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Healthcare providers are increasing their focus on patient satisfaction and patient-oriented services as they play a significant role in managing rising costs, elevating service quality and establishing sustainable quality improvement strategies. In recent years, the Kano model has gained popularity in the healthcare industry and has been employed to improve patient satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the Kano model can be deployed to identify a wide range of complex patient needs and convey its potential usefulness in the continuous improvement of the healthcare sector.

This paper provides a case study of implementing the Kano model to identify diverse patient needs and aims to eliminate the gaps identified in prior research, which include generically applying the Kano model to all service units of the healthcare system and using a predetermined service quality scale. This study emphasizes the importance of scale development and individual attention to each healthcare service unit in determining intricate patient needs. A cross-sectional study was conducted at the Student Health Services (SHS) of Missouri University of Science and Technology where the data were collected using the Kano survey. The respondents included undergraduate and graduate students that have utilized the healthcare services offered. A total of 138 patients were surveyed using a Kano model-based questionnaire that included demographics and treatment as well as service expectations.

Of the 21 quality attributes evaluated by the patients, 16 were categorized as one-dimensional, 3 as indifferent, and 2 as attractive attributes using the Kano model. None of the quality attributes showed a dominant must-be feature. The students considered the availability of appropriately qualified medical staff within 10 minutes of the check-in process and provision of after-hours care as attractive attributes that create greater satisfaction.

The research was conducted at a university SHS center. Therefore, respondents in the survey are in a younger age group, which may affect patient expectations. In addition, expectations of an SHS center may be different than expectations of visiting a primary care physician and other healthcare units.

This study contributes to a better understanding of the identification of healthcare needs using the Kano model and advocates focusing on shifts in the categories over time and changes in the demographic environment.

This paper aims to underline and evaluate what corporations are as artificial entities, the concept of corporate governance (CG) in the twentieth century and whether a corporation owes allegiance to its key stakeholders in the twenty-first century.

Because it requires development in the twenty-first century, a clarification of the key areas of reform in “global corporate governance” is overdue. These include an analysis of the stakeholder role; the logic and effect of the codes of corporate practise such as in the Cadbury Code and Combined Codes. The “value chain theory” in CG and how it should be placed not only on financial value but also on natural, human and cultural values will looked at. This paper also provides a brief insight into major multi-national corporate collapse. The Enron case, for example, highlights how such mishaps can be avoided to rekindle trust and transparency, as well as disclosure to authorities, shareholders and the public.

This paper looks at how public interest and consumer interest play a role in corporate existence by analysing an inevitable change in the twenty-first century from absolute corporate control to public/consumer control and have an influence in areas like environmental, ethical and employee protection and recognition. The emotional side of a corporation is brought to life to win the hearts of consumers and the public. How this fares in the light of profits and long-term Environmental Management Scheme investment will be evaluated.

This paper ends with a general conclusion, summarising the necessary changes to governance and the author’s opinion on the realities of change: will it work, will it improve the living standards or will it just increase the gap between well-organised and ill-fated economies?

This study aims to diagnose the perception, knowledge, awareness and position of the bioeconomy in university education and research.

This study is based on a questionnaire survey conducted at universities in Poland, the Czech Republic, Spain and Portugal (n = 464). The questionnaire consisted of open-ended, dichotomous and Likert-type questions. Variable frequency distribution methods and the non-parametric chi-square test were used to test the independence of the characteristics. The Cramer’s V contingency coefficient was used to determine the degree of dependence between the variables.

The researched academic community is dominated by a traditional approach to the bioeconomy, which relates to agriculture and ecological aspects. Respondents believe in the positive environmental impacts of the bioeconomy, while less often being aware of its importance from a socio-economic perspective. Insufficient teaching and research in the field of the bioeconomy can be widely observed. The presumed link between the existence of a bioeconomy strategy at national level and awareness of the bioeconomy was not confirmed.

The limited sample, the narrow geographical scope of the study does not allow for a comprehensive analysis of the topic. Another limitation is the lack of representativeness of the results in relation to all university representatives in the countries studied and the uneven composition of the samples.

This study fills the knowledge gap about the status of the bioeconomy in European academic communities by analysing its perception among both teachers and students of social, natural and applied sciences.

