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The purposes of this paper are two-fold: first, to introduce a new concept of primary care consultation system at a mainland Chinese hospital in response to healthcare reform; and second, to explore the factors associated with change resistance and acceptance from both patients’ and medical staff’s perspectives.

A survey design study, with two questionnaires developed and distributed to patients and medical staff. Convenience and stratified random sampling methods were applied to patient and medical staff samples.

A 5-dimension, 21-item patient questionnaire and a 4-dimension, 16-item staff questionnaire were identified and confirmed, with 1020 patients (91.07 percent) and 202 staff (90.18 percent) as effective survey participants. The results revealed that patient resistance mainly stems from a lack of personal experiences with visiting general practice (GP) and being educated or having lived overseas; while staff resistance came from occupation, education, GP training certificate, and knowledge and experience with specialists. Living in overseas and knowledge of GP concepts, gender and education are associated with resistance of accepting the new practice model for both patients and staff.

There are few Chinese studies on process reengineering in the medical sector; this is the first study to adopt this medical consultation model and change in patients’ consultation culture in Mainland China. Applying organizational change and process reengineering theories to medical and healthcare services not only extends and expands hospital management theory but also allows investigation of modern hospital management practice. The experience from this study can serve as a reference to promote this new consultation model in Chinese healthcare reform.

The purpose of this paper is to derive a conceptual model for information science, which is both academically sound and practically useful, particularly for curriculum design.

The approach takes the form of a conceptual analysis, based on an extensive literature review, going back to the earliest days of information science.

A conceptual model is derived, based on the study of components of the information chain through approaches of domain analysis, plus “fringe” topics and a meta‐level consideration of the discipline itself. Links to related subjects may be derived systematically from this model.

This is the first paper to suggest that a useful model for information science can be derived, based on the idea of studying the communication chain by means of domain analysis.

This paper aims to examine the effect of R&D teams’ gender diversity on different innovation outputs. The paper argues that some innovations are best positioned to capitalize on the benefits of gender diversity because of the greater relevance of market insight and personal interactions. Moreover, it argues that gender diversity is not a source of innovation for foreign firms because of the subsidiaries’ role in the multinational group, the tacit nature of gender policies and the institutional distance between multinationals’ home and host countries.

Drawing from data of the Spanish Survey of Technological Innovation Panel de Innovación Tecnológica (PITEC), this study uses multivariable probit models that allow for systematic correlations among the different innovation outcomes to determine the impact of R&D workforce gender diversity on the likelihood of introducing different innovation outputs.

Allowing for systematic correlations among different innovation outcomes, results indicate that the relationship between gender diversity and product and process innovation has the shape of an inverted-U, while there is a positive linear association with service innovation. Moreover, gender diversity produces a greater impact on product innovation than on process innovation. Results also indicate that while gender diversity fosters every innovation outcome of domestic firms, it only contributes to foreign firms’ services innovation in a positive non-linear way.

Because of the availability of data, this paper has focused on how firms’ multinationality and group affiliation influence the relationship between gender diversity and innovation; however, other firms’ differences might also play a role on the effectiveness of the R&D workforce’s gender diversity. Firms differ on strategies, structures and capabilities (Nelson, 1991), and these differences may condition the potential of gender diversity. Therefore, this paper opens future research lines.

Innovative firms should be concerned with human resource management practices for gender diversity regardless of their innovation output strategy. However, managers should not consider forming teams with equal proportions of men and women. Those firms aiming at introducing innovations that involve interactions among internal and external agents and those that require a better interface with the marketplace will benefit more from gender diversity than those firms pursuing innovations related to the solution of technical problems. Finally, the paper shows that foreign subsidiaries have problems with the implementation of gender policies, especially when it comes to service and process innovation activities.

This paper contributes by examining the influence of two contextual factors that may affect the relationship between gender diversity and innovation. First, it examines how gender diversity affects the likelihood of introducing different innovation outputs (product, service and process) as the different tasks required by each innovation represent different contexts that may affect the effectiveness of gender diversity. Second, the paper analyzes whether the influence of R&D workforce’s gender diversity on innovation outputs is different for domestic and foreign firms as foreign firms’ national culture, organizational culture, strategy and HR practices differ from those of domestic firms.

Hospital systems are expected to influence patient safety outcomes. The purpose of this study is to explore organisational factors influencing patient safety and safety behaviour among nurses and other hospital staff.

Based on a theoretical model, six dimensions were selected from the hospital survey on patient safety culture. Moreover, one standardized dimension measuring safety behaviour was included. The data were collected from 1,703 hospital workers completing a cross-sectional survey.

Confirmatory factor analysis and supplementary statistics supported the use of measurement concepts applied in the study. A two-step statistical approach using structural equation modelling resulted in a satisfactory final model illustrating direct and indirect influence of the explanatory factors used.

The limitation of this study is the use of a cross-sectional survey design.

The study illustrates how organisational factors are interconnected. The theoretical model developed and tested can be applied to improve safety behaviour and patient safety in hospital settings.

The social implications of this study include the social relationships within the hospital setting, illustrating how organisational factors influence both safety behaviour and perception of patient safety levels.

A new theoretical model is developed and tested among hospital staff. The paper adds a new perspective on how organisational factors influence perceived safety outcomes in hospital settings.

European Parliament adopted a new directive on gender balance in corporate boards when by 2026, companies must employ 40% of the underrepresented sex into non-executive directors or 33% among all directors. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the impact of gender diversity (GD) on board of directors and the shareholders’ structure and their impact on the likelihood of company bankruptcy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The data sample consists of 1,351 companies for 2019 and 2020, of which 173 were large, 351 medium-sized companies and 827 small companies. Three bankruptcy indicators were tested for each company size, and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and logistic regression models were developed. These models were then cross-validated by a 10-fold approach.

XGBoost models achieved area under curve (AUC) over 98%, which is 25% higher than AUC achieved by logistic regression. Prediction models with GD features performed slightly better than those without them. Furthermore, this study indicates the existence of critical mass between 30% and 50%, which decreases the probability of bankruptcy for small and medium companies. Furthermore, the representation of women in ownership structures above 50% decreases bankruptcy likelihood.

This is a pioneering study to explore GD topics by application of ensembled machine learning methods. Moreover, the study does analyze not only the GD of boards but also shareholders. A highly innovative approach is GD analysis based on company size performed in one study considering the COVID-19 pandemic perspective.

Physicians who are primary care providers in rural communities form an essential stakeholder group in rural mobile health (mHealth) delivery. This study was exploratory in nature and was conducted in Udupi district of Karnataka, India. The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of rural medical officers (MOs) (rural physicians) regarding the benefits and challenges of mobile phone use by community health workers (CHWs).

In-depth interviews were conducted among 15 MOs belonging to different primary health centers of the district. Only MOs with a minimum five years of experience were recruited in the study using purposive and snowball sampling. This was followed by thematic analysis of the data collected.

The perceptions of MOs regarding the CHWs' use of mobile phones were largely positive. However, they reported the existence of some challenges that limits the potential of its full use. The findings were categorized under four themes namely, benefits of mobile phone use to CHWs, benefits of mobile phone-equipped CHWs, current mobile phone use by CHWs and barriers to CHWs' mobile phone use. The significant barriers reported in the CHWs' mobile phone use were poor mobile network coverage, technical illiteracy, lack of consistent technical training and call and data expense of the CHWs. The participants recommend an increased number of mobile towers, frequent training in mobile phone use and basic English language for the CHWs as possible solutions to the barriers.

Studies examining the perceptions of doctors who are a primary stakeholder group in mHealth as well as in the public health system scenario are limited. To the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine the perception of rural doctors regarding CHWs' mobile phone use for work in India.

The first indication that traditional lecture-style teaching is not very effective was provided by Dr Donald Bligh in the 1980s and 1990s. As empirical evidence about this fact has continued to accumulate, science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in the USA has undergone a significant change in emphasis away from lecture-based approaches in favor of systems emphasizing more interactive learning. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

A wide range of experimental research has employed the principles of scientific teaching to investigate the efficacy of an ever widening range of pedagogical methods. For STEM education, the most successful of these has been active learning.

At its core, active learning is a redesign of in-class activities to maximize interactivity and feedback through facilitated problem-solving environments. Although the efficacies of both scientific teaching and active learning have been verified in a wide range of empirical works, the dissemination of these platforms, in general, teaching has been slow, even in the USA.

The first significant impediment has been an overall lack of awareness coupled with general skepticism about alternative learning methods.

This paper first reviews the education literature behind scientific teaching and active learning before reviewing some of the challenges to their implementation on an institutional level.

These challenges and known solutions are then applied to the European and East Asian contexts to examine why scientific teaching and active learning remain predominantly an American phenomenon.

For East Asian countries, the authors offer a commentary on how certain aspects of Confucian classroom culture may interact negatively with efforts to install scientific teaching and active learning systems.