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The purpose of this paper is to describe the development, implementation and initial evaluation of the Geriatric Flying Squad's reciprocal referral pathways with emergency responders including New South Wales Ambulance, Police and Fire and Rescue. These innovative pathways and model of care were developed to improve access to multidisciplinary services for vulnerable community dwelling frail older people with the intent of improving health and quality of life outcomes by providing an alternative to hospital admission.

This is a case study describing the review of the Geriatric Flying Squad's referral database and quality improvement initiative to streamline referrals amongst the various emergency responders in the local health district. The implementation and initial evaluation of the project through online survey are further described.

Sustainable cross-sector collaboration can be achieved through building reciprocal pathways between an existing rapid response geriatric outreach service and emergency responders including Ambulance, Police, Fire and Rescue. Historically, emergency services would have transferred this group to the emergency department. These pathways exemplify person-centred care, underpinned by a multidisciplinary, rapid response team, providing an alternative referral pathway for first responders, with the aim of improving whole of health outcomes for frail older people.

Enablers of these pathways include a single point of contact for agencies, extended hours to support referral pathways, education to increase capacity and awareness, comprehensive and timely comprehensive assessment and ongoing case management where required and contemporaneous cross-sector collaboration to meet the medical and psychosocial needs of the client.

The Geriatric Flying Squad reciprocal pathways are a unique model of care with a multi-agency approach to addressing frail older people's whole of health needs.

As libraries, museums, and research institutions continue to work on historical digital collections for their digital repositories, there is always a need to either hire or train digital librarians and they are expected to bring or learn a set of technical skills that can help these institutions keep up with the current trends of web technology. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the current technical skills being sought for digital librarian positions, as well as provide a basic exploration of the list of technical courses offered by major library school programs in 2010.

A twofold data collection methodology was developed that compared the required and desired technical skills as expressed in 43 positions announcements from January to December 2010 and the technical courses offered in 2010 at selected library programs listed on the top schools, as identified by the 2009 US News and World Report ranking. A common set of categories was developed to account for variations in wording and specific implementations of a technology.

This study reveals that current students and practicing librarians need to seek out additional non‐curricular opportunities to build competency in the technical areas represented in the study. Fortunately, the areas where the greatest disparity exists are also areas where significant opportunities for independent learning are available.

This paper can be useful for library students or practicing librarians who are interested in acquiring new technical skills. The results can also help library administrators when hiring new librarians for digital and technical departments.

The purpose of this paper is to use a comparative qualitative case study design to better understand how the observed characteristics of an organization correspond to their score on the organizational performance metric (IWH-OPM), a leading indicator tool designed to measure an organization’s occupational health and safety (OHS) performance.

Five organizations were recruited based on their diverse IWH-OPM scores obtained in a previous study. Qualitative data were collected from these cases and analyzed with consideration of OHS leadership; OHS culture and climate; employee participation in OHS; OHS policies, procedures and practices; and OHS risk control. Similarities and differences among organizations were examined in relation to these themes.

Three distinct groups of firms emerged from the cross-case analysis in terms of their overall OHS performance: high, medium and low. Higher firm IWH-OPM scores generally corresponded to better OHS performance in the workplace as observed through qualitative methods.

The findings are a step toward OHS leaders or practitioners eventually being able, based on an organization’s IWH-OPM score, to have a quick understanding of a workplace’s OHS status and of how best to support further improvement.