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Disasters pose significant challenges globally, affecting millions of people annually. In Saudi Arabia, floods constitute a prevalent natural disaster, underscoring the necessity for effective disaster preparedness among Emergency Medical Services (EMS) workers. Despite their critical role in disaster response, research on disaster preparedness among EMS workers in Saudi Arabia is limited.
Study Objective/Methods:
The study aimed to explore the disaster preparedness among EMS workers in Saudi Arabia. This study applied an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design to explore disaster preparedness among EMS workers in Saudi Arabia, focusing on the qualitative phase. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 EMS workers from National Guard Health Affairs (NGHA) and Ministry of Health (MOH) facilities in Riyadh, Dammam, and Jeddah. Thematic analysis was conducted following Braun and Clarke’s six-step process, ensuring data rigor through Schwandt, et al’s criteria for trustworthiness.
Findings:
The demographic characteristics of participants revealed a predominantly young, male workforce with varying levels of experience and educational backgrounds. Thematic analysis identified three key themes: (1) Newly/developed profession, highlighting the challenges faced by young EMS workers in acquiring disaster preparedness; (2) Access to opportunities and workplace resources (government versus military), indicating discrepancies in disaster preparedness support between government and military hospitals; and (3) Workplace policies and procedures, highlighting the need for clearer disaster policies, training opportunities, and role clarity among EMS workers.
Conclusion:
The study underscores the importance of addressing the unique challenges faced by EMS workers in Saudi Arabia to enhance disaster preparedness. Recommendations include targeted support for young EMS professionals, standardization of disaster training across health care facilities, and improved communication of disaster policies and procedures. These findings have implications for policy and practice in disaster management and EMS training in Saudi Arabia.
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) workers are critical to effective disaster response. Therefore, it is important to understand their knowledge, skills, and preparedness for disasters. This study investigated factors influencing EMS workers’ disaster knowledge, skills, and preparedness in the Saudi Arabian context. The study also sought to identify challenges to disaster preparedness among Saudi Arabian EMS workers.
Methods
A descriptive cross-sectional survey using The Disaster Preparedness Evaluation Tool was distributed to EMS workers in military and government hospitals across 3 Saudi Arabian cities. Responses were recorded on a 6-point Likert scale where higher scores indicated higher knowledge, skills, or preparedness. The results were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistical analysis.
Results
272EMS workers participated in this study. EMS workers reported a moderate level of knowledge (3.56), skills (3.44), and preparedness (3.73) for disasters. Despite this, EMS workers reported a high level of involvement in regular disaster drills (M = 4.24, SD = 1.274) and a strong interest in further disaster education opportunities (M = 5.43, SD = 1.121). Participants also reported a high skill level with the triage principles used in their workplace during a disaster (M = 4.06, SD = 1.218). The study findings revealed a significant positive correlation between disaster preparedness levels and age, years of experience, education level, and the facility worked in.
Conclusions
EMS workers have moderate disaster knowledge, skills, and preparedness levels. Knowledge, skill, and preparedness have a significant relationship on the EMS workers’ demographics. These findings demonstrate the need to invest in preparing Saudi Arabian EMS workers to effectively respond to bioterrorism disasters.
The fourteen years of Tory rule constitute a stunning missed opportunity to seize on one of Britain’s few internationally renowned assets – its creativity. The government did step in to save organisations from disaster during the pandemic; it did, early on, extend its successful system of tax credits from film and TV to other cultural forms. It did the beat drum for extending demographic opportunities, even if in its actions it did not follow through. What mattered at least as much as specific decisions in this latest Tory era, particularly the latter part under May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, was the manner of government engagement. Many in the sector are demoralised, having to raise private funds while being disparaged by ministers.
Four core communication skills are “Ask-tell-ask”, recognize and respond to emotion, ask permission to move forward, and “Tell me more…” “Ask-tell-ask” is asking what the patient or surrogate knows about the medical situation, telling them the headline (information and meaning), and asking what they are taking away from your conversation. Recognizing and responding to emotion, both verbal and nonverbal, can allow patients to discuss additional medical information, builds connection between clinician and patient, and can clarify what is important to the patient. Responding to emotion may be nonverbal or verbal (e.g., NURSE statements), and may include simple or complex reflections or “wish statements”. Asking permission to move the conversation forward signposts that there is a transition, allows patients control, and helps you judge if they are ready. Finally, “Tell me more…” helps clarify informational needs or allow a deeper view into a patient’s reasoning or emotional space, giving the clinician guidance on where to direct the conversation. In telemedicine, communication skills need to be adapted as some of the in-person nonverbal skills are less effective or impossible.
