Sprendimų priėmimo proceso švietimo srityje organizavimas ir komunikacinė parama

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0This article examines the essence of the definitions of management decision and decision-making, highlighting the essential components of these definitions. This later allows us to provide the authors’ definition of the concept of organizational and communication support of the decision-making process in the educational sphere. The article analyzes decision-making models that can be extrapolated in educational institutions under reform conditions. The Rational model is high-lighted as a priority decision-making model for the educational sphere. Unlike existing models, the Rational model differs in a significant number of economic criteria, which helps to make accurate decisions among existing alternative choices. The communication process is considered, taking into account the stages of decision-making, where the relationships and correlations between actions at each stage of decision-making are revealed. This subsequently makes it possible to form a matrix of the in-terrelationship of factors of the development of organizational and communication support and stages of decision-making. The study of organizational and communication support for the decision-making process in higher education institutions makes it possible to schematically depict a complex organizational structure, where close communication links between departments are defined. It is noted that information about decisions is mainly provided remotely through the internal module of information and communication support. This allows the administrative and management unit to distribute management information for execution simultaneously to all units, eliminating the distortion of information. It also enables the educational institution to effectively interact with the external environment. The selected components of the organizational and communication support of the decision-making process allow a comprehensive approach to the substantiation of the hypothesis, which is based on the perception of organizational and communication support as necessary tools that have an impact on the quality of the decision-making process in the educational sphere

How Did the Two Years of the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect the Outcomes of the Patients with Inflammatory Rheumatic Diseases in Lithuania?

Background and objectives: the COVID-19 pandemic globally caused more than 18 million deaths over the period of 2020–2021. Although inflammatory rheumatic diseases (RD) are generally associated with premature mortality, it is not yet clear whether RD patients are at a greater risk for COVID-19-related mortality. The aim of our study was to evaluate mortality and causes of death in a retrospective inflammatory RD patient cohort during the COVID-19 pandemic years. Methods: We identified patients with a first-time diagnosis of inflammatory RD and followed them up during the pandemic years of 2020–2021. Death rates, and sex- and age-standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) were calculated for the prepandemic and pandemic periods. Results: We obtained data from 11,636 patients that had been newly diagnosed with inflammatory RD and followed up until the end of 2021 or their death. The mean duration of the follow-up was 5.5 years. In total, 1531 deaths occurred between 2013 and 2021. The prevailing causes of death in the prepandemic period were cardiovascular diseases, neoplasms, and diseases of the respiratory system. In the pandemic years, cardiovascular diseases and neoplasms remained the two most common causes of death, with COVID-19 in third place. The SMR of the total RD cohort was 0.83. This trend was observed in rheumatoid arthritis and spondyloarthropathy patients. The SMR in the group of connective-tissue diseases and vasculitis was higher at 0.93, but did not differ from that of the general population. The excess of deaths in the RD cohort during the pandemic period was negative (−27.2%), meaning that RD patients endured the pandemic period better than the general population did. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic did not influence the mortality of RD patients. Strict lockdown measures, social distancing, and early vaccination were the main factors that resulted in reduced mortality in this cohort during the pandemic years