The Trials and Tribulations of the National Health System (ESY) in Greece: A Chronicle of Unfulfilled Promises

The creation of the National Health System (ESY) in the 1980s is a majorlandmark in the development of the welfare state in Greece during the metapolitefsi (regime change) period. An ambitious effort to reform the fragmented, ineffective health services of the post-World War II period, it achieved a major reorganisation of public hospitals and the establishment of rural health centres providing primary health care. Yet its promise of high-quality services for all was not fulfilled, since vested interests blocked its full implementation. While the fiscal crisis of the 2010s was the catalyst for theunification of the health insurance funds, the creation of integrated primary health care intowns failed once again. This article examines the achievements and failures of the reform in light of the political and social factors that shaped this era

Many worlds of meaning: a framework for object reference

Our words seem connected with objects – some in our current perceptual experience and some beyond. Words seem to link us to cats, authors, cities and places, present, historical or fantastical. In this work, I try to describe this phenomenon of reference in a unified way: one story that can explain the role of words, of things in the world, and of the intermediary mental content often called ‘meaning’ as part of a greater mechanism common to all cases. This is an old and massive challenge and what I offer here is at most a framework for how that story could be told – one built from pieces already present in the formal, philosophical and (recently) behavioural sciences. I regiment the broader problem into a call for a theory of contact between lexical labels and objects in the world, a theory for information content attached to labels, and a theory of reference coordination between agents or communities. To construct this framework, I trace historical links between two very different projects: the logico-philosophical ‘classical semantics’ of Frege, Russell and Kripke and the more recent computational-psychological view of conceptual cognition based on generated hypotheses. I argue these two approaches can be seen as continuations of each other: one providing a logical blueprint for what the other already explains and describes. Specifically, I argue the information structures used by causal and/or probabilistic generative models of conceptual cognition could also constitute a theory of ‘meaning’ (in my terms: content) – one linked so closely to a given physical environment that contact and coordination, even as envisioned in classical semantics, will follow from the suitable creation, revision and communication of hypotheses anticipating that environment. I end by presenting two sets of empirical results, on effects from conceptual cognition (categorisation and feature inference) on choices and development of lexical labels in dialogue, relating language use to conceptual coordination

Signature Entrenchment and Conceptual Changes in Automated Theory Repair

Human beliefs change, but so do the concepts that underpin them. The recent Abduction, Belief Revision and Conceptual Change (ABC) repair system combines several methods from automated theory repair to expand, contract, or reform logical structures representing conceptual knowledge in artificial agents. In this paper we focus on conceptual change: repair not only of the membership of logical concepts, such as what animals can fly, but also concepts themselves, such that birds may be divided into flightless and flying birds, by changing the signature of the logical theory used to represent them. We offer a method for automatically evaluating entrenchment in the signature of a Datalog theory, in order to constrain automated theory repair to succinct and intuitive outcomes. Formally, signature entrenchment measures the inferential contributions of every logical language element used to express conceptual knowledge, i.e., predicates and the arguments, ranking possible repairs to retain valuable logical concepts and reject redundant or implausible alternatives. This quantitative measurement of signature entrenchment offers a guide to the plausibility of conceptual changes, which we aim to contrast with human judgements of concept entrenchment in future work.Comment: Presented at The Ninth Advances in Cognitive Systems (ACS) Conference 2021 (arXiv:2201.06134

Features of recording practices and communication during nursing handover: a cluster analysis

Objective: To record and identify the characteristics of nursing handovers in a tertiary hospital. Method: Observational study. Twenty-two nurses participated in 11 nursing handovers in 2015/16, using a recorded audio system and an unstructured observation form. Hierarchical cluster analysis was performed. Results: Thirty characteristics were identified. The nursing handovers were based on the clinical status of patients, and all nurses obtained specialized scientific knowledge specific to the clinical environment. The information used was not based on nursing diagnoses and not in accordance with best nursing clinical practice. The following four clusters emerged among the 30 characteristics: 1) the use of evidence-based nursing practice, 2) the nonuse of evidencebased nursing practice and its correlation with strained psychological environment, 3) patient management and the clinical skills/knowledge of nurses, and 4) handover content, quality of information transferred and specialization. Conclusion: Multiple characteristics were observed. The majority of characteristics were grouped based on common features, and 4 main clusters emerged. The investigation and understanding of structural relations between these characteristics and their respective clusters may lead to an improvement in the quality of nursing health care services