Improving the Odds: Seven Principles for Investing in Early Care and Education

Recent research and advocacy efforts have led funders, politicians, and the business community to agree that the first years of a child's life can determine the rest of their development. Across ideological divides, there is consensus that investing early makes sense—it helps children prepare for successful futures and creates a high return on investment of public dollars.We have created this short guide, featuring examples and how-to's based on our work with more than a dozen foundations working to make progress in the early care and education space. The guide highlights 7 principles to help funders understand and anticipate the challenges and opportunities of supporting early care and education, including practical advice on how to:Inclusively identify and constructively connect the many actors that provide quality care and education to children and their families.Navigate challenges that arise from a sector filled with different approaches and business models.Balance long-term strategies and outcome measures with short-term wins and progress markers.

Designing for Effective and Safe Multidisciplinary Primary Care Teamwork: Using the Time of COVID-19 as a Case Study

Effective medical teamwork can improve the effectiveness and experience of care for staff and patients, including safety. Healthcare organizations, and especially primary care clinics, have sought to improve medical teamwork through improved layout and design, moving staff into shared multidisciplinary team rooms. While co-locating staff has been shown to increase communi-cation, successful designs balance four teamwork needs: face-to-face communications; situational awareness; heads-down work; perception of teamness. However, precautions for COVID-19 make it more difficult to conduct face-to-face communications. In this paper we describe a model for un-derstanding how layout affects these four teamwork needs and describe how the perception of teamwork by staff changed after COVID-19 precautions were put in place. Observations, interviews and two standard surveys were conducted in two primary care clinics before COVID-19 and again in 2021 after a year of precautions. In general, staff felt more isolated and found it more difficult to conduct brief consults, though these perceptions varied by role. RNs, who spent more time on the phone, found it convenient to work part time-from home, while medical assistants found it more difficult to find providers in the distanced clinics. These cases suggest some important considera-tions for future clinic designs, including greater physical transparency that also allow for physical separation and more spaces for informal communication that are distanced from workstations

Building standardized and secure mobile health services based on social media

Mobile devices and social media have been used to create empowering healthcare services. However, privacy and security concerns remain. Furthermore, the integration of interoperability biomedical standards is a strategic feature. Thus, the objective of this paper is to build enhanced healthcare services by merging all these components. Methodologically, the current mobile health telemonitoring architectures and their limitations are described, leading to the identification of new potentialities for a novel architecture. As a result, a standardized, secure/private, social-media-based mobile health architecture has been proposed and discussed. Additionally, a technical proof-of-concept (two Android applications) has been developed by selecting a social media (Twitter), a security envelope (open Pretty Good Privacy (openPGP)), a standard (Health Level 7 (HL7)) and an information-embedding algorithm (modifying the transparency channel, with two versions). The tests performed included a small-scale and a boundary scenario. For the former, two sizes of images were tested; for the latter, the two versions of the embedding algorithm were tested. The results show that the system is fast enough (less than 1 s) for most mHealth telemonitoring services. The architecture provides users with friendly (images shared via social media), straightforward (fast and inexpensive), secure/private and interoperable mHealth services

TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Tacit networks, crucial care: Informal networks and disaster response in Nepal’s 2015 Gorkha earthquake

It is often reiterated that a better understanding of local networks and needs is key to risk reduction. Nevertheless, the crucial role of informal social networks and actors in the catering for human needs in disaster circumstances remains largely under-explored. If we have to rethink the ‘work’ that informality does for our understanding of urban areas, its contribution to resilience, and take it seriously in the ‘full spectrum of risk’ in urban and peri-urban centres, better and more balanced methods are needed. This paper attends to this gap. Examining the mechanisms of aid provision in the aftermath of the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake in Nepal, it details an experimental set of quantitative research methods to explore the role of informal social networks in the provision of critical human needs in natural disasters. Relying on a sample of 160 households across four districts and 16 villages in the built environment affected by the Gorkha earthquake, the paper reveals that, overall, a wide disparity exists in the comparative importance of organisations in the provision of aid and resources. Much crucial after-disaster care is catered for by a mix of relatives, temples, friends, neighbours and local clubs. It highlights the importance of informal networks in understanding, and theorising, governance (of disaster and of the ‘urban’ more in general), and calls for greater attention to its role. It is time, it argues, to revalue informal disaster governance networks as a crucial, not tacit, component of disaster response

NHBC Foundation: improving recruitment of young people into home building : a literature review

This literature review was undertaken to support research into young people's attitudes to careers in house building. The review is based on database searches supplemented by the evidence gathered during stakeholder interviews and through requests made to the wider careers and home building sectors. In order to fully answer the main research questions, the literature mapping the barriers faced by young people to working within the sector was explored. Based on the review a set of criteria for analysing and categorising industry sector initiatives will also be developed. The criteria will be presented as a separate compendium of opportunities.National House Builders Council Foundatio

A review of social protection in Latin America

This paper reviews social protection trends and policy responses in Latin America as part of a global scoping study on social protection commissioned by Ford Foundation (See Appendix One for ToR for this paper). The paper is organised as follows (following the paper contents as described in Appendix One): Section 1 identifies the main trends in poverty and vulnerability in the region, with particular references to rural-urban and life course poverty incidence. Section 2 provides a review of social protection trends. It discusses the two main areas of change and innovation in the last two decades: the reform of social insurance provision and the rapid expansion of social assistance schemes. Section 3 identifies some potential points of engagement between Ford Foundation work and the social protection policy agenda in the region

Engaging with Health Markets in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Many low and middle-income countries have pluralistic health systems with a variety of providers of health-related goods and services in terms of their level of training, their ownership (public or private) and their relationship with the regulatory system. The development of institutional arrangements to influence their performance has lagged behind the spread of these markets. This paper presents a framework for analysing a pluralistic health system. The relationships between private providers of health services and government, or other organisations that represent the public interest, strongly influence their performance in meeting the needs of the poor. Their impact on the pattern of service delivery depends on how the relationships are managed and the degree to which they respond to the interests of the population. Many governments of low and middle-income countries are under pressure to increase access to safe, effective and affordable health services. In a context of economic growth, it should be possible to improve access by the poor to health services substantially. Innovations in information technologies and in low cost diagnostics are creating important new opportunities for achieving this. It will be important to mobilise both public and private providers of health-related goods and services. This will involve big changes in the roles and responsibilities of all health sector actors. Governments, businesses and civil society organizations will need to learn how to make pluralist health systems work better through experimentation and systematic learning about what works and why