The purpose of this article is to examine the effect of housing type, relative to demographics, on householders' self-reported recycling across low-, medium- and high-density housing without recycling facilities by using the theory of planned behaviour.

A survey was conducted amongst 580 households across houses, townhouses and apartments in Pretoria, South Africa. The household member most responsible for recycling completed a self-administered questionnaire. Data were analysed using factor and reliability analyses, decision trees and multivariate analysis of variance.

Age was the strongest predictor; the older the respondent, the more likely the household recycled. Housing type was the second strongest predictor with a significant increase in recycling in houses compared to townhouses and apartments. Subsequent analyses focussed on young respondents to control for age. Housing type had an overall non-significant effect on the factors behind recycling. Post hoc tests, however, suggest that young respondents in townhouses and apartments felt significantly less able to recycle, particularly because of lack of space and support from managing agencies.

For recycling to be acceptable to young people in medium- and high-density housing, interior architects and site planners should find innovative ways to make individual and communal facilities as convenient and accessible as possible to tenants, owners and recycling companies. The role of managing agencies is also critical.

This study is one of the first to systematically examine recycling across three different housing types with recommendations for planning, design and further research.

This chapter explores the local narration of gendered experience of disasters in two iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) communities, Votua and Navala, both located in the Ba River catchment, Fiji. The methodology consisted of semi-formal interviews, talanoa, mapping sessions and journal entries from community members in Votua and Navala. Local narratives of post-disaster response and recovery in the aftermath of 2016 Tropical Cyclone Winston showed that women were not perceived as embodying a heightened vulnerability to disasters in comparison to men in either Votua or Navala. Rather perceptions of vulnerability were based on the experiences of those who physically struggled, such as people with disabilities, the elderly and those who had lost their homes. While gender roles and responsibilities underlay perceptions and gender relations, the roles and responsibilities were predominantly perceived as changing over time, either to a more shared sense of responsibilities or a shift from male responsibilities to female. This shift may lay the foundations for future changes in vulnerability and experiences towards disasters.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the agricultural activities and past experiences in professional training in the context of mobile learning in different countries (Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, Hungary, UK, Italy and Turkey).

For the survey, a questionnaire was prepared in English and Portuguese and then translated into the languages of the participating countries. It was delivered electronically for answering online by adults only. The participation was voluntary and in the end 133 consented valid questionnaires were obtained. For the treatment of the data, SPSS was used and basic descriptive statistics tools were applied, together with tests, namely, crosstabs and χ² tests, considering a level of significance of 5 percent.

The results showed that the majority of the participants presently have some agricultural activity and one-third is thinking about starting one in the future. Most of the participants want to produce food organically, with significant differences among the countries studied in this paper. Most of the participants were enrolled in training activities in agriculture, especially those with higher education. This participation showed significant differences between countries as well as according to the dimension of the farms owned by the participants. A significant association was found between being a teacher in forming activities related to agriculture and being a farmer. When compared to distance learning, the training activities in classroom were the most frequent, with significant differences among the countries.

This study allowed characterizing the learning activities in the field of organic agriculture and established vision for planning of future training programs, in different countries, with maybe different social, educational and cultural realities.

Because the study included the participation of people from several countries all around Europe, the results obtained enrich the scientific area of training in organic farming, in view of distance learning vs classroom learning on a more global basis.

There are different ways of implementing a corporate social responsibility (CSR) system. One interesting way of implementing a CSR system is based on standards such as SA8000 and ISO 26000. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the differences brought by the two standards in European manufacturing in CSR implementation using a survey.

Eight hypotheses were derived from an analysis of the implementation pattern for a CSR management system revealed from a review of the literature as well as from the actual two investigated standards. A questionnaire based on these hypotheses was administered to the CSR managers of 326 European manufacturing companies. A χ² and Cramer’s V-tests were used to validate the results. The CSR managers also added comments to their responses. The qualitative results gathered from the respondents’ comments helped the authors’ to better understand the quantitative data.

The results showed differences in how the standards affect strategies, economic and financial issues, stakeholders involved, environmental management, customer and market issues, supply chain management and CSR key performance indicators. The results indicated that it is not clear how production and technical departments can be involved in and committed to such standards or, in general, to a CSR system.

The research is based on a sample of European manufacturing managers and limited to the implementation of two specific CSR standards.

The differences between the standards should be interesting to practitioners who are thinking of implementing a CSR system in a manufacturing context and weighing the pros and cons of each standard.

This research analyses, for the first time, the differences in CSR implementation brought by SA8000 and ISO 26000 in manufacturing and, in particular, in production and technical departments.

The purpose of this paper is to show that there were differences in the use of Twitter by professors at AAU schools. Affordance use differed between the personal and professional tweets of professors as categorized by turkers. Framing behaviors were described that could impact the interpretation of tweets by audience members.

A three phase research design was used that included surveys of professors, categorization of tweets by workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and categorization of tweets by active professors on Twitter.

There were significant differences found between professors that reported having a Twitter account, significant differences found between types of Twitter accounts (personal, professional, or both), and significant differences in the affordances used in personal and professional tweets. Framing behaviors were described that may assist altmetric researchers in distinguishing between personal and professional tweets.

The study is limited by the sample population, survey instrument, low survey response rate, and low Cohen’s κ.

An overview of various affordances found in Twitter is provided and a novel use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for the categorization of tweets is described that can be applied to future altmetric studies.

This work utilizes a socio-technical framework integrating social and psychological theories to interpret results from the tweeting behavior of professors and the interpretation of tweets by workers in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the quality and accreditation of management education by examining the fit between the characteristics of current management academics in Portugal and recognised accreditation standards. For purposes of comparison, the authors use both general Portuguese teaching accreditation standards and specific international standards for management education.

The authors analyse indicators of staff career positioning, tenure status, full time vs part-time, age, degree qualifications, field of training, level of academic inbreeding, internationalisation, research activity, professional activity, and the number of hours taught per week. The authors also examine the relationship between them, in light of accreditation standards, for all academic staff teaching in management degrees submitted for compulsory accreditation by the Portuguese accreditation agency.

The reality found in this study shows gaps between the actual attributes of management academics and what can be considered appropriate attributes, according to the general consensus found in the literature and which is duly mirrored in common “qualified faculties” accreditation standards by Portuguese and international standards (AACSB, AMBA and EQUIS).

The findings relate to the Portuguese situation and the analysis developed should be extended to other contexts. Also, while the data, which were collected through a census, has a wide national scope, it only covers one academic year.

This work has policy setting implications for degree accreditation and for developing capacity during the transitional periods when universities implement the mandatory minimum standards. It can also help universities to benchmark themselves against their peers as a diagnostic tool for elaborating improvement plans.

The massification of higher education has led to legitimate concerns about the quality of the services provided, and consequently accreditation procedures were devised to restore trust. However, policy makers must be aware of the impacts of their actions, namely the effects of degree accreditation, as their goals need to be achieved with the minimum negative impact on academic work.

The authors work sheds light on the characteristics of those who teach management and how they align with the current accreditation policies that affect academia globally and, in the process, presents empirical evidence from Portugal, which is at a relatively early stage in the accreditation process.

The amount of overlap between criminal justice practices and public health is growing and more research is needed to guide new initiatives. This study was designed to assess the relationships between various chronic medical conditions, substance use severity, mental health indicators and criminal justice contact using the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

Analyses were conducted in three stages to comprehensively examine the relationships between various indicators of physical health, mental health, substance use severity and criminal justice contact.

Results demonstrate indicators of substance use severity surpass physical and mental health conditions as stronger determinants of any criminal justice contact, as well as repeated interactions with police. In addition, combinations of multiple conditions increase the likelihood of criminal justice involvement, but substance use remains a consistent factor contributing to the strongest associations. These findings highlight the importance of capitalizing on the initial point of criminal justice contact to address substance use to prevent further and subsequent involvement in the system.

Criminal justice initiatives based on least harm solutions require evidence to support public health-oriented approaches. The unique approach to examining the intersection of criminal justice practices and health provided in this study can be used to inform alternates to arrest.

The least harmful practices should be adopted to address health conditions at the time of criminal justice contact. These practices should focus heavily on injection drug use as a primary factor associated with the prior arrest. Practices designed to divert arrestees with health conditions away from jails are needed. Law enforcement practices can significantly benefit from public health-oriented approaches.

Criminal justice initiatives based on least harm solutions require evidence to support public health-oriented approaches. The unique approach to examining the intersection of criminal justice practices and health provided in this study can be used to inform alternates to arrest.