Public value summary background paper

The Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government (ACELG) at UTS has published a background paper about understanding and promoting public value creation within Australian local government. The paper provides a definition of public value and public value creation from key literature, and links this with current practice within the sector. The Public Value project is a partnership between the Local Government Business Excellence Network (LGBEN) and ACELG and explores how councils create public value in a broad sense – or ‘the common good’ – and deliver this value specifically through planning and managing and delivering a wide range of services, programs and projects. A final phase of the project will provide examples of public value so frameworks and tools can be developed for councils looking at undertaking continual improvement initiatives

Councils_learning_from_each_other.pdf

This report explores the motivations for, and barriers to inter-council learning. The research identifies how information, ideas and inspiration is accessed from peers and then developed within other organisations

Distal Femur Osteotomy in Collegiate Field Hockey Goalie

In volume 4, Issue 1 of the JSMAHS you will find Professional Research Abstracts, as well as Bachelor Student Research Abstracts and Case Reports. Thank you for viewing this 4th Annual OATA Special Editio

Profile-of-the-Local-Government-Workforce.pdf

An extensive profile of the Australian local government workforce. Supplements include a summary document of the key findings and an infographic

Evidence follows rhetoric -evaluating cultural development in an adaptive frame: Cultural development and Australian local government

ABSTRACT Over the last 50 years, local government in Australia has increasingly practiced cultural development as a means of supporting community cohesion, wellbeing, sense of identity and economic development. The practice includes activities intended to elicit, express or explore aspects of community life that lend themselves to these goals, including arts practices that are generally integral to the activities. The requirement of funding bodies to evaluate the effectiveness of subsidised programs has led to a tendency to view the arts instrumentally, that is, as a means to an end. That tends to leave discussion of the intrinsic value of the arts relatively undeveloped or unresolved. The paper argues for the use of an adaptive frame for evaluating cultural development and for cultural development's institutional contribution to local government and its communities to be better recognised. Integrated strategies are available for a systems view of cultural development and the paper discusses how this can contribute to governance approaches in local government

Centering Communities of Color in the Modernization of a Public Health Survey System: Lessons from Oregon

Context: Public health survey systems are tools for informing public health programming and policy at the national, state, and local levels. Among the challenges states face with these kinds of surveys include concerns about the representativeness of communities of color and lack of community engagement in survey design, analysis, and interpretation of results or dissemination, which raises questions about their integrity and relevance. Approach: Using a data equity framework (rooted in antiracism and intersectionality), the purpose of this project was to describe a formative participatory assessment approach to address challenges in Oregon Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Student Health Survey (SHS) data system by centering community partnership and leadership in (1) understanding and interpreting data; (2) identifying strengths, gaps, and limitations of data and methodologies; (3) facilitating community-led data collection on community-identified gaps in the data; and (4) developing recommendations. Results: Project team members’ concerns, observations, and critiques are organized into six themes. Throughout this engagement process, community partners, including members of the project teams, shared a common concern: that these surveys reproduced the assumptions, norms, and methodologies of the dominant (White, individual centered) scientific approach and, in so doing, created further harm by excluding community knowledges and misrepresenting communities of color. Conclusions: Meaningful community leadership is needed for public health survey systems to provide more actionable pathways toward improving population health outcomes. A data equity approach means centering communities of color throughout survey cycles, which can strengthen the scientific integrity and relevance of these data to inform community health efforts

Engaging Antiracist and Decolonial Praxis to Advance Equity in Oregon Public Health Surveillance Practices.

Public health surveillance and data systems in the US remain an unnamed facet of structural racism. What gets measured, which data get collected and analyzed, and how and by whom are not matters of happenstance. Rather, surveillance and data systems are productions and reproductions of political priority, epistemic privilege, and racialized state power. This has consequences for how communities of color are represented or misrepresented, viewed, and valued and for what is prioritized and viewed as legitimate cause for action. Surveillance and data systems accordingly must be understood as both an instrument of structural racism and an opportunity to dismantle it. Here, we outline a critique of standard surveillance systems and practice, drawing from the social epidemiology, critical theory, and decolonial theory literatures to illuminate matters of power germane to epistemic and procedural justice in the surveillance of communities of color. We then summarize how community partners, academics, and state health department data scientists collaborated to reimagine survey practices in Oregon, engaging public health critical race praxis and decolonial theory to reorient toward antiracist surveillance systems. We close with a brief discussion of implications for practice and areas for continued consideration and reflection