Climate Change Reporting: A Resource Based Perspective

Kajian ini dilakukan untuk mengkaji tahap serta faktor yang mengalakkan laporan pemanasan global di antara syarikat-syarikat yang tersenarai di Bursa Malaysia. This study investigates the extent of climate change disclosure among Malaysian public listed companies

Monitoring Technical Agents: Theory, Evidence, and Prescriptions

Agency relationships--where one party (the principal) delegates authority to another (the agent)--are well studied in financial settings but less so in technical settings. The asymmetry of information between the general manager and the technical manager is likely to create the possibility of misdirected effort, an overuse of the agent's human capital, whether the agent is opportunistic or not. Analyzing a dataset of information technology hardware and staff spending by larger multidivisional firms during a growth phase of US IT spending, 1989-1993, results suggest that technical managers significantly overspent on hardware, with deleterious consequences for performance. Chief executive experience significantly altered the effects of overspending. Analysis of the results suggest a solution, a model termed "staged commitment," that can be used to monitor technical agents in many areas of business.

Risk Mitigation Of Outsourcing Manufacturing Process: A Study On The Semiconductor Manufacturing Organizations In Malaysia

Penggunaan perkhidmatan pihak ketiga daripada proses pembuatan semikonduktor menjadi sebahagian daripada strategi korporat sebuah organisasi yang didorong oleh kelebihan kos dan fleksibiliti dalam ketidakpastian. Outsourcing of semiconductor manufacturing process is becoming integral part of the corporate strategy of an organization which is driven by cost advantage and flexibility during uncertainty

Stress on the Ward – An Empirical Study of the Nonlinear Relationship between Organizational Workload and Service Quality

We discuss the impact of organizational workload on professional service outcomes, such as survival rates in hospitals. The prevailing view in the literature is that service quality deteriorates when organizational workload increases. In contrast, we argue that the relationship between workload and service outcomes is nonlinear and that there is a quality-optimal workload level. Whilst outcomes deteriorate with increasing workload when workload levels are already high, they will improve if workload increases from a low level. We reach this hypothesis by combining three perspectives: (i) the queuing theory perspective, with its focus on congestion, (ii) a discretionary choice perspective, with a focus on decisions made by professionals in response to changes in workload, and (iii) an endocrinological perspective, with a focus on the subconscious eff ects of workload on worker performance through the cognitive impact of stress hormones. Using a patient census of 1.4 million patients in 624 departments across 101 hospitals, we provide empirical support for the nonlinearity hypothesis in the context of hospital survival rates. We further discuss the implications for hospital capacity planning and the wider implications for service operations management.Service quality; service outcomes; organizational workload; hospital capacity planning; behavioral operations; stress

Improving waiting times in the Emergency Department

Waiting times in the Emergency Department cause considerable delays in care and in patient satisfaction. There are many moving parts to the ED visit with multiple providers delivering care for a single patient. Factors that have been shown to delay care in the ED have been broken down into input factors such as triaging, throughput factors during the visit, and output factors, which include discharge planning and available inpatient beds for admitted patients. Research has shown that throughput factors are an area of interest to decrease time spent in the ED that will lead to decrease waiting room times. In this Quality Improvement project, we will develop a systematic check in system with ED providers that will allow providers to identify any outstanding issues that may be delaying care or discharge. We hypothesize that this system will increase throughput in the ED by resolving any lab, radiology, or treatments that were overlooked. Reviewing the results of this QI project will allow us to see if we were effective in our timing of scheduled check-ins. Ultimately, this will reduce time spent in the waiting room by allowing more patients to be seen. In the era of the Affordable Care Act, more patients have access to affordable healthcare and will increase volume in the ED. This check-in system will allow more patients to be seen smoothly and in a timely manner that will improve and increase patient care and satisfaction in the ED

A Mitochondrial Health Index Sensitive to Mood and Caregiving Stress.

BACKGROUND:Chronic life stress, such as the stress of caregiving, can promote pathophysiology, but the underlying cellular mechanisms are not well understood. Chronic stress may induce recalibrations in mitochondria leading to changes either in mitochondrial content per cell, or in mitochondrial functional capacity (i.e., quality). METHODS:Here we present a functional index of mitochondrial health (MHI) for human leukocytes that can distinguish between these two possibilities. The MHI integrates nuclear and mitochondrial DNA-encoded respiratory chain enzymatic activities and mitochondrial DNA copy number. We then use the MHI to test the hypothesis that daily emotional states and caregiving stress influence mitochondrial function by comparing healthy mothers of a child with an autism spectrum disorder (high-stress caregivers, n = 46) with mothers of a neurotypical child (control group, n = 45). RESULTS:The MHI outperformed individual mitochondrial function measures. Elevated positive mood at night was associated with higher MHI, and nightly positive mood was also a mediator of the association between caregiving and MHI. Moreover, MHI was correlated to positive mood on the days preceding, but not following the blood draw, suggesting for the first time in humans that mitochondria may respond to proximate emotional states within days. Correspondingly, the caregiver group, which had higher perceived stress and lower positive and greater negative daily affect, exhibited lower MHI. This effect was not explained by a mismatch between nuclear and mitochondrial genomes. CONCLUSIONS:Daily mood and chronic caregiving stress are associated with mitochondrial functional capacity. Mitochondrial health may represent a nexus between psychological stress and health

Personalized medicine—a modern approach for the diagnosis and management of hypertension

The main goal of treating hypertension is to reduce blood pressure to physiological levels and thereby prevent risk of cardiovascular disease and hypertension-associated target organ damage. Despite reductions in major risk factors and the availability of a plethora of effective antihypertensive drugs, the control of blood pressure to target values is still poor due to multiple factors including apparent drug resistance and lack of adherence. An explanation for this problem is related to the current reductionist and ‘trial-and-error’ approach in the management of hypertension, as we may oversimplify the complex nature of the disease and not pay enough attention to the heterogeneity of the pathophysiology and clinical presentation of the disorder. Taking into account specific risk factors, genetic phenotype, pharmacokinetic characteristics, and other particular features unique to each patient, would allow a personalized approach to managing the disease. Personalized medicine therefore represents the tailoring of medical approach and treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient and is expected to become the paradigm of future healthcare. The advancement of systems biology research and the rapid development of high-throughput technologies, as well as the characterization of different –omics, have contributed to a shift in modern biological and medical research from traditional hypothesis-driven designs toward data-driven studies and have facilitated the evolution of personalized or precision medicine for chronic diseases such as hypertension