differed by major disease type and number/type of comorbidities. NN patients had high healthcare needs with 53 per cent having two comorbidities. In adjusted analyses, compared with the control groups, NN patients showed higher proportions of preventable hospitalisations over 12 months, similar days in intensive care and a smaller proportion had overnight stays in hospital. However, the NN patients had significantly more hospitalisations (mean: 6.0 for NN cases, 3.4 for historical group and 3.2 for concurrent group); and emergency visits.

As many factors will affect hospitalisation rates beyond whether patients receive NN care, further research and longer follow-up is required.

A matched case-control study provides a reasonable but insufficient design to compare the NN and non-NN exposed patient outcomes.

Healthcare in the public and private sectors is facing increasing pressure to become more cost‐effective. Time‐based competition and work‐in‐progress have been used successfully to measure and improve the efficiency of industrial manufacturing. Seeks to address this issue.

Presents a framework for time based management of the total cost of a patient episode and apply it to the six sigma DMAIC‐process development approach. The framework is used to analyse hip replacement patient episodes in Päijät‐Häme Hospital District in Finland, which has a catchment area of 210,000 inhabitants and performs an average of 230 hip replacements per year.

The work‐in‐progress concept is applicable to healthcare – notably that the DMAIC‐process development approach can be used to analyse the total cost of patient episodes. Concludes that a framework, which combines the patient‐in‐process and the DMAIC development approach, can be used not only to analyse the total cost of patient episode but also to improve patient process efficiency.

Presents a framework that combines patient‐in‐process and DMAIC‐process development approaches, which can be used to analyse the total cost of a patient episode in order to improve patient process efficiency.

The purpose of this article is to provide an understanding of the methodology of action research, especially its use in a marketing context. A retrospective account of a market‐oriented action research project in which the author was involved is provided in the form of a summative evaluation of the methodology used. The status of research claims for action research in scholarly publications is discussed and found to be problematic. A hermeneutic case research pathway is recommended as a solution. Links between action research as methodology and internal marketing as strategy are made. A conclusion is reached that the basis of market‐oriented action research is “knowledge renewal”. This is achieved through an iterative process of action and learning, facilitated by the relationships formed between those involved.

Research on hospital productivity has progressed over the last few decades considerably from early models where measurements of hospital services simply counted inpatient days, and perhaps outpatient visits or numbers of surgeries performed. This simplicity represents an extreme of aggregation, focuses the attention of the analysis entirely on the structure of the organization at the highest levels, and provides no insight into the specific services that might be provided to each patient as well as the characteristics of those patients, which might lead to specialization of their care. This process is fundamentally complex, which makes it especially difficult to model. This table-setting chapter will characterize some of the key contextual choices that must be made by researchers in this field which are then applied in subsequent chapters. The key point of this chapter will be to argue that there are very few “one size fits all” decisions in this process and thus the context of particular research objectives and questions will determine how modeling choices are made in practice. Some intuition about how these decisions have substantial implications for outcomes of measurement for hospital productivity will be provided; however, no attempt will be made to conduct a literature review of all the choices that have been made. Instead, we will suggest that new careful attention to the choices made can make future studies more effective in communicating to the communities implementing the research.

When a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment cannot be carried out, a quick and discriminant tool of good psychometric properties can be useful to practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in patients with Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) and to test its reliability for cognitive assessment in a population with intellectual disabilities.

Thirty-seven adults with PWS took the MoCA. Reliability of the battery was tested using Cronbach’s alphas. The performance of PWS adults in each subtest was then compared to that of a normative population of healthy adults.

The MoCA was found to be unreliable in PWS. The subtests analyses indicated that the PWS sample underperformed the normative population of healthy adults on most subtests of the MoCA. A sub-sample aged between 17and 29 years showed normal performance on Naming and Memory, and a sub-sample aged from 30 to 39 years showed similar performance on Language, Memory and Orientation relative to age-matched normative healthy adults.

Results showed that the current version of the MoCA, if taken as a whole test for cognitive assessment, does not present with adequate psychometric properties, which the authors interpret as reflecting the heterogeneity in PWS cognitive profiles. If used in PWS, the MoCA may however be useful in examining cognitive functions separately using subtest-based comparisons to normative data.

This research contributes to a better assessment of cognitive profile in PWS and people with learning disabilities by arguing that the use of psychometric tests should depend more on the specificity of the population under evaluation.

Many countries have developed hospital-at-home (HAH) models to bring hospital services closer to home. Although some countries already have a long tradition of HAH for adults, paediatric HAH has been developed more recently. Specificities of paediatric care make it difficult to directly extend an adult HAH model to the paediatric population. The objective of this study is to compare the organisation of paediatric HAH in four countries: France, Australia (states of Victoria and New South Wales), the Netherlands and Belgium. Ultimately, lessons can be drawn for further development in the countries analysed and/or for implementation in other countries.

Legal documents and other grey literature were analysed to describe the legal context for the provision of paediatric HAH in the selected countries. In addition, semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with key informants from paediatric HAH organisations in these countries, addressing the following topics: historical background, legal framework, functioning of HAH models, workforce, number of services, profile of children, type of care activities, funding, coordination with other providers and quality of care. Results were reviewed by a content expert from the respective country.

Organisational differences were highlighted in terms of coordinating actor (hospital or home nursing care services), decision-making process, range of clinical conditions treated, territorial organisation, qualifications and expertise of the team members, medical expertise, financing, responsibilities, etc.

There is no single preferred model for the provision of HAH care for children. There is a large variety in almost all aspects of organisation. There are, however, also some common characteristics across the different models. Notably, paediatric expertise of nurses within the HAH team was considered indispensable in all programmes.

Autism spectrum condition (ASC) is a lifelong developmental condition. According to research, it is recommended that those diagnosed with ASC should be offered post-diagnosis support to explore their diagnosis (Punshow, Skirrow and Murphy, 2009). The ASC Diagnostic Assessment Service at Gloucestershire Health Care (GHC) NHS Foundation Trust offers an assessment service to adults (18+) located within Gloucestershire. All those who receive a diagnosis are then invited to a 7-week post-diagnostic group facilitated by the multidisciplinary team. This service evaluation aimed to evaluate the aforementioned group so that it can be improved upon and thus provide a better service for future clients.

In total, 14 participants (6 males, 8 females) were interviewed for the purpose of this evaluation following their attendance at these groups.

The interview transcripts then underwent thematic analysis with four themes identified; “Autistic Community”, “Experience of Being Part of an Online Group”, “Opportunity for Consolidation”, and “Design Considerations and Improvements”. Further sub-themes were also identified. Overall, the service evaluation identified that the group provided a platform for sharing experiences and gaining a sense of belonging. It also highlighted that individuals have different preferences for whether groups should be facilitated online or face-to-face, and also different preferences for the duration of sessions. Further analysis also revealed the suggestion that the final session, for family and friends, should be optional so that those without a support network, do not need to attend as this caused unease in some. Further findings were also identified.

To the authors’ knowledge, existing articles have only focused on the evaluation of the availability of post-diagnostic provision and autistic individuals’ general impression of it rather than an in-depth evaluation of a specific type of support.