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Efficient delivery of integrated healthcare requires solid alliances and collaboration with stakeholders on a regular basis. Due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), it has become necessary to explore new ways of delivering integrated healthcare, and virtual clinics have offered one solution and are likely to continue due to the uncertainty with COVID-19. This study aims to explore clinicians’ experiences of how efficient virtual elective knee clinics (VEKC) are in an orthopaedic setting in comparison to traditional face-to-face clinics.

The study utilised a mixed-methods study to obtain qualitative and quantitative data. This involved an anonymous online survey in addition to in-depth qualitative interviews conducted with a purposive sample of multidisciplinary colleagues who work with the VEKC in an acute hospital.

Three overarching themes and nine sub-themes emerged in the qualitative analysis. Overall, clinicians in both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the study highlighted several ways that virtual clinics are efficient from both the patient and health service perspective. However, participants also highlighted barriers in relation to virtual clinics not being suitable for certain cohorts of patients and pathologies.

This is the first study in Ireland to provide valuable insights into the experiences of multidisciplinary clinicians using VEKC and their efficiency compared to traditional face-to-face clinics.

This paper aims to survey the published journal literature on reference transaction assessment. Its purpose is to highlight the need for a multiple perspectives approach due to the complexity of reference transactions. Satisfaction indicators, behavioral aspects, accuracy rates, success measures, and other desired transaction outcomes contribute to the need for a broader assessment picture.

This is a review from the first decade of the twenty‐first century. Selected were papers from 2001 through 2010, filtered from search results from library literature databases. Primary inclusion criteria identified refereed papers, studies of academic library populations, evaluation or assessment of reference transactions, and methods contributing to systematic practices versus unique assessment events.

By viewing reference transactions as complex interactions, librarians are recognizing that simple counts and narrow views of assessment are not adequate. Missing in the assessment literature is a universally accepted set of standard approaches, study methodologies, and reporting formats for comparison and analysis. Improvements may contribute to efforts that go beyond local studies to more meaningful peer comparisons.

Although not an exhaustive representation of all reference services assessment literature, the paper profiles the heart of reference, i.e. the interaction between users and library service providers. This focus fosters a concentration on a core reference activity: addressing library users' information needs.

This review highlights assessment challenges, unresolved problems, and topics addressed from 2001 to 2010. It also provides a look at tools that can enhance assessment programs.

Dr D.C. Martin said that what he was about to say might appear to be somewhat superficial, perhaps, because, unlike the audience, he was no expert and from the Assistant Secretary's chair one obtained a general rather than a particular view.

The purpose of this paper is to consider why Richard Dawes (1793-1867) academic, college business manager and Church of England priest developed a curriculum in a nineteenth century English village school with which he sought to modify differences in social class and achieved outstanding results in student engagement and educational attainment.

The approach is documentary. It uses books and internet scans of original documents. It locates Dawes's work in the social movements of early nineteenth century Britain and associates Dawes's activities with those of Kay-Shuttleworth who was administrator of the British government's first move to provide education for poor children.

Dawes emphasised tolerance and secular teaching within a school system devoted to instilling Church of England doctrine. He based classroom teaching on things familiar to children and integrated subject content. He used science to encourage parents of “that class immediately above that of labourers” to send their children to his school to overcome class differences. For his system to be widely adopted he needed science teachers trained in his practical teaching methods. Initial government support for science in elementary schools was eroded by Church of England opposition to state intervention in education.

Dawes's pedagogic achievements are well known in the history of science education; his secular teaching in a church school and his valiant attempt to use science as an instrument of social change, perhaps less so.

