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Infection control guidelines for cystic fibrosis (CF) stress cleaning of environmental surfaces and patientcare equipment in CF clinics. This multicenter study measured cleanliness of frequently touched surfaces in CF clinics using an ATP bioluminescence assay to assess the effectiveness of cleaning/disinfection and the impact of feedback.
Methods:
Eight surfaces were tested across 19 clinics (10 pediatric, 9 adult) over 5 rounds of testing. Rounds 1 and 2 served as uncleaned baseline, and Round 3 occurring after routine cleaning. Rounds 4 and 5 were performed after feedback provided to staff and measured after cleaning. Pass rates defined as <250 relative light units were the primary outcome.
Results:
Of the 750 tests performed, 72% of surfaces passed at baseline, and 79%, 83%, and 85% of surfaces passed in Rounds 3, 4, and 5, respectively. The overall pass-rate was significantly higher in adult compared to pediatric clinics (86% vs 71%; P < 0.001). In pediatric clinics, blood pressure equipment and computer keyboards in the pulmonary function lab consistently passed, but the exam room patient/visitor chairs consistently failed in all rounds. In adult clinics blood pressure equipment, keyboards in exam rooms and exam tables passed in all rounds and no surface consistently failed.
Conclusion:
We demonstrate the feasibility of an ATP bioluminescence assay to measure cleanliness of patient care equipment and surfaces in CF clinics. Pass rates improved after cleaning and feedback for certain surfaces. We found that surfaces are more challenging to keep clean in clinics taking care of younger patients.
This article examines the power and purpose of union peak bodies, focussing on one particularly powerful organisation, the Barrier Industrial Council in Broken Hill. We argue that the power and purpose of all such bodies is multi-dimensional, historically contingent and spatially specific. The most illuminating studies conceptualise peak bodies as agents of mobilisation, with power delegated by affiliates, and of economic and political exchange, with power derived from a ‘structural coupling’ with the state and capital. However, there is a third possible peak body purpose: social regulation and, specifically, the regulation of labour and commodity markets. This was a conspicuous activity of the Barrier Industrial Council, underpinned by success in mobilisation and exchange and by ‘place consciousness’. Understanding the variety of potential power sources holds the key to explaining not only why some peak bodies command more power than others but also why there is so much variation in peak union focus and behaviour.
Economists have rightly observed that labour commodification is one of the defining characteristics of the market capitalist mode. In this contribution, however, we contend that while a traditional macroeconomic perspective goes some way towards explaining the nature of the employment relationship, it fails to acknowledge that commodification is a necessary but not sufficient condition for labour utilisation. Viewed through the lens of organisation theory, the main employer agenda regarding labour utilisation is that of ‘human resource’ objectification, rather than market commodification. We seek to demonstrate this by examining how, under contemporary ‘human resource management’ (HRM), labour management theory and practice have developed into a sophisticated project designed to psychologise the employee subject into a resource object. In line with objectification, it is a project through which management seek to render human capabilities, attitudes and emotions — the basis of the worker's status as a social and organisational subject — classifiable, measurable and, hence, more manipulable.
This chapter examines plant macrofossils from Lower Bed II, Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania). During field surveys in 1998, pieces of fossilized sedge culm were identified eroding from the earthy clay exposures of Lower Bed II. The gaps in plant taphonomic literature relating to sedges and marshlands led us to initiate a long-term actualistic field study in a modern seasonal wetland, specifically the living seasonal wetland plant community at Seekoeivlei (South Africa). The results of this study, as applied to the fossil evidence from Olduvai, are invaluable in interpreting the nature of the marshland of Lower Bed II.
Social innovation has come to be widely embraced as a fresh problem-solving approach to address what are framed as stubborn and costly social policy challenges. Paradoxically, despite claims to newness, SI is often cast as a neutral path to identify ‘what works’ to solve problems. This apolitical positioning fails to contextualize the socio-economic and political dynamics in which problems and SI have arisen. This chapter engages in such a contextualization and re-politicization of the SI agenda.
