The Role of Internal Audit in Fighting Corruption

The present paper relates to the key role of internal auditors in reducing corruption and bribery on public governance. Risk mitigation starts from the top of organizations, requires a strong compliance environment and organizational culture, developing and implementing anti-corruption programs. Public and private organizations are more conscious over bribery and corruption and are trying to combat them by respecting international agreements, regional conventions, best practice guidelines and corruption perception indicators and cases. Fighting corruption means also detecting risks as a main worldwide concern. The most efficient way to combat it is to prevent it, by developing implementing ethics standards, procedures and policies, implementing processes, conceiving clear and strong laws

Organizational Culture Impact on Strategic Management

This paper focuses on the impact that organizational culture has on strategic management in terms of performance of the organization. We analyzed the relationship between the two concepts and how one influences the other. Corporate culture consists in competitive advantage for a business, leading it for success, motivating employees and make their work most effective, at its best, or it can lead to failure, at its worst. Organizational culture can influence actions, decisions and opinions. Every business has a specific way of working that commits to its culture. Strategic management refers to a process of developing goals, a mission and a vision, values and duties that will lead to the organization’s success. Main assets of an organization that lead it to proper functioning are its employees and the organizational culture is the one that gives it the uniqueness and creates its brand image. The absolute compatibility between the strategic and cultural path is in the organizational alignment

Eating habits in school-age children

University of Medicine and Pharmacy „Grigore T. Popa”, Iasi, RomaniaAdopting a healthy lifestyle at childhood would reduce a number of conditions with a great influence on the quality of life, as we can recall obesity and malnutrition. Diet can be both a primary cause of a disease and a protective factor against it. The school-age child can be very easily influenced in one direction by class, teacher, family or media. That is why the education and advice received at this age are very important, as they can „cut off the roots” the possible health problems that could change the whole life course. In view of these considerations, we have focused on the analysis of the nutrition of the school-age children in order to identify non-healthy eating habits and their influence on the nutritional status. Methods: We evaluated the eating habits on a cohort of 270 children aged 7 to 15 from an urban school in Romania. We applied KIDMED questionnaire, by Serra-Majem et al. (2004), comprised of 16 questions with dichotomous response possibilities (YES / NO). Results: Of the study group, 91.48% responded that they consume fresh fruit or fresh fruit juice daily, while 8.51% responded negatively. At second item of the questionnaire, ‘’if they eat more than a fruit by day’’, only 68.51% of the children gave a positive answer. Answer to the question „if they eat once a day a vegetable was positive in 82.59% of cases and negative in 17.40%, but only 57.50 % of the study group eats more than one vegetable by day. From the study group 42.22% of children are not eating breakfast. 66.29% of children eat cereals/cereals products at breakfast, 61.11% of them are eating milk/milk based products at breakfast and 23.70% are eating pastry at breakfast. 36.66% of the study group eats more than once a week fast-food and 52.96% of them eat more than once a day sugar and sweets. 52.59 % of children declared that they eat olive oil at home. Conclusions: A high number of children have unhealthy habits in schools. School-based programs can play an important role in promoting lifelong healthy eating

Particularities regarding Clinical-biological and Evolutive Parameters of Immune-mediated Rheumatic Diseases in Patients with COVID-19 – systematic literature review

Background: Since its outbreak in 2019, Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)/Severe Acu-te Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was a serious medical threat and was declared Global Pandemic, triggering fear, panic and uncertainty for people around the Globe. Among those individuals, there is a specific category of patients – the ones with immune-mediated rheumatic diseases (IMIDs) – whose mantra from the diagnosis was to avoid infections at all costs because of the additional negative impact on the immune sys-tem and overall reactivity. Objective: Considering the aforementioned, our objective is to understand the in-depth relation of the immune system of patients with IMIDs in the set-ting of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and the real bur-den of the disease and vaccination against COVID-19. Materials and Methods: In this res-pect, we have conducted a thoroughly systematic literature review according to the “Prefer-red Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)” concept. Following its five-steps algorithm, we first selected 745 articles that were published in re-putable international medical databases, ISI-indexed, for the period 1 January, 2021–31 December, 2022. After consequent elimination of duplicates, of articles that were not En-glish-written and “open access” and then applying PEDro classification/scoring-inspired, only 58 articles were selected for in-depth full qualitative reading. In the last stage,20 arti-cles were “excluded with reasons”, because they didn’t offer significant information. The-refore, in our systematic literature review, 38 articles were included.Results: In the data gathered in this review we described the molecular pathways of activation of the immune system triggered by COVID-19, with significance on the clinical and paraclinical aspects of IMID patients infected with the new Coronavirus. Patients with IMIDs are at higher risk for hospitalization if diagnosed with SARS-CoV2 and more prone to severe outcomes and death. Risk factors associated with severe outcomes and death are: age, comorbidities, un-derlying disease activity, therapies used (“the good” being anti-tumor necrosis factor α, “the bad” – Methotrexate, Sulfasalazine, Azathioprine and “the ugly” – anti CD20 mono-clonal antibodies). There were several reports of flares and new-onset of IMIDs after CO-VID-19 and after vaccination against this disease, but data from larger studies and registri-es do not confirm higher incidence of flare-ups or new-onset IMIDs. Regarding vaccination, of mounting importance is the timing between immunomodulatory and immunosuppres-sive agents and the administration of the vaccine. And last but not the least, we discussed about Long COVID and the role of artificial intelligence in the pandemic and related-drug development. Discussion and Conclusion: The data in our systematic literature review is consistent with the expertise from our clinical practice. This article is the first part of the doctoral study that is centralized on the same topics, with the current objective of deepe-ning the knowledge about the intersection of COVID-19/SARS-CoV2 and immune-mediated rheumatic diseases and a future objective: to compare information we have synthetized here with our database of almost 170 Romanian patients with a IMID and COVID-19/SARS-CoV2. The next objective is to extend the study to a multicenter control one