This chapter turns to the conception of ‘legitimate’ knowledge, first examining constructions of ‘legitimacy’, drawing on political, sociological, and philosophical conceptions. The construction of legitimate knowledge in relation to the conceptions of belief, truth, and justification are considered. In addition, debates pertaining to the recent discourses of the democratisation of knowledge, linked to the notion of ‘expertise’ and ‘stakeholders’, indigenous knowledge and decolonising knowledge are discussed; this entails a critical exploration of various types of factors complicit in the formulation of knowledge, including positionality, with respect to class, political interest, gender, race, and so on; university diversity initiatives; disciplinary quality; methodology and the ‘Canon’; skills, employment, and research assessment initiatives; funding and international partnerships; and global legitimating systems such as global university rankings, publication systems, and citation practices. Furthermore, it is argued that the production of research does not sit outside these positionalities and the politics of knowledge production.
Effective public health practice requires a combination of expertise and influence. Yet gaining expertise in the subject matter is only one element of practice: the ability to influence outcomes, policy, services and the people who make decisions is crucial. To deploy your expertise to have an impact, you must hone leadership and management skills to persuade, encourage and empower others. This chapter, therefore, aims to:
offer a brief overview of different schools of thought in leadership;
propose a simple framework of eight core domains for identifying skills and areas for professional development;
introduce some popular theories for understanding others, which can enable you to work more effectively with individuals and influence within teams and organizations; and
signpost to some key models of conceptualizing change and how to lead or manage change.
Public health cannot be understood or fully appreciated without some knowledge of its history, which this Introduction provides. Conventionally, this begins with the large body of work associated with Hippocrates (c. 460–370 BC). In these writings, health was viewed as resulting from a sound balance of the humours. Therapy included diet, exercise and other interventions tailored to the individual – akin to today’s emphasis on healthy living and lifestyle. The Hippocratics were, in addition, early exponents of environmentalism. In Airs, Waters, Places, the occurrence of disease was linked to such factors as climate, soil and water quality. Proposals for disease prevention were related to specific social and economic circumstances.
As we discussed with regard to leadership in Part 1, the context in which the public health tools are used has a bearing on the choice of tool and how it is implemented. In the second part of Essential Public Health: Theory and Practice, we consider a range of contemporary contexts in which public health is practised and illustrate how the tools we have described are applied.
Edited by
Rob Waller, NHS Lothian,Omer S. Moghraby, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust,Mark Lovell, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust
Despite the rapid advance of technology which has been felt throughout society, the impact on healthcare delivery has taken much longer to be felt. The role of psychiatrists and clinical staff more widely in the design, delivery and development of clinical systems has similarly taken a long time to develop although there has been a significant shift in recent times. The development can be traced through a series of important events including several at national level. There are significant challenges to the current approach to training at all levels, and there remains an urgent need for a well-developed career pathway to make the most of the talent and experience which currently exists whilst providing opportunity for development and support of new staff interested in this work.
There have been consistent calls for more research on managing teams and embedding processes in data science innovations. Widely used frameworks (e.g., the cross-industry standard process for data mining) provide a standardized approach to data science but are limited in features such as role clarity, skills, and cross-team collaboration that are essential for developing organizational capabilities in data science. In this study, we introduce a data workflow method (DWM) as a new approach to break organizational silos and create a multi-disciplinary team to develop, implement and embed data science. Different from current data science process workflows, the DWM is managed at the system level that shapes business operating model for continuous improvement, rather than as a function of a particular project, one single business unit, or isolated individuals. To further operationalize the DWM approach, we investigated an embedded data workflow at a mining operation that has been using geological data in a machine-learning model to stabilize daily mill production for the last 2 years. Based on the findings in this study, we propose that the DWM approach derives its capability from three aspects: (a) a systemic data workflow; (b) multi-disciplinary networks of collaboration and responsibility; and (c) clearly identified data roles and the associated skills and expertise. This study suggests a whole-of-organization approach and pathway to develop data science capability.