The SI agenda jumped into prominence in the wake of the 2008 ‘Great Recession’ and must be understood as tightly tied to neoliberal projects of austerity. In this chapter, we argue that SI helps us to understand the ways in which the neoliberal project has proven to be ‘an adaptive creature of crisis’, embracing policy ideas and reforms needed to drive forward its agenda. Its engagement in a ‘permanent revolution’ of experimentation and policy shapeshifting has been necessary, ironically, because so much of its market-based reforms have been failures (Peck et al 2012). We argue that the movement from ‘roll back’ (‘greed-is-good’) to ‘roll out’ (‘markets-with-morals’) neoliberalism has been facilitated through SI (Peck nd) and warn that this current phase of ‘neoliberalism with a smile’ remains centred in austerity. Neoliberalism's adaptive abilities enables it to co-opt many seemingly alternative ideas, stripping them of more progressive political projects that might be at their root. For instance, the Stanford Social Innovation Review has accepted the austerity argument that there is just not enough state fiscal capacity to deal with meaningful social policy reform. It endorses a non-statist ‘realist position’ of employing the use of the non-profit sector, charity and venture-based philanthrocapitalism as a way to harness private initiative and capital for public good. Yet, this was not always the case as SI has roots in radical, restorative and transformative movements. In this chapter, we explore the lineage of SI, including its amorphous definition, seemingly conflicting idea-sets, and associated tools and techniques to understand how it has been used to extend the neoliberal project through austerity and to identify internal conflicts that might be exploited to challenge austerity politics.
We made 28 collections of black flies (Diptera: Simuliidae) at 24 locations in central and northeastern Washington state, United States of America, and identified 10 species in three genera, including Simulium arcticum Malloch, which we studied cytogenetically. We analysed 745 larvae of S. arcticum cytogenetically from nine of the 11 sites where it occurred; five sites had small sample sizes. For the collections with large sample sizes, the distribution of S. arcticum may have a geographic pattern. Larvae in western tributaries of the Columbia River have the sex-linked IIL-2 inversion and heterozygotes for the IS-1 autosomal polymorphism in abundance but lack the IIL-21 sex-linked inversion, whereas larvae in eastern tributaries of the Columbia River possess the IIL-21 inversion but lack IIL-2 and the IS-1 inversions. A cytotype new to science, S. arcticum IIL-81, occurs in some larvae at the Methow River in the eastern Cascades region. All females, regardless of location, possess enhanced (Ce Ce) centromere bands in their IIL-chromosomes, whereas all males possess the enhanced, thin (Ce Ct) centromere band dimorphism. The Methow River had nine types of chromosomally identified males in 2019 and eight types in 2020.
The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) is the first large-area survey to be conducted with the full 36-antenna Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope. RACS will provide a shallow model of the ASKAP sky that will aid the calibration of future deep ASKAP surveys. RACS will cover the whole sky visible from the ASKAP site in Western Australia and will cover the full ASKAP band of 700–1800 MHz. The RACS images are generally deeper than the existing NRAO VLA Sky Survey and Sydney University Molonglo Sky Survey radio surveys and have better spatial resolution. All RACS survey products will be public, including radio images (with
$\sim$
15 arcsec resolution) and catalogues of about three million source components with spectral index and polarisation information. In this paper, we present a description of the RACS survey and the first data release of 903 images covering the sky south of declination
$+41^\circ$
made over a 288-MHz band centred at 887.5 MHz.
The third edition of Managing Employee Performance and Reward: Systems, Practices and Prospects has been thoroughly revised and updated by a new four-member author team. The text introduces a new conceptual framework based on systems thinking and a dual model of strategic alignment and psychological engagement. Coverage of chapter topics provides a balance between research evidence and practice and, in this new edition, is enhanced with a more applied and technical approach. The text also includes chapters dedicated to conceptual framing, base pay and individual recognition and reward; 'reality check' breakout boxes with practical examples and current problems on each of strategic alignment, employee engagement, organisation justice and workforce diversity; and a new chapter exploring new horizons in performance and reward practice and research with a focus on the mega-trends of technological transformation under 'Industry 4.0', new economic forms and relationships arising from the 'gig' economy, and generational change.
