Strategic Shift to a Diagnostic Model of Care in a Multi-Site Group Dental Practice.

BackgroundDocumenting standardized dental diagnostic terms represents an emerging change for how dentistry is practiced. We focused on a mid-sized dental group practice as it shifted to a policy of documenting patients' diagnoses using standardized terms in the electronic health record.MethodsKotter's change framework was translated into interview questions posed to the senior leadership in a mid-size dental group practice. In addition, quantitative content analyses were conducted on the written policies and forms before and after the implementation of standardized diagnosis documentation to assess the extent to which the forms and policies reflected the shift. Three reviewers analyzed the data individually and reached consensuses where needed.ResultsKotter's guiding change framework explained the steps taken to 97 percent utilization rate of the Electronic Health Record and Dental Diagnostic Code. Of the 96 documents included in the forms and policy analysis, 31 documents were officially updated but only two added a diagnostic element.ConclusionChange strategies established in the business literature hold utility for dental practices seeking diagnosis-centered care.Practical implicationsA practice that shifts to a diagnosis-driven care philosophy would be best served by ensuring that the change process follows a leadership framework that is calibrated to the organization's culture

Australian Government guiding principles for civil-military-police interaction in international disaster and conflict management

The Australian Government’s Guiding Principles for Civil-Military-Police Interaction in International Disaster and Conflict Management (the Guiding Principles) has been developed by the Australian Civil-Military Centre (ACMC) in collaboration with the departments of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), Defence (ADF), Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and Attorney-General’s (AGD), the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID). The Department of Immigration and Citizenship and the Treasury have also reviewed and contributed to the Guiding Principles. The purpose of this document is to outline five strategic principles, agreed at working and senior levels across government, to inform policy and planning for international disaster and conflict management. The Guiding Principles does not seek to replace current multiagency 1 or single agency documents and policies. It aims to provide common strategic imperatives to improve the effectiveness of whole-ofgovernment collaboration in a multiagency environment. The Guiding Principles is designed to build on the unique capabilities of all stakeholders. The agreed principles are: > Clearly define strategic objectives and operational roles and responsibilities > Engage proactively > Share knowledge and understanding > Leverage organisational diversity > Commit to continuous improvement

Determining Teachers’ TPACK through observations and self-report data

This study reports an arrangement directed at the development of 12 pre-service teachers’ TPACK, by guiding them in developing, practicing and teaching lessons that integrate technology for the first time. Interview, observation, and survey data were collected throughout the study. Results from the study confirmed the contention of Koehler and Mishra (2008) that teachers’ TPACK can be expressed in different ways for different students and in different contextual conditions. Analysis of lesson plan documents showed a well presented theoretical development of the teachers’ TPACK. This seemed to have aligned with their self-reported beliefs which reported slightly higher competencies of TPACK. Observation data however, indicated that teachers had acquired technology integration skills but demonstrated relatively low competencies in blending the components of TPACK. The study leaves no doubts that these teachers’ stated pedagogical beliefs did not align with their instructional practice

Developing collaborative partnerships with culturally and linguistically diverse families during the IEP process

Family participation in the special education process has been federally mandated for 40 years, and educators recognize that effective collaboration with their students’ families leads to improved academic and social outcomes for students. However, while some family-school relationships are positive and collaborative, many are not, particularly for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) families. This article provides practice guidelines based in research for teachers who seek to improve their practices when working with CLD families who have children served by special education

Clustering documents with active learning using Wikipedia

Wikipedia has been applied as a background knowledge base to various text mining problems, but very few attempts have been made to utilize it for document clustering. In this paper we propose to exploit the semantic knowledge in Wikipedia for clustering, enabling the automatic grouping of documents with similar themes. Although clustering is intrinsically unsupervised, recent research has shown that incorporating supervision improves clustering performance, even when limited supervision is provided. The approach presented in this paper applies supervision using active learning. We first utilize Wikipedia to create a concept-based representation of a text document, with each concept associated to a Wikipedia article. We then exploit the semantic relatedness between Wikipedia concepts to find pair-wise instance-level constraints for supervised clustering, guiding clustering towards the direction indicated by the constraints. We test our approach on three standard text document datasets. Empirical results show that our basic document representation strategy yields comparable performance to previous attempts; and adding constraints improves clustering performance further by up to 20%

The relationship between intra- and intergenerational ecological justice. Determinants of goal conflicts and synergies in sustainability policy

The guiding principle of sustainability is widely accepted in today´s international policies. The principle contains two seperate objectives of justice with regard to the conservation and use of ecosystems and their services: (1) global justice between different people of the present generation ("intragenerational justice"); and (2) justice between people of different generations ("intergenerational justice"). Three hypotheses about the relationship between these objectives are logically possible and are, in fact, held in the political and scientific discourse on sustainable development: independency, facilitation and rivalry. Applying the method of qualitative content analysis we evaluate political documents and the scientific literature on sustainable development by systematically revealing the lines of reasoning and determinants underlying the different hypotheses. These determinants are the quantity and quality of ecosystem services, population development, substitutability of ecosystem services by humanmade goods and services, technological progress, institutions and political restrictionssustainable development, ecosystem services, intragenerational justice, intergenerational justice, ecological justice, sustainability research

Law as Language (Reviewing Peter M. Tiersma, Legal Language (1999))

The jacket of Professor Peter Tiersma’s book Legal Language illustrates the problem inherent in a linguistic study of legal language. The jacket features a legal document in fine print, with an overlay of a magnifying glass that brings some of the indecipherable words into focus. The problem, of course, is that a scholar conducting a linguistic study of language does not have access to a distinct magnifying glass that can posit language as an object; he can study language only with language. Tiersma attempts to avoid the most difficult problems of self-reference that follow from the interpretive turn in social studies by pursuing a carefully delimited project. He argues that legal language has diverged from ordinary language, and therefore can be assessed by comparing it to ordinary language. His thesis is that legal language can and should be much less arcane and ponderous, and much more understandable, than it now is. In other words, he argues that legal discourse should employ ordinary language to a much greater extent if law is to serve its social purposes. On its own terms, the book is a success. Some legal documents (standard form contracts, statutes, formulaic wills and trusts, etc.) are easily lampooned for their verbosity, redundancy, complexity and archaisms. Tiersma’s book provides an accessible and helpful reminder of this fact by identifying some of the worst examples of legal language and providing general explanations of how these examples are sustained in modern legal practice. But this theme is old news. I can’t imagine that there is a lawyer, judge or law professor today who would advocate using cumbersome and archaic language instead of so-called plain English, even if their practice involves all too frequent relapses. Legal language is like an ornate pastry: we know that often it is impressive in appearance but disappointingly lacking in substance, yet we can’t help reaching for it again and again. Tiersma’s effort to avoid certain topics in the interest of simplicity and focus is not entirely successful. In his Acknowledgments, he admits that his linguistic approach necessarily leaves out the important insights of literary theory, rhetoric and semiotics, and he concedes that he gives only brief attention to the important linguistic topic of the pragmatics of meaning. At the risk of appearing to be a spoil sport by reviewing the book that he expressly chose not to write, I want to identify how his uncontroversial plea for a renewed commitment to using plain English in legal discourse uncovers more difficult and subtle problems