This chapter locates the Sophists within the context of earlier Greek wisdom traditions and efforts by a variety of individuals (from Hesiod to Parmenides and Pindar) to establish and communicate their own poetic and/or intellectual authority. The Sophists participated in long-standing debates over the relationship between sophia and technê, and over tensions surrounding physical versus intellectual skills, learning, and teaching. They also looked back to the practice of wisdom and maxim collection. There was no dominant tradition under which one could unify the manifestations of sophia in Archaic and early Classical Greece; this complexity was an important aspect of the sophistic inheritance, and is the background against which we must measure individual efforts to claim distinctive achievement. The analysis traces the importance of Hesiodic and quasi-Hesiodic wisdom collections, the emergence of the inquiry into nature and of intellectual and cultural experts known as “sages” (sophoi), and the representation of sophia in sympotic and epinician poetry.
Contemporary educational reformers strive to balance education for some (elite knowledge workers) with education for all. British and Danish policymakers resolve this conflict in different ways that resonate with long-term cultural frames. British politicians applaud vocational education but devote few resources to it. Efforts to equalize schooling focus on rewarding winners from the working class, but these interventions do little to develop skills for nonacademic learners. Denmark devotes more resources to vocational education, yet reformers have problems meeting the contradictory needs of high and low-skill workers, and immigrants are disproportionately represented in the ranks of the poorly educated. Cultural legacies echo in young people’s views of education in an internet survey of 2100 British and Danish young people. British respondents support national quality standards and uniform curricula more than Danish ones, who prefer individualized learning experiences. Danish students are happier with their educational experiences, support educational investments to strengthen society, and appreciate practical, real-life skills. Upper-secondary vocational education students are more likely to report obtaining useful skills than their British colleagues. Yet Danish NEETs feel shut out of the core economy and their exclusion may be more agonizing because it goes against the historical commitment to a strong society.
Community-based organizations (CBOs) are important equity-promoting delivery channels for evidence-based interventions (EBIs). However, CBO practitioners often cannot access needed support to build EBI skills. Additionally, the capacity-building literature is hindered by inconsistent definitions, limited use of validated measures, and an emphasis on the perspectives of EBI developers versus implementers. To address these gaps, we explored commonalities and differences between CBO practitioners and academics in conceptualizing and prioritizing core EBI skills.
Methods:
We utilized Group Concept Mapping, a mixed-methods approach connecting qualitative data (e.g., regarding the range of critical EBI skills) and quantitative data (e.g., sorting and ranking data regarding unique skills) to create conceptual maps integrating perspectives from diverse participants. A total of 34 practitioners and 30 academics working with cancer inequities participated in the study.
Results:
Participants nominated 581 core skills for EBI use, and our team (including practitioners and academics) identified 98 unique skills from this list. Participants sorted them into conceptual groups, yielding five clusters: (1) using data and evaluation, (2) selecting and adapting EBIs, (3) connecting with community members, (4) building diverse and equitable partnerships, and (5) managing EBI implementation. The ordering of importance and presence of skill clusters were similar across groups. Overall, importance was rated higher than presence, suggesting capacity gaps.
Conclusions:
There are helpful commonalities between practitioners’ and academics’ views of core EBI skills in CBOs and apparent capacity gaps. However, underlying patterns suggest that differences between the groups’ perceptions warrant further exploration.
A growing number of researchers have focused on Africa’s capabilities in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Some scholars have analyzed the impacts of mobile internet and broadband on the continent, while others have researched initiatives such as smart cities and the implications of the 4IR on development and manufacturing. Others have touched on the opportunities present in African development and the types of innovation that are already present or can take place. After reviewing the literature, the chapter dives into five critical domains on which the 4IR will change African states, industries, and society. These five domains are economic growth and structural transformation; labor, skills, production; poverty and inequality; power and governance; and peace and security. The chapter concludes with the five key domain summaries and strategies that can be employed in Africa.
