Knowledge, attitudes and practice of healthcare ethics and law among doctors and nurses in Barbados

BACKGROUND: The aim of the study is to assess the knowledge, attitudes and practices among healthcare professionals in Barbados in relation to healthcare ethics and law in an attempt to assist in guiding their professional conduct and aid in curriculum development. METHODS: A self-administered structured questionnaire about knowledge of healthcare ethics, law and the role of an Ethics Committee in the healthcare system was devised, tested and distributed to all levels of staff at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Barbados (a tertiary care teaching hospital) during April and May 2003. RESULTS: The paper analyses 159 responses from doctors and nurses comprising junior doctors, consultants, staff nurses and sisters-in-charge. The frequency with which the respondents encountered ethical or legal problems varied widely from 'daily' to 'yearly'. 52% of senior medical staff and 20% of senior nursing staff knew little of the law pertinent to their work. 11% of the doctors did not know the contents of the Hippocratic Oath whilst a quarter of nurses did not know the Nurses Code. Nuremberg Code and Helsinki Code were known only to a few individuals. 29% of doctors and 37% of nurses had no knowledge of an existing hospital ethics committee. Physicians had a stronger opinion than nurses regarding practice of ethics such as adherence to patients' wishes, confidentiality, paternalism, consent for procedures and treating violent/non-compliant patients (p = 0.01) CONCLUSION: The study highlights the need to identify professionals in the workforce who appear to be indifferent to ethical and legal issues, to devise means to sensitize them to these issues and appropriately training them

Emerging IT risks: insights from German banking

How do German banks manage the emerging risks stemming from IT innovations such as cyber risk? With a focus on process, roles and responsibilities, field data from ten banks participating in the 2014 ECB stress test were collected by interviewing IT managers, risk managers and external experts. Current procedures for handling emerging risks in German banks were identified from the interviews and analysed, guided by the extant literature. A clear gap was found between enterprise risk management (ERM) as a general approach to risks threatening firms’ objectives and ERM’s neglect of emerging risks, such as those associated with IT innovations. The findings suggest that ERM should be extended towards the collection and sharing of knowledge to allow for an initial understanding and description of emerging risks, as opposed to the traditional ERM approach involving estimates of impact and probability. For example, as cyber risks emerge from an IT innovation, the focus may need to switch towards reducing uncertainty through knowledge acquisition. Since individual managers seldom possess all relevant knowledge of an IT innovation, various stakeholders may need to be involved to exploit their expertise

Enterprise Risk Management measurement: Insights from an interdisciplinary literature review

Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) represents a paradigm envisioned to provide an organization both resilience and opportunity in the face of uncertainty. The de-bate around ERM\u2019s value contribution to the organization has led to key ERM re-search questions arising, highlighting the need for further investigation of empiri-cal measurement of ERM and its implementation. Calls from several scholars specifically request extending the academic body of knowledge on ERM meas-urement. Motivated by the above calls, this study presents the findings of a systematic review of the ERM literature. The review examines the academic discipline of journals existing ERM studies are published in, these journals\u2019 H-indices, the lo-cation of the studies, and the methodology of how ERM is measured in the stud-ies. The review establishes that the ERM literature cuts across several academic research disciplines such as accounting, finance and strategy. Moreover, the ex-tant literature underscores that it is very difficult to quantify and measure ERM in practice within organizations. Consequential to this, most empirical studies of ERM have emphasized either a qualitative approach focusing in depth on specific organizations, or a quantitative approach relying on accessible, basic secondary data available in company reports. A gap in knowledge is presented around ex-tending ERM measurement, in particular in terms of a methodology based on primary data collection and analysis. This paper concludes that further development of empirical measurement scales based on primary data, whereby direct, first-hand input from members of organi-zations implementing ERM is collected, will augment the ERM body of knowledge. Such scales will allow for important aspects of ERM as it is imple-mented in the organization to be empirically measured