A patient satisfaction survey was undertaken in a mixed psychiatric and somatic care unit. An anonymous self-report questionnaire covering setting and satisfaction with care was completed by 60 patients. Median age was 42 (range 20–64), and the majority female (63%). Main ICD-10 diagnostic categories were depressive disorders (51.7%), substance-related disorders (33%) and personality disorders (25%). Somatic comorbidity was present in 60% of patients. Overall satisfaction with care and setting was high. Higher satisfaction was significantly associated with a history of previous hospitalizations in a psychiatric hospital and with being referred to the program by a psychiatrist. These findings emphasize the perceived advantages of mixed units, such as decreased stigmatization of psychiatric inpatients and opportunity to receive adequate treatment for both physical and mental problems during a single hospital stay.

Coordination of distributed design work is an important activity in large-scale and complex engineered systems (LSCES) design projects. Coordination strategies have been studied formally in system design optimization and organizational science. This article reports on a study to identify what strategies are used in coordination practice. While the literature primarily offers prescriptive coordination strategies, this study focussed on the contribution of individuals’ behaviours to system-level coordination. Thus, a coordination strategy is seen as a particular set of individual actions and behaviours. We interviewed professionals with expertise in systems engineering, project management and technical leadership at two large aerospace design organizations. Through qualitative thematic analysis, we identified two strategies used to facilitate coordination. The first we call authority-based and is enabled by technical know-how and the use of organizational authority; the second we call empathetic leadership and includes interpersonal skills, leadership traits and empathy. These strategies emerged as complementary and, together, enabled individuals to coordinate complex design tasks. We found that skills identified in competency models enable these coordination strategies, which in turn support management of interdependent work in the organization. Studying the role of individuals contributes an expanded view on how coordination facilitates LSCES design practice.

Coordination in system design requires an interplay between different roles. In this work, we identify five design team roles that pertain to the partitioning and coordination of distributed design team tasks. The proposed characterization is based on self-reported responsibilities and communication behaviors from 109 student designers in 22 teams at the conclusion of a semester-long design project. The self-reports capture both how team members viewed their own work as well as communication patterns between team members. We leverage two representations of this data. Through text analysis, we identify keywords describing team member roles and responsibilities. Social network analysis can further distinguish roles based on team communication behaviors. Cluster analysis on both types of data identifies groups of individuals with similar characteristics. The resulting five clusters capture common roles in system design teams that simultaneously capture the diverse responsibilities and communication patterns.

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict.