Advancing Racial Equity in Communities: Lessons for Philanthropy

Outlines elements of success and lessons learned from efforts by foundations and nonprofits in five communities to help dismantle the structural racism perpetuating disparities in income, wealth, education, housing, employment, and criminal justice

A healthcare space planning simulation model for Accident and Emergency (A&E)

The National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom provides a range service for its population including primary care and hospital services. The impact of the 2008 economic and financial crises prompted a tightening of public budgets including health. Over the next few years, and most likely beyond, the NHS is planning for unprecedented levels of efficiency saving in the order of £ billions. With little doubt, the NHS will need to review its way of working will need to do more with less. Simulation is an established technique with applications in many industries including healthcare. Potentially, there are huge opportunities for simulation use to make further inroads in the field of healthcare. Despite the potential, arguably, simulation has failed to make a significant impact in health. Some evidence has tended to suggest that within health there has been poor adaption along with poor linkage to real-world problems, as perceived by healthcare stakeholders. The aim of this thesis is to develop a model to help address real-world healthcare issues as recognised by healthcare stakeholders. In doing so, this thesis will focus on a couple of real-world problems, namely: What space is needed to meet service demand, when is it needed and what will it cost? What space do we have, how can it be used to meet service demand and at what cost? The developed simulation space demand model will demonstrate its value modelling dynamic systems over static models. The developed models will also show its value highlighting space demand issues by groups of patients, by time of day. Real, readily available data (arrival and length of stay, by patient group) would drive the model inputs, supporting ease of use and clarity for healthcare stakeholders. The model was modular by design to support rapid reconfiguration. Dynamically modelled space information allows service managers and Healthcare Planners to better manage and organise their space in a flexible way to meet service requirements. This work will also describe how space demand can linked with building notes to determine Schedules of Accommodation which can be used to cost floor space and consequent building or refurbishment costs. Furthermore, this information could be used to drive business plans and to develop operational cost pertaining to the floor area. This body of work debates using function-to-space ratios and attaching facilities management cost. Our findings suggest great variance in function-to-space ratios. Our findings also suggest that moving to median or lower quartile function-to-space ratios could potentially save hospitals £ millions in facilities management costs. This thesis will reflect on the level of modelling taking place in the healthcare industry by non-academic healthcare modellers, sometimes collectively known as Healthcare Planners, the Healthcare Planning role in space planning and their links with healthcare stakeholders. This reflection will also consider whether healthcare stakeholders perceive a great need for academic healthcare modelling, if they believe their modelling needs are met by Healthcare Planners. A central theme of this thesis is that academic modelling and Healthcare Planning have great synergy and that bringing together Healthcare