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December 11, 1968 National Insurance — Industrial injuries benefit — Disablement benefit — Functions of statutory and medical authorities — Industrial accident — Medical authorities finding injury different from injury found by local insurance officer — Whether estoppel arising — “Decision… shall be final” — National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act, 1965 (c.52), ss.ll(l), 12(1) — National Insurance Act, 1965 (c.51), s.75.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the medical incident responses from two public hospitals in Hong Kong, namely, Kowloon Hospital and Caritas Medical Centre, in order to improve the strategic preparation for crisis management in hospitals.

The paper analyses two medical incidents using Situational Crisis Communication Theory by Coombs (2007). The two case studies presented herein demonstrate the importance of consistency in terms of crisis responses.

For the first case, the crisis responses from different parties after the incident, including Hospital Authority, the doctor and the nurses from Kowloon Hospital, are contradicting to each other. First, Hospital Authority confirmed that the incident is solely an accident which is a denial response. Second, the doctor passed the responsibility to the nurses which is a scapegoating response. Third, the nurses tend to reduce the responsibility for the death of patient by excusing strategy. As a whole, their responses are inconsistent to each other. For the second case, Caritas had initially denied the responsibilities, but finally had given partial apology under public pressure. That makes people think that Caritas does not really regret.

Rebuilding posture should be used instead of denial and diminishment posture. However, public organization and civil servants are reluctant to use a full apology due to possible legal consequences. The apology ordinance would ease the pressure to express regret and sympathy.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.

This paper examines whether affiliation strategies used by social movement organizations to establish institutional linkages assure survival. Several streams within both social movement and organization theories suggest contrasting expectations. Two core research questions are proposed: how does strategic affiliation, as well as increasing legitimation, alter social movement organizations’ longevity, and how does the evolution of the movement condition these dynamics? Our answer focuses on the self-help/mutual-aid movement and the institutionalization of national self-help/mutual-aid organizations. Analyses comparing economic, political and symbolic means of survival at the population-of-organizations level and organizational level, and across the history of the movement, show that professional and political alliances and legitimation impact the longevity of self-help/mutual-aid organizations in unexpected ways. For instance, as the number of political alliances at the population level increases, the likelihood of organizational survival declines, although political alliances at the individual organizational level are beneficial for an organization. These relationships change dramatically as the movement matures. Implications for integrating social movement and organizations theories are discussed.

This qualitative study aims to examine key stakeholders' perspectives of primary care group/trust prescribing strategies. Within the context of general practice prescribing, the paper also debates the wider issue of whether GPs' prescribing autonomy is under threat from managerial expansion following recent organisational changes in primary care.

Data were obtained from focus groups and a series of individual semi‐structured interviews with GPs and key primary care organisation stakeholders.

The data underlie a tension between the managerial objective of cost‐restraint and GPs' commitment to quality improvement and individual clinical patient management. In presenting both managerial and medical narratives, two divergent and often conflicting discourses emerge, which leads to speculation that managerial attempts to constrain prescribing autonomy will achieve only limited success. The contention is that GPs' discourse features as a challenge to a managerial discourse that reflects attempts to regulate, standardise and curtail clinical discretion. This is due not only to GPs' expressed hegemonic ideals that clinical practice centres on the interests of the individual patient, but also to the fact that the managerial discourse of evidence‐based medicine encapsulates only a limited share of the knowledge that GPs draw on in decision making. However, while managers' discourse presented them as unwilling to impose change or directly challenge clinical practice, evidence also emerged to suggest that is not yet possible to be sufficiently convinced of the future retention of prescribing autonomy. On the other hand, the use of peer scrutiny posed an indirect managerial influence on prescribing, whilst the emergence of prescribing advisors as analysts of cost‐effectiveness may threaten doctors' dominance of medical knowledge.

There is a continuing need to analyse the impact of the new managerial reforms on primary care prescribing.

This study provides a snapshot of managerial and GP relations at a time of primary care transition.

This paper aims to identify variation in the introduction of New Public Management reforms in healthcare and how this variation is related to country‐specific healthcare states.

The analysis uses the introduction of clinical standards in Britain and Germany as cases. The two countries are characterised by interesting differences in relation to the institutional set‐up of healthcare states and as such present ideal cases to explore the specific ways of how healthcare states filter clinical standards as tools of a generic managerialism.

Both countries have introduced clinical standards but, importantly, the substantive nature of clinical standards differs, reflecting differences in initial institutional conditions. More specifically, in Britain clinical standards have taken the form of two parallel policies, which strengthen hierarchy‐based governing and redefine professional self‐regulation. In Germany, by contrast, clinical standards come in one single policy, which strengthens the hybrid of network‐ and hierarchy‐based governing and to some extent also pure hierarchy‐based forms of governing.

First, with its cross‐country comparative focus, the analysis is able to identify systematic variations across healthcare states and the specific ways in which they impact on the introduction of New Public Management. Second, with its focus on clinical standards, the analysis deals with the governance of medical practice as one of the central areas of healthcare states.

The medical suppression of female sexuality in Victorian society has long been the subject of historical and cultural scholarship, with documentation not only of textual threats by religious and medical “experts,” but also of surgical assaults on female reproductive systems (Longo, 1979, 1986; Scull & Favreau, 1986; Sheehan, 1997). Less well known is the apparent obverse: the use of medical techniques to stimulate the female genitalia as a means of treating hysteria and other mental disorders (Maines, 1999; Schleiner, 1995). In this paper, I trace the cultural history (mainly Anglo-American) of the psychiatric enhancement, as well as repression, of female sexual pleasure, through various genital treatments, including the surgical and the electrical.¹ I then make the case that these “opposite” treatments are, in the context of Victorian society, two sides of the same coin of the patriarchal, medical control of female sexuality.²

Purpose – Using Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality along with sociological constructions of risk, this chapter asks, “What definitions and procedures have states used in their legislation about FAS to justify state intervention? What are the social and policy implications?”

Methodology/approach – Qualitative content analysis of state legislation enacted into law.

Findings – Against a backdrop of child abuse which justifies intervention, states use different techniques of biopolitics to secure governance over pregnant women and their developing fetuses, including (a) a social history of prenatal alcohol consumption; (b) a diagnosis of FAS in the child; and/or (c) a visible or measurable physiological characteristic of the newborn/child associated with FAS.

Social implications – This chapter extends the analysis of alcohol consumption by pregnant women to a policy level and examines central questions about the government's role in the biopolitical framing of prenatal alcohol use and the differential assignment of risk and responsibility.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter contributes to work on maternal–fetal conflict, risk, and governmentality in women's reproductive health.

Physicians are instrumental to our national defense against epidemics, whether natural or bioterror-related. Broadly speaking, they are obligated to help rapidly identify threats, prevent the spread of disease, and care for infected patients. Each task presents ethical challenges, including the need to address access to care, balance the medical needs of individuals and communities, and ensure that health professionals continue to treat infectious patients in spite of the risk they present. If physicians can acknowledge these duties and meet these challenges, they have an opportunity to strengthen medicine's public trust and professional identity.