Since the 1970s, international manufacturing companies, in pursuit of world‐class goals, have been adopting and adapting management practices developed originally in Japan. Notable characteristics of such companies now include: a customer‐focused culture; a concentration on core competencies with high levels of outsourcing; an emphasis on team working and manufacturing cells; low levels of stock at all stages of assembly; frequent small deliveries by suppliers directly to the production areas; a supply base of relatively few suppliers; partnership agreements with key first‐tier suppliers. Such companies are aiming to produce goods of world‐class quality and to do so, given the large amounts of bought‐in components and sub‐systems, pay a great deal of attention to the supply network. As a result, the purchasing function in these companies, as the interface with suppliers, plays a crucial role in manufacturing strategy. It is thus important to determine what multinational manufacturing companies want from their suppliers, ie what constitutes the “total package” that they want to have supplied? To this end, a total quality‐based 15‐criteria model of this package was developed and pre‐tested with senior purchasing managers from multinational corporations (MNCs). Based on this model a survey of senior purchasing managers of 170 MNCs throughout Ireland was undertaken and this paper reports on the results from the 62 usable returns.

The long-term financial stability of hospital systems represents a “grand challenge” in health care. New ownership forms, such as private equity (PE), promise to achieve better financial performance than nonprofit or for-profit systems. In this study, we compare two systems with many similarities, but radically different ownership structures, missions, governance, and merger and acquisition (M&A) strategies. Both were nonprofit, religious systems serving low-income communities – Montefiore Health System and Caritas Christi Health Care.

Montefiore's M&A strategy was to invest in local hospitals and create an integrated regional system, increasing revenues by adding primary doctors and community hospitals as feeders into the system and achieving efficiencies through effective resource allocation across specialized units. Slow and steady timing of acquisitions allowed for organizational learning and balancing of debt and equity. By 2019, it owned 11 hospitals with 40,000 employees and had strong positive financials and low reliance on debt.

By contrast, in 2010, PE firm Cerberus Capital bought out Caritas (renamed Steward Health Care System) and took control of the Board of Directors, who set the system's strategic direction. Cerberus used Steward as a platform for a massive debt-driven acquisition strategy. In 2016, it sold off most of its hospitals’ property for $1.25 billion, leaving hospitals saddled with long-term inflated leases; paid itself almost $500 million in dividends; and used the rest for leveraged buyouts of 27 hospitals in 9 states in 3 years. The rapid, scattershot M&A strategy was designed to create a large corporation that could be sold off in five years for financial gain – not for health care integration. Its debt load exploded, and by 2019, its financials were deeply in the red. Its Massachusetts hospitals were the worst financial performers of any system in the state. Cerberus exited Steward in 2020 in a deal that left its physicians, the new owners, holding the debt.

MANY and sundry are the worries which fall to the lot of the librarian, and the matter of book‐repair is not the least among them. The very limited book‐fund at the disposal of most public library authorities makes it imperative on the part of the librarian to keep the books in his charge in circulation as long as possible, and to do this at a comparatively small cost, in spite of poor paper, poor binding, careless repairing, and unqualified assistants. This presents a problem which to some extent can be solved by the establishment of a small bindery or repairing department, under the control of an assistant who understands the technique of bookbinding.

Recent corporate failures such as Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing and K‐Mart and auditing failures such as Arthur Andersen have sparked great public concern, including the passage of the Sarbanes‐Oxley Act of 2002. This paper aims to address the development of accounting standards.

The approach is to use the fuzzy‐analytical‐hierarchical‐process (FAHP), recently developed by de Korvin and Klyele. Uncertainty in assigning priorities and the use of semantic variables lead naturally to the inclusion of fuzzy sets in the structure of the AHP paradigm. The hierarchy of decisions, constructed sequentially, consists of three levels of attributes.

The paper shows that applying the highly sophisticated mathematical FAHP model is needed to select the optimum mechanism for establishing accounting and auditing standards. The FAHP application results lead to a rational ranking of the four bases to develop accounting standards.

This paper helps to explain the ambiguous and vague nature of the attributes of financial reporting and to apply a recently developed mathematical methodology to help accounting policy makers select the optimum mechanism for developing accounting standards.