The Current Crisis in Emergency Care and the Impact on Disaster Preparedness

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The Homeland Security Act (HSA) of 2002 provided for the designation of a critical infrastructure protection program. This ultimately led to the designation of emergency services as a targeted critical infrastructure. In the context of an evolving crisis in hospital-based emergency care, the extent to which federal funding has addressed disaster preparedness will be examined.</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>After 9/11, federal plans, procedures and benchmarks were mandated to assure a unified, comprehensive disaster response, ranging from local to federal activation of resources. Nevertheless, insufficient federal funding has contributed to a long-standing counter-trend which has eroded emergency medical care. The causes are complex and multifactorial, but they have converged to present a severely overburdened system that regularly exceeds emergency capacity and capabilities. This constant acute overcrowding, felt in communities all across the country, indicates a nation at risk. Federal funding has not sufficiently prioritized the improvements necessary for an emergency care infrastructure that is critical for an all hazards response to disaster and terrorist emergencies.</p> <p>Summary</p> <p>Currently, the nation is unable to meet presidential preparedness mandates for emergency and disaster care. Federal funding strategies must therefore be re-prioritized and targeted in a way that reasonably and consistently follows need.</p

Assessment of the transparency of Spanish local public administrations : methodology and results

The availability of information about public management is a key factor in the democratic participation of citizens, as it enables public management to be assessed and makes contributions to the decision-making processes regarding public affairs. In this article, we present some results of the Infoparticipa Project, whose objective was to determine to what extent local public institutions meet the minimal requirements of transparency and whether there is a relationship between the behaviour of municipal governments and the number of inhabitants, the governing political party and the mayor's gender. In order to do this, in a first phase, the information published by the websites of the local public administrations was analysed through 41 indicators. In a second phase, the geolocalized outcomes were published and disseminated through the media and a consultancy procedure was offered to the administrations' politicians and policymakers. The results of the evaluation of municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants in six Spanish Autonomous Communities indicate that the information published by the councils is still very scarce, especially in those with fewer inhabitants. No clear relationships could be established between the political party governing in each municipality or the mayor's gender and the level of transparency on their websites. However, we have been able to confirm that the full application of the Project, including the consultancy phase, has led to an improvement in the information published by the municipalities in which it was applied

Integrated Popular Reporting as a Tool for Citizen Involvement in Financial Sustainability Decisions

The more information that is disseminated about the financial impact of government decisions, the more public sector entities are stimulated to make decisions in a transparent manner. Several tools can be used to involve citizens in financial sustainability decisions; among these, popular reporting is receiving growing attention in the public sector. The goal of popular reporting is to engage the interest of average citizens and make it easy for them to understand financial sustainability, by presenting more information than traditional financial reporting, in a concise, comprehensive, and attractive manner. For these reasons, government entities should consider implementing integrated popular reporting. This chapter aims to present a prototype integrated popular report designed to promote citizen participation in financial sustainability decisions. Through a theoretical-deductive methodology, it aims to identify the main features that an integrated popular report should contain to best respond to the information needs of public sector user groups, focusing on citizens in particular

Culture Invites Participation. An Inquiry on Matera as European Capital of Culture 2019

The active involvement of citizens in the co-creation of public initiatives has been embraced by the European Commission as a relevant topic on its reform agenda. In this line, citizen participation emerged as one of the main criteria for nominating the European Capitals of Culture (ECoCs). However, there are still few systematic studies that seek to investigate the challenges, the problems, and the difficulties that are associated with the processes aiming to foster and establish citizen participation. Hence, in this paper we address the following research question: What are the conditions for developing an effective participatory process in ECoCs? We propose an exploratory approach by analysing the case study of Matera ECoC 2019. Following the triangulation of data, information has been collected from a wealth of both secondary sources of evidence and primary sources, in order to analyze a range of opinions and perspectives. Our inquiry provides a twofold contribution to this stream of research. First, we propose a simple yet comprehensive framework to analyse participation in the context of participatory cultural initiatives. Second, we enrich the empirical evidence by providing an in-depth analysis of an ECoC project from the launch of the idea, to its first implementation phase