Keeping the Commitment: A Progress Report on Four Early Leaders in Patient Safety Improvement

Examines four healthcare systems' expansion of patient safety interventions over five years through the development of practical training methods, effective tools for minimizing errors, an emphasis on goal setting and accountability, and other approaches

Resisting bare life : civil solidarity and the hunt for illegalized migrants

While European governments have pursued illegalized migrants for decades, the techniques through which they do so have taken a more radical turn since 2015. Focusing on the particular case of Belgium, this paper documents how its Federal government has increasingly tried to “police” migrants into the European refugee regime, while migrants and citizens have continued to resist these efforts through a series of “political” actions. Drawing on ethnographic work with the Brussels‐based Citizen Platform for the Support of Refugees, I pursue two aims: first, I demonstrate how the Belgian state has consciously produced a humanitarian crisis as part of a broader “politics of exhaustion”; and second, I explore the specific forms and types of humanitarian action that emerge from citizens’ response to these policies. I do so by describing three moments in which these opposing logics of policing and politicization conjure

Key dimensions for the prevention and control of communicable diseases in institutional settings. a scoping review to guide the development of a tool to strengthen preparedness at migrant holding centres in the EU/EEA

Migrant centres, as other institutions hosting closed or semi-open communities, may face specific challenges in preventing and controlling communicable disease transmission, particularly during times of large sudden influx. However, there is dearth of evidence on how to prioritise investments in aspects such as human resources, medicines and vaccines, sanitation and disinfection, and physical infrastructures to prevent/control communicable disease outbreaks. We analysed frequent drivers of communicable disease transmission/issues for outbreak management in institutions hosting closed or semi-open communities, including migrant centres, and reviewed existing assessment tools to guide the development of a European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) checklist tool to strengthen preparedness against communicable disease outbreaks in migrant centres. Among articles/reports focusing specifically on migrant centres, outbreaks through multiple types of disease transmission were described as possible/occurred. Human resources and physical infrastructure were the dimensions most frequently identified as crucial for preventing and mitigating outbreaks. This review also recognised a lack of common agreed standards to guide and assess preparedness activities in migrant centres, thereby underscoring the need for a capacity-oriented ECDC preparedness checklist tool

Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been widely used in recent years with significant improvements for many language pairs. Although state-of-the-art NMT systems are generating progressively better translations, idiom translation remains one of the open challenges in this field. Idioms, a category of multiword expressions, are an interesting language phenomenon where the overall meaning of the expression cannot be composed from the meanings of its parts. A first important challenge is the lack of dedicated data sets for learning and evaluating idiom translation. In this paper we address this problem by creating the first large-scale data set for idiom translation. Our data set is automatically extracted from a widely used German-English translation corpus and includes, for each language direction, a targeted evaluation set where all sentences contain idioms and a regular training corpus where sentences including idioms are marked. We release this data set and use it to perform preliminary NMT experiments as the first step towards better idiom translation.Comment: Accepted at LREC 201

Sufficiency, Comprehensiveness of Health Care Coverage, and Cost-Sharing Arrangements in the Realpolitik of Health Policy

This chapter explores two questions in detail: How should we determine the threshold for costs that individuals are asked to bear through insurance premiums or care-related out-of-pocket costs, including user fees and copayments? and What is an adequate relationship between costs and benefits? This chapter argues that preventing impoverishment is a morally more urgent priority than protecting households against income fluctuations, and that many health insurance plans may not adequately protect individuals from health care costs that threaten to drop their financial status below a decent minimum. A design that places greater emphasis on preventing impoverishment and finances the achievement of that goal by reducing unnecessary subsidies to better-off households would better accord with a sufficientarian approach to health care

Urinary biomarker concentrations of captan, chlormequat, chlorpyrifos and cypermethrin in UK adults and children living near agricultural land

There is limited information on the exposure to pesticides experienced by UK residents living near agricultural land. This study aimed to investigate their pesticide exposure in relation to spray events. Farmers treating crops with captan, chlormequat, chlorpyrifos or cypermethrin provided spray event information. Adults and children residing ≤100 m from sprayed fields provided first-morning void urine samples during and outwith the spray season. Selected samples (1–2 days after a spray event and at other times (background samples)) were analysed and creatinine adjusted. Generalised Linear Mixed Models were used to investigate if urinary biomarkers of these pesticides were elevated after spray events. The final data set for statistical analysis contained 1518 urine samples from 140 participants, consisting of 523 spray event and 995 background samples which were analysed for pesticide urinary biomarkers. For captan and cypermethrin, the proportion of values below the limit of detection was greater than 80%, with no difference between spray event and background samples. For chlormequat and chlorpyrifos, the geometric mean urinary biomarker concentrations following spray events were 15.4 μg/g creatinine and 2.5 μg/g creatinine, respectively, compared with 16.5 μg/g creatinine and 3.0 μg/g creatinine for background samples within the spraying season. Outwith the spraying season, concentrations for chlorpyrifos were the same as those within spraying season backgrounds, but for chlormequat, lower concentrations were observed outwith the spraying season (12.3 μg/g creatinine). Overall, we observed no evidence indicative of additional urinary pesticide biomarker excretion as a result of spray events, suggesting that sources other than local spraying are responsible for the relatively low urinary pesticide biomarkers detected in the study population

Expanding, Complementing, or Substituting Multilateralism? EU Preferential Trade Agreements in the Migration Regime Complex

Intense pressure for international solutions and weak support for multilateral cooperation have led the EU to increasingly rely on its strongest foreign policy tool in the pursuit of migration policy goals: preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Starting from the fragmentary architecture of the migration regime complex we examine how the relevant content of the EU PTAs relates to multilateral institutions. Depending on the constellation of policy objectives, EU competence, and international interdependence, we propose a set of hypotheses regarding the conditions under which EU bilateral outreach via PTAs expands, complements, or substitutes international norms. Based on an original dataset of migration provisions in all EU PTAs signed between 1960 and 2020, we find that the migration policy content in EU PTAs expands or complements the objectives of multilateral institutions only to a very limited extent. Instead, the predominant constellation is one of substitution in which the EU uses its PTAs to promote migration policy objectives that depart from those of existing multilateral institutions

International Labor Migration: A Responsible Role for Business

Outlines trends in labor migration in international supply chains and proposes an action plan for businesses to raise awareness and engage with suppliers to protect foreign workers' rights. Includes a case study of the Philippine government's policies

Four types of diaspora mobilization : Albanian diaspora activism for Kosovo independence in the US and the UK

This comparative study explores the conditions and causal pathways through which conflict-generated diasporas become moderate or radical actors when linked to homelands experiencing limited sovereignty. Situated at the nexus of scholarship on diasporas and conflict, ethnic lobbying in foreign policy, and transnationalism this article develops four types of diaspora political mobilization—radical (strong and weak) and moderate (strong and weak)—and unpacks the causal pathways that lead to these four types in different political contexts. I argue that dynamics in the original homeland drive the overall trend towards radicalism or moderation of diaspora mobilization in a host-land: high levels of violence are associated with radicalism, and low levels with moderation. Nevertheless, how diaspora mobilization takes place is a result of the conjuncture of the level of violence with another variable, the linkages of the main secessionist elites to the diaspora. The article uses observations from eight cases of Albanian diaspora mobilization in the US and the UK from 1989 until the proclamation of Kosovo's independence in 2008