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The Royal College of Surgeons recognises patient handover as the point at which patients are collectively at their most vulnerable. Concerns were raised in a London teaching hospital surgical department regarding an unstructured handover system, poor access to relevant clinical information, and inadequate weekend staffing. A quality improvement programme was designed and implemented to respond to these concerns and improve patient safety. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A structured questionnaire was distributed to staff and results used to construct a diagram outlining the main factors influencing weekend patient safety. This framework was used to design changes, including a new electronic handover tool, regular handover meetings and additional weekend staff. Regular staff training was provided, and success was assessed in a continuous audit cycle with the results fed back to team leaders.

Over a three-month period, the handover meeting recorded an attendance rate consistently above 80 per cent. The electronic handover entries were scored according to seven criteria (correct layout; key information, i.e.: patient location, clinical priority, active issues, resuscitation status, test results and weekend plan), averaging between 42.2 and 92.9 per cent, with progressive improvement seen over the assessment period. Weekend staffing was increased by 50 per cent, allowing a dedicated team to care for stable inpatients and to oversee discharges.

This improvement programme delivered lasting and significant change in response to staff concerns. It resulted in a more structured and reliable weekend system and established key mechanisms for dynamic performance feedback.

This paper explores the political and legal issues contained in the law and jurisprudence surrounding missing American service personnel. It argues that the Missing Service Personnel Act of 1995 is an effect of the legacy of the Vietnam War rather than a response to a particular legal problem. The essay further contends that we should be suspicious of the effort to transform the balance sheet of war into a justiciable legal question, primarily because the requirement to produce a body fails to disarm the representational economy in which the absent body constitutes a continuation of Vietnam War hostilities.

Although the debate about Internet governance has cooled off as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s ambitions have narrowed, there remains a broad variety of regulatory issues that will require an international approach. Apart from ICANN, a diverse set of institutions is already involved in setting standards, allocating resources, and resolving conflicts. This paper looks at how the operations of these institutions, together with the experiences of ICANN, could serve as a starting point for a more integrated and comprehensive approach to tackling the challenges the Internet will face in the years to come.

Governments are no strangers to dealing with crises. On the contrary, a central role of any government is to absorb, navigate and mitigate them. However, crises themselves are unpredictable and represent a significant challenge to governments at both the national and local level. Despite such uncertainty, studying how governments in different countries respond to crises offers a great opportunity to learn from the past and to understand the nature of resilience in the face of significant shocks and disruption.

This book charts how local governments in 11 countries, covering Europe, the United States, South America and Australia, responded to the recent crises and austerity period by shedding new light on the role of contextual- and policy-related conditions as well as the internal capacities and conditions that may influence responses and, ultimately, performance.

This chapter sets the scene for the book, by highlighting the relevance of examining financial crises and austerity and the ways in which governments, and more specifically, local governments, are facing the related shocks. In doing so, it proposes a preliminary framework for exploring governmental financial resilience at the local level. In such a framework, financial resilience is seen as the dynamic combination of internal and external dimensions, including the external environment, financial shocks, vulnerability, anticipatory capacity and coping capacity.

The aim of this study was to assess how post‐16 students in Wales conceptualized health and healthy eating.

A health survey questionnaire was completed by 297 post‐16 students who were pursuing Biology at A level in year 12. The questionnaire was issued towards the end of the summer term in year 12 which ensured that at that stage in their A level studies, all students had received teaching on the nutritional and biochemical component of the syllabus they were taking.

For the majority of respondents, and particularly males, being healthy was seen as the absence of illness and having the capacity to function as expected whereas female students significantly reported the importance of positive health behaviours, such as the need for exercising regularly and eating a balanced diet. Of concern, only a small percentage of the respondents reported the importance of eating fruit and vegetables as part of a healthy diet. Despite an increased emphasis on health issues within the school curriculum, it was apparent that female students possessed a more positive view of health as well as demonstrating a better understanding of what healthy eating means.

It is recommended that greater attention needs to be devoted to how health and nutritional education is taught in secondary schools.

Self‐regulation is widely considered to be a necessary complement – sometimes substitute – for traditional media‐supervision legislation and practice, especially so when the regulatory object is the Internet, where national legislation meets global networks and content. An example of an internationally structured self‐regulation initiative is provided by the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA). Its filter for blocking Internet content must be seen within the context of a more extensive bundle of measures based on the principle of self‐regulation. By choosing ICRA as a focal point, the authors set out to illustrate the new, user‐centered paradigm that could become the rule rather than exception for all kinds of media.

In this chapter, the authors explore emotional discomfort and the use of live polling to enable business leaders on executive education leadership programmes to move beyond their emotional comfort zones, to facilitate self-awareness and enhance reflective practice. Openly acknowledging and discussing one’s leadership weaknesses produce emotions which are not always easily shared, especially among business leaders. Yet, identifying emotions and acknowledging discomfort is key for reflective practice and a common failure in many leadership development programmes (LDP). The authors reflect on their experience in designing and delivering a custom LDP commissioned by a UK-based corporate client. The authors draw on the pedagogy of discomfort, emotions in leadership development, and the use of audience response system (ARS) technology to enable and facilitate the development of learner self-awareness.

It is no longer merely far-fetched science fiction to think that robots will be the chief combatants, waging wars in place of humans. Or is it? While artificial intelligence (AI) has made remarkable strides, tempting us to personify the machines “making decisions” and “choosing targets”, a more careful analysis reveals that even the most sophisticated AI can only be an instrument rather than an agent of war. After establishing the layered existential nature of war, we lay out the prerequisites for being a (moral) agent of war. We then argue that present AI falls short of this bar, and we have strong reason to think this will not change soon. With that in mind, we put forth a second argument against robots as agents: there is a continuum with other clearly nonagential tools of war, like swords and chariots. Lastly, we unpack what this all means: if AI does not add another moral player to the battlefield, how (if at all) should AI change the way we think about war?