The previous chapter examined the range of reward plans associated with the recognition and reward of individual behaviour and/or results. This chapter focuses on plans where reward outcomes are contingent on measures of collective results; that is, on collective incentive plans. Because such plans are generally geared to measures of group results over a relatively brief time frame – typically monthly, quarterly or annually – they are also known as collective or group short-term incentive plans, or ‘STIs’.
We begin our exploration of collective STIs by outlining the general rationale for such plans and by overviewing the four main plan types: profit-sharing, gainsharing, goal-sharing and team incentives. Subsequent sections explore each of these four plan types in more detail, noting the advantages and disadvantages of each. Consistent with the approach taken in earlier chapters, a final section considers the strategic priorities to which each plan type would be most and least appropriate.
Chapter 1 introduced the basic ‘tools’ of performance and reward management, including key aspects of purpose and practice. In this chapter we introduce two overarching concepts of alignment that recur throughout this book: ‘strategic alignment’ and ‘psychological engagement’. The design, implementation and maintenance of effective performance and reward management systems requires simultaneous, systematic and constant attention to both of these dimensions of alignment.
‘Strategic alignment’ refers to the plans, processes and actions involved in establishing and maintaining an alignment between an organisation’s overarching purpose or intent and how it manages employee performance and reward, as well as all other aspects of people management.
A remuneration system typically comprises three main elements: base pay, benefits and performance-related pay. In designing any remuneration system careful attention should be paid to three key considerations: first, the relative role that each of these three components will play in total remuneration; second, the practices that will be drawn on to configure each component; and third, the target level of total remuneration for each position. Any discussion of remuneration practice must consider what, for most employees, is the primary component of their total remuneration, namely base pay.
This is a book about two of the core activities integral in the field of human resource management: managing employee performance and managing how employees are rewarded. As we shall see throughout the book, there is a close and complex inter-dependence between these two activities; so much so that it makes little sense to consider them in isolation from each other. Equally, while the book’s central concerns are with performance and reward practices and processes, attention is also paid throughout to recognising and analysing the interconnectedness of these and other aspects of human resource management. Performance management systems provide inputs into other HR functions such as training and employee development, as well as evaluating HR decisions such as recruitment and selection.
The concept of ‘total reward management’, which was canvassed in chapter 1, acknowledges the growing importance of benefit plans in strategic reward practice, particularly in attracting and retaining high capability employees with specific demographic characteristics, such as women professionals, experienced older workers of both sexes, and younger workers, such as ‘Millennials’ (born between 1985 and 2000) and ‘Generation Z’ (those born since 2000).
Whereas benefits were once the least glamorous of all aspects of reward management – and were literally referred to as ‘fringe’ reward practices – many organisations now consider them to be an important means of gaining a competitive advantage in labour markets where key ‘talent’ is in short supply. As the workforce becomes more diverse and as the level of employee education and reward expectation rises, financial and non-financial benefits are assuming an increasingly critical role in the reward management system’s ability to attract, retain and motivate high-potential and high-performing employees.
Having laid out all the pieces of the performance and reward puzzle, it is time for us to consider how to go about assembling these elements into a coherent whole. In previous chapters, we have offered you some insights as to how the practices referred to in the chapter might support certain strategic priorities rather than others. In this chapter, we detail common approaches to assembling the various concepts, practices and strategies explored previously. In developing an integrated, strategically aligned and psychologically engaging performance and reward system, we need to remember that nothing is ever ‘finished’ and that change is the great constant. Accordingly, we examine the requirements for performance and reward system review, the steps involved in system change and development and challenges that may be encountered along the way. Although our approach here is primarily prescriptive in nature, we also draw on a range of insights from the research literature that has been referred to at various points throughout the book.