This study examined the mediating role of civic skill-acts and direct associations of group identity on intentions to engage in peaceful or radical protest actions (i.e., activism or radicalism intentions respectively). A sample of 526 university students in Hong Kong was surveyed. The findings suggested that political identity complementarily mediated the relationship between joining political activities and radicalism intentions. Religious identity and ethnic/racial identity each have an indirect-only mediation to activism as well as radicalism intentions when mediated by community activities and responding activities respectively. Finally, political identity and economic identity each have direct-only mediations to activism intentions respectively. These results suggest that although group identity and civic skill-acts uniquely contribute to protest intentions, the inter-relationship is complicated by the type of group identity, civic skill-act, and protest activity studied. Recommendations for future studies are discussed in light of the findings.
In this chapter, we begin by examining the role of reflective practice in partnership work and in doing so highlight the importance of knowing yourself and who you are as person. In Chapter 7, we critically examine reflective practice and how it unfolds in partnership work. In this chapter, we introduce the notion of reflective practice and how it prepares educators to begin thinking about how to come together with families. As you commence this journey of self-reflection, you will come to understand the complexity of partnership work and the skills you might need to develop to effectively engage with difference. We then explore some of the key ideas underpinning the planning of partnership work, including the importance of communication and open and positive mindsets, as well as the idea of active engagement and development of intercultural knowledge and capabilities. Through this examination, you will come to understand the first premise of the TWINE Model of Partnership so that you can identify as well as learn how to draw on this premise of the model when planning for partnership work.
This chapter examines the multiple ways in which obtaining food was tied to labor in the ghetto. This includes trading labor for resources to purchase food as well as supplemental food which was provided for certain occupations. It explores different types of work in the ghetto including forced labor, work for the Judenrat, factory work, home-based piece work, as well as employment in the ghetto’s private sector. The chapter looks at ways in which people utilized their social networks to obtain better work as well as how hunger impacted productivity. This chapter also explores the tension between obtaining work that provided enough funds to meet one’s food needs versus positions which protected one against deportation and the strategies employed by individuals and households to meet their needs of adequate food and protection. This chapter also discusses the struggles of the Jewish communal leadership in providing labor to the Germans while feeding working and nonworking ghetto inhabitants. This chapter examines how the Germans took control of food distribution out of the hands of the communal leadership in order to prioritize labor.
Skills that are difficult to automate are expected to increase in demand and reward according to skill-biased technological change advocates, who have identified high rewards for cognitive and social skills. However, such broad skill categories involve numerous essential competencies that can be differentially rewarded or go simply unrewarded. Using US data, this article analyses the demand for and payment of linguistic competency, a cross-cutting kind of skill that is basic for both cognitive and social work in the new economy and is one of the human capacities that is most difficult to automate. While human capital theory predicts an increase in wages as the demand for linguistic skills rises, from cultural/institutional perspectives, it can be theorised that communicative abilities and foreign-language knowledge are socially undervalued because of their association with feminised activities, ethnicity, and low-status service jobs. We analyse the demand and reward for linguistic skills through a two-step analysis of occupational and individual data derived from two sources: the Occupational Information Network and the Current Population Survey. Results show that while ‘hard’ verbal-reasoning skills are associated with high average salaries, as is predicted by neoclassical theory, the potentially undervalued linguistic skills – interactive and multilingual skills – are unrewarded and even penalised. This evidence requires further political attention, given its implications for large number of workers, especially in feminised, low-status service jobs.
It is often argued that job insecurity and precarious work are on the rise. However, the evidence to back these arguments remains mixed and inconclusive. In this study, we define and measure precarious work in Finland using five variables that reflect both objective and subjective insecurity: atypical employment, actually experienced unemployment, the threat of dismissal or unemployment, poor chances of finding a new job, and low earnings. Results based on Statistics Finland’s Quality of Work Life Surveys from 1984 to 2013 indicate that, from a labour market or forms of employment perspective, the proportion of precarious wage earners has increased from 11% in 1984 to 13% in 2013. From a second perspective, however, focusing on changing working conditions, growing inequality and eroding social security mechanisms, we also analyse how a precarious labour market position is related to intrinsic job quality. Precarious workers experience decreased levels of skill and discretion, and they work in a less supportive environment than other employees.
This article, written by Kate Faulkner and Wendy Lynwood, considers the skills of law librarians and shows how they can assist those who also hold a copyright specialist role. Most librarians encounter some aspects of copyright within their role. However, the understanding that law librarians have with regard to law, legal research capabilities, teaching and liaison skills equips them to take on copyright, sometimes in addition to their law library role, or to move into a full-time copyright specialist role.