Pathways of metastatic spread in meningiomas

Meningioma is a common intracranial neoplasm derived from meningothelial cells, and it is generally associated with a benign clinical course. In spite of this, the malignant behaviour of these tumours as the occurrence of extracranial meningioma metastases in different organs is described in the literature: lung and pleura, spine and other bones, abdominal organs, lymph nodes or even skin. The aim of this review is to analyse the pathways of metastatic spread of the intracranial meningioma tumour cells towards different organs

Research and Science Today No. 1(5)/2013

Research and Science Today Journal is a publication founded in 2011 and it is dedicated to the students of all levels (license, master and doctoral) of faculties in the country and abroad. We want to offer the participants the opportunity to present their scientific works in the following areas: Social Sciences, Economic Sciences, Legal Sciences, Humanities, Education Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Sport. This journal provides students the opportunity to create and/or to improve their abilities to write scientific papers. So each appearance (two appearances per year at which we can add supplements) contains a number of papers written by students, masters and doctoral from the faculties from the country or/and abroad. The journal promotes original studies contributing to the progress of knowledge and it is motivated by the need to address issues of theory and practice in the areas mentioned above

Research and Science Today No. 1(5)/2013

Research and Science Today Journal is a publication founded in 2011 and it is dedicated to the students of all levels (license, master and doctoral) of faculties in the country and abroad. We want to offer the participants the opportunity to present their scientific works in the following areas: Social Sciences, Economic Sciences, Legal Sciences, Humanities, Education Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Sport. This journal provides students the opportunity to create and/or to improve their abilities to write scientific papers. So each appearance (two appearances per year at which we can add supplements) contains a number of papers written by students, masters and doctoral from the faculties from the country or/and abroad. The journal promotes original studies contributing to the progress of knowledge and it is motivated by the need to address issues of theory and practice in the areas mentioned above

Research and Science Today No. 1(5)/2013

Research and Science Today Journal is a publication founded in 2011 and it is dedicated to the students of all levels (license, master and doctoral) of faculties in the country and abroad. We want to offer the participants the opportunity to present their scientific works in the following areas: Social Sciences, Economic Sciences, Legal Sciences, Humanities, Education Sciences, Engineering, Medicine and Sport. This journal provides students the opportunity to create and/or to improve their abilities to write scientific papers. So each appearance (two appearances per year at which we can add supplements) contains a number of papers written by students, masters and doctoral from the faculties from the country or/and abroad. The journal promotes original studies contributing to the progress of knowledge and it is motivated by the need to address issues of theory and practice in the areas mentioned above

THE SWOT ANALYSIS OF A ROMANIAN SEASIDE HOTEL COMPANY

Different regions, countries or areas have identified the development of the tourism industry as a strategic objective in their policies, at both the microeconomic and macroeconomic levels. These regions, obviously, expect the tourism industry to generate economic effects to residents (both households and local businesses.) Over time, our country was considered an important tourist destination for the market in South-East Europe, supporting and promoting Romania's image and especially coastal tourism, spas, cultural programs and monasteries in Bucovina. The Romanian tourist offer did not do profound changes in relation to the tourism demand and to the requirements of comparative tourism products on the international market, requirements that, over time, proved to be increasingly demanding. There are several approaches that aim at diagnosing the business of accomodation industries but a method commonly used for this is the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), i.e. the analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks or threats of a company

THE ECONOMIC VALUE ADDED (EVA) - A MEASUREMENT INDICATOR OF THE VALUE CREATION WITHIN A COMPANY FROM THE ROMANIAN SEASIDE HOTEL INDUSTRY

The purpose of this research is to highlight the role of EVA – an indicator measuring the financial performance of a hotel company from the Romanian seaside. EVA is one of the most appreciated indicators in terms of achieving performance that involve all used resources; this indicator can be adopted for the decentralization of management decisions. In order to highlight the importance of the EVA assessment method, we performed a case study on a representative hotel company that gets positive financial results pursuant to conventional methods, aiming to outline the correlation between EVA and the traditional methods for performance assessmen