Quality evaluation in healthcare services based on the customer-provider relationship.

This paper identifies important changes in the Portuguese healthcare industry such as the ownership of healthcare providers, meaning that profit-oriented organisations are currently entering into an industry, which was traditionally dominated by public services. At the same time customers are changing their attitudes towards healthcare becoming much more concerned and demanding with health services. These changes are driving Portuguese healthcare private and public organisations to develop more marketing-oriented services. This paper recognises the importance of quality evaluation of healthcare services as a means to increase levels of customer satisfaction and organisational efficiency. Although evaluating healthcare services raises different questions from other services because of their complexity, ambiguity and heterogeneity, the paper develops a framework to healthcare evaluation based on the relationship between customers (patients, their relatives and citizens) and providers (managers, doctors, other technical staff, non-technical staff) having in mind four quality items (customer service orientation, financial performance, logistical functionality, and level of staff competence).Healthcare, customer service, quality evaluation, performance

International diversification and performance improvement in Portuguese SMEs : The mediating role of international learning

International operations, with its multiplicity of objectives, can be seen as a diversification strategy, sometimes even as a strategic option taken as an effective alternative to product diversification. This work, focusing on a sample of SMEs of Portuguese manufacturing industries, analyzes the mediating role of experiential knowledge arising from the international learning, on the relationship between the international diversification strategies and performance. Data used were collected in 390 companies through an online questionnaire. Data analysis suggests the existence of this mediating effect, stressing therefore its importance as a potential source of competitive advantage. These results provide guidelines for managers and generate directions for future research

Ensino Superior e a Realidade Empresarial: em busca do adequado interposicionamento

O grande "divórcio" que tem caracterizado o interrelacionamento entre ensino superior e a realidade do jogo económico tem - salvo honrosas e escassíssimas excepções - resistido tenazmente quer a críticas quer às variadas tentativas dos "conselheiros matrimoniais" mais empenhados. Se, por um lado, a realidade empresarial se queixa do grande desajuste entre a formação com que os alunos saem das nossas escolas de ensino superior e as reais necessidades das empresas e demais organizações, por outro assiste-se à lamentação das escolas em relação à falta de interesse com que empresários e outros responsáveis encaram a sua participação - supostamente activa - nos conselhos consultivos e, de um modo geral, sempre que são chamados a sugerir, colaborar, ou seja, a contribuir para o almejado ajustamento de posicionamentos

From Concept to Policy: Building Regional Innovation Systems in Follower Regions

In the spirit of “The Lisbon strategy”, public policies are redirecting support from investment-driven policies to knowledge building as the main driver for competitiveness and innovation. This re-orientation poses different challenges to regions and RIS concept may be the central element, simultaneously goal and toolbox, for devising innovation promotion policies. The RIS framework stresses the need to combine a systemic and inclusive view of innovation along with territorially embedded specificities. In this paper we explore how to operationalize the concept of RIS in terms of innovation policy, arguing against a “one size fits all” approach. Concentrating our analysis on follower regions, we bridge the concept of RIS with the structural deficiencies and challenges posing to this kind of regions, for which innovation policy should seek an adequate combination between science push and demand pull perspectives. We also address the importance of taking advantage of the catching-up status, building upon R&D cost-advantages and clustering around external initiatives as well as the correction of important constraints to the construction of a RIS.Innovation, Regional Innovation Systems, Innovation Policy, Follower Regions

Sleep against Capitalism

UIDB/05021/2020 UIDP/05021/2020Parasomnia (2019), a site-specific participatory performance by Patrícia Portela (PT/BE), addresses sleep in its biological and cultural meanings while retrieving its historicity. Sleep is one of the last resistance gestures against capitalised lives, opening a gap for social change through the aesthetic dimension as an extension of arts in politics. Parasomnia raises awareness for empathy and unproductiveness by inviting spectators to take a massage and eating delicacies. Bodily senses are therefore a way to activate potentials and becomings. Often understood as weaknesses and vulnerabilities, the actions elicited—contemplating, caring, and resting—bring up a strength and a capacity to arouse the imagination and fabulation as political acts. It is also argued that dimensions such as fantasmatic, cyclicity, and subjectivity are key social outputs of Parasomnia. Allowing for a pause in a continuous stream of goals, of connectivity and consumption, and without commodification purposes, sleep may return us to a sense of our own interiority made of several layers: like a fall into the sleep that enables alterity to emerge inside the self.publishersversionpublishe

A Geração 2.0 e os novos Saberes

Que implicações terão os novos media para a geração dos jovens cujos percursos de vida e pertenças culturais são construídos no uso da Internet e dos telemóveis? Que oportunidades e ameaças se adivinham? Que novas literacias estão a despontar? Reflectindo sobre estas questões, procura-se identificar pistas quanto aos saberes indispensáveis à convivência com estas mudanças e com o mundo globalizado onde elas organicamente emergem.What are the implications of the new media for the generation of young people whose life paths and cultural affiliations are built using the Internet and mobile phones? What opportunities and threats can we anticipate? What new literacies are emerging? Reflecting upon these issues, we seek to identify clues as to the knowledge needed to cope with these changes and with the globalized world to which they are organically bound

Learning Contexts: a Blueprint for Research

Most research efforts in online learning tend to concentrate on the delivery of content relegating to a lesser role the contexts, the activity-rich, interaction-rich and culturallyrich learning environments that the use of technology is making possible and where new principles and practices apply. We illustrate some of the threads of this emerging research field: What are learning contexts? How do they interact with contents? How can they be managed? What philosophical perspectives and social theories frame and support their use? Can they be designed? How do they shape the platforms of the future?Most research efforts in online learning tend to concentrate on the delivery of content relegating to a lesser role the contexts, the activity-rich, interaction-rich and culturallyrich learning environments that the use of technology is making possible and where new principles and practices apply. We illustrate some of the threads of this emerging research field: What are learning contexts? How do they interact with contents? How can they be managed? What philosophical perspectives and social theories frame and support their use? Can they be designed? How do they shape the platforms of the future

Compreender e desenvolver as competências digitais

O Vol 2 (1) 2019 é dedicado à problemática das Competências Digitais.Já Wittgenstein (1995) defendia que se quisermos compreender o significado de uma palavra teremos de dominar o jogo de linguagem no qual a palavra se inscreve: o significado de um conceito não está na sua definição, mas sim no uso que fizermos dele. Será difícil, por exemplo, explicar o que é um “peão” de xadrez a alguém que não saiba pelo menos os rudimentos do jogo. O mesmo acontece com as “competências digitais”. Podemos defini-las das formas mais rigorosas e melhoradas que quisermos, mas se não conseguirmos clarificar como usá-las não conseguiremos tirar partido delas. Existem variadas definições de competências digitais e numerosos quadros de referência para as classificar. No entanto, nem essas definições nem os seus quadros de referência se têm prestado a transposições práticas minimamente convincentes. O objetivo central deste artigo é tornar compreensível e acionável o conceito de competência digital, para que possamos tirar pleno partido dele ao serviço de uma educação adaptada aos tempos em que vivemos. Seguindo a recomendação de Wittgenstein, adotaremos uma linha de argumentação que é também um jogo de linguagem em torno do conceito.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio