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This article focuses on psychosocial barriers to sexual health and their implications on the design and delivery of mass media‐based public health campaigns. A family planning campaign that attempted to address barriers to seeking sexual health information and services by promoting positive attitudes toward couple's communication about sexual health care is presented. Specifically, this article reports how the campaign conducted formative research to develop audience‐centered, culturally sensitive messages, particularly with young adults, aged 18‐24 as well as Hispanic young adults (aged 18‐24); and utilized mixed‐media to effectively reach at‐risk populations.

This paper aims to explore the current state of research on supply chain flexibility (SCF) and mass personalization (MP) to identify the literature findings to date, research gaps and to provide guidelines for future research in this area.

A systematic literature review of 64 papers was undertaken to address the use of SCF as a productive response to MP environments. The methodology used is made up of five steps: formulation of the research questions, identification of studies, selection and evaluation of studies, analysis and synthesis and presentation of the results.

Three main research topics have been identified: personalization levels and flexible processes in supply chain, where flexible processes in supply chain are analysed as a productive response to high levels of MP; supply chain collaborative processes for SCF and MP, where product co-creation and relationships between supply chain members is analysed; and SCF and MP enabling technologies, in which technologies to support MP implementation and SCF are considered. Each of these three main topics have been divided into research lines and research sublines that allowed identifying a positive relationship between the SCF and the MP strategies.

Systematic literature review is a methodology reliable and recommended by a large number of scientific papers. However, it depends on available and accessible research studies and the researcher’s criteria. The selection of certain criteria for inclusion and exclusion of papers introduces publication bias, which should be considered an intrinsic limitation to systematic literature review.

The main literature findings in each research line and subline related to the SCF-MP relationship are identified and analysed. Furthermore, research gaps and further research lines in the SCF-MP area are highlighted. The information presented in this paper improves the literature on the advances in the SCF use as a productive response to MP environments.

Telephone response system is the frontline of hospital operations. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a representative telephone response system of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, address the existing inefficiency issues such as long call waiting time, and improve system resilience to changes.

Resource sharing schemes are proposed to improve the system performance in answering calls related to appointment booking and medication renewal. Discrete event simulation is adopted to model the current system and the resource sharing schemes.

The resource sharing schemes dramatically improve system performance reflected by the decrease of call waiting time and queue, as well as the extreme high utilization of agents in a key unit. Compared with the less desired alternative of hiring additional employees to mitigate the performance issues, the resource sharing schemes perform at par or even better. Sharing more resource during the peak hours can further balance the agent workload.

The resource sharing schemes could alleviate staffing shortage, long waiting time, and high-abandonment rate in the bottle-beck unit of the system, and lead to better utilization of scarce resources on the hospital floor. The concept reflects localized centralization efforts in traditionally highly decentralized telephone operations in hospital systems.

This research provides a structured approach to analyze the operations of a VA telephone response system. The developed simulation model is validated, and this provides a valuable tool for management to analyze the complicated telephone operations of the telephone systems of other VA and non-VA hospitals. Resource sharing constitutes a cost-effective solution for improving system performance and resilience.