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It is widely acknowledged that the delivery of health care has been made more complex by a number of factors including technology, information, organizational arrangements, and the increasing burden of chronic illness. This increase in complexity has underscored the need for more effective teamwork and working relationships among health care providers. Although professional education groups such as the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) have mandated competencies such as “work effectively as a member or leader of a health care team or other professional group” since at least 2007, it is clear from both research and anecdotal accounts that there is still room for significant development in this area.

As health care delivery becomes increasingly focused on patient-centered models, interventions such as patient navigation that have the potential to improve care coordination garner interest from health care managers and clinicians. The ability to understand how and to what extent patient navigation is successful in addressing coordination issues, however, is hampered by multiple definitions, vague boundaries, and different contextual implementations of patient navigation. Using a systematic review strategy and classification method, we review both the conceptual and empirical literature regarding navigation in multiple clinical contexts. We then describe and conceptualize variation in how patient navigation has been defined, implemented, and theorized to affect outcomes. This review suggests that patient navigation varies along multiple dimensions and that the variation is related to differing resources, constraints, and goals. We propose a conceptual model to frame further research and suggest that research in this area must carefully account for this variation in order to accurately assess the benefits of patient navigation and provide actionable knowledge for managers.

John D. Blair examines, in systematic detail, the challenges and opportunities that arise from the significantly different perspectives of context-specific versus context-free researchers and the literatures to which they contribute. He argues that reviews of one type or the other or both types of literatures may provide different understandings of the state of the art in a particular area of health care management. He also provides some detailed suggestions for writing quality reviews along with suggested topics for future reviews.

The pricing of parking is a common tool used by governments to facilitate the efficient movement of traffic, raise revenue and, more recently, influence travel behaviour. An important and under-researched by-product of parking pricing schemes is the impact of these schemes on parking supply.

This chapter offers a review of prior research and literature, and explores: who pays the parking levy, the impact of the Congestion Levy on the provision of parking and an overview of the transport impacts of the levy.

The direction of the levy at parking operators and owners rather than the vehicle drivers does not provide a direct link between users and the levy and results in many parking providers not passing the levy onto commuters. The study of parking supply impact shows that, since the introduction of the levy, the supply of commercial off-street parking spaces has declined while the growth in private, non-residential, parking spaces has slowed. Over the same period, there has been a decrease in the number of parking spaces provided for long-stay parking (which attract the parking levy), and an increase in the number of spaces provided for other uses. Understanding these parking supply impacts are important, not only because a reduction in the number of long-stay car parking spaces is an objective of the levy, but also because any such reduction could magnify the travel behaviour impacts that may have occurred solely as a result of an increase in parking price. Investigation of the overall transport impacts of the levy indicate that the parking levy did have an impact on mode choice. However the extent of this impact was not clear due to a large number of associated changes in policy and economic conditions that took place at the same time as the levy.

The chapter shows that the parking levy was positive in its impact on transport use, however there were a number of improvements that could be made to the way the levy was implemented that could improve these. Interestingly, there have been a number of recent changes in the implementation of the levy that address some of these issues. Most importantly, following its own investigation into the impact of the levy, from January 2014 the cost of the levy was increased by 40% to $1,300 per annum, and its coverage extended (Victorian State Revenue Office, 2013). The impact of this change has not been considered in this research.

The uniqueness of the chapter lies in its exploration of how increased prices of parking has influenced supply and how the levy, as a new form of congestion pricing, has influenced the supply of parking in the context of the case study of the Melbourne parking levy in Australia.

Since the mid-1990s most Australian jurisdictions have adopted, either through subordinate legislation or through internal government directives, rules regarding how government agencies should behave when participating in litigation. While these rules met an immediate need associated with the outsourcing of legal work to private law firms, this chapter argues that they are unsuited for enduring use: they lack a proper rationale, they are poorly worded and uncertain in their meaning; it is unclear whether and how courts should enforce them, and they have not been reviewed to take account of the more recent developments in civil procedure.