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This study aims to explore the community strengths/ weaknesses and the opportunities/ threats of the Nepalese communities in Hong Kong that have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The infection of COVID-19 among the ethnic minorities (EM) population in western democracies was reported higher, and it was wondered whether it was due to structural discrimination of the underprivileged.

This study is situated in Hong Kong during the peak of pandemic in 2020–2021. The authors followed the work of an EM service agency and interacted with their Nepalese clients to explore their reactions in coping with the sudden physical and economic adversities and examined their capacity amid the pandemic.

The authors noticed their effective self-mobilization that was strategically facilitated by veteran social workers and thus have strong resilience compared to other EM clusters in the territories.

The ways of their interactions offer useful insights for the authors to examine the prevailing strategy for achieving the mission of social inclusion in Hong Kong with 8% of the EM population.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main reasons for discharge against medical advice (DAMA) in the emergency department (ED) of a teaching hospital in Tehran, Iran.

This cross-sectional study was conducted on all the patients who left the ED of a referral teaching hospital against medical advice (AMA) in 2008. A questionnaire was filled out for each patient to determine the reasons behind patient leaving AMA.

In total, 12.8 percent of the patients left the hospital AMA. Dissatisfaction with being observed in the ED, having a feeling of recovery and hospital personnel encouraging patients to leave the hospital were the main reasons for leaving the hospital AMA.

Like many other centers, the results showed that poor communication skill and work overload were the main contributing factors to DAMA. The center managed to improve patient satisfaction and thus lowered DAMA rates following this study. Considering the similarities reported in the reports and that of other studies, it could be concluded that policy makers in other centers can also benefit from the results to adopt effective approaches to reduce DAMA rate.

To the knowledge no study has evaluated the rate and the reasons behind DAMA in the Iranian EDs.

This chapter explores the impact of delivering culturally community family therapy with strength-based strategies, to transgenerational Black Haitian families living in Haiti and the Dominican Republic following the 2010 earthquake. A series of workshop intervention over several years, which were co-facilitated by community pastors and leaders provided a cultural-based intervention drawing on Black British and Caribbean culture, Haitian culture, Christian spiritual belief systems, in conjunction with some bi-cultural attachment and systemic methods and techniques. Community feedback through testimonies contributed to evaluation and outcomes in developing new strategies to manage stress, and family conflict and distress, together with developing new strategies in sharing a vision for the future across the community.

L'Ecologie a une Histoire 1.1 Une histoire intellectuelle ancienne C'est en 1866 que le naturaliste allemand Haeckel a forgé le terme d'“écologie”, en définissant son objet comme “la somme de toutes les relations amicales ou antagonistes d'un animal ou d'une plante avec le milieu organique ou inorganique, y compris les autres êtres vivants, l'ensemble de toutes les relations considérées par Darwin comme les conditions de lutte pour la vie”.

Approche générale du problème Peu nombreux sont les parcs qui se prêtent à une visite de plus d'une journée. Une réflexion qui s'attache aux établissements majeurs pourra donc se cantonner aux réalisations conçues en vue d'accueillir le public pendant une journée, c'est‐à‐dire 5 à 7 heures d'activités entrecoupées de pauses et d'un repas pris sur place.

La présente contribution concerne les tendances “non‐quantifiables” que J.R. Blanchet évoque en conclusions de son rapport de base. Ou plutôt, les tendances non quantifiées, en ce sens que la densité d'équipements concourant à l'animation des stations de montagne ne fait pas l'objet d'une statistique suivie.

An accurate estimation of project costs is always a great challenge for a construction company, particularly when there is a commitment with the owner to achieve a project at a given price. It is thus essential to develop technical and logistic solutions (TLS) ensuring a good organisation and improving the productivity. These improvements are not yet well assessed because relevant models are not available at the right time. This paper presents a new approach for assessing productivity by using an analytical cost model and indicators widely used to measure the site productivity. A case study is described to validate the cost and indicator model. They can be used in a decision making process consisting of a comparative study of different TLS in order to select, in a predicted term, the TLS ensuring the best productivity. A decision support system for generating different alternatives to be compared is currently under development.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart based on the Wilcoxon rank-sum (WRS) statistic using repetitive sampling to improve the sensitivity of the EWMA control chart to process mean shifts regardless of the prior knowledge of the underlying process distribution.

The proposed chart is developed without any distributional assumption of the underlying quality process for monitoring the location parameter. The authors developed formulae as well as algorithms to facilitate the design and implementation of the proposed chart. The performance of the proposed chart is investigated in terms of the average run-length, standard deviation of the run-length (RL), average sample size and percentiles of the RL distribution. Numerical examples are given as illustration of the design and implementation of the proposed chart.

The proposed control chart presents very attractive RL properties and outperforms the existing nonparametric EWMA control chart based on the WRS in the detection of the mean process shifts in many situations. However, the performance of the proposed chart relatively deteriorates for small phase I sample sizes.

This study develops a new control chart for monitoring the process mean using a two-sample test regardless of the nature of the underlying process distribution. The proposed control chart does not require any assumption on the type (or nature) of the process distribution. It requires a small number of subgroups in order to reach stability in the phase II performance.

Excellencies Ladies and Gentlemen At the end of this memorable 33rd Congress of our Association, I would like to thank very heartly our hosts H.E. E.W. Mwangale, Minister for Tourism and Wildlife, the Organizing Committee, presided by Mr. Maliti as well as to Universal Safary Tours as executing agency for having done everything to make our stay in Kenya pleasant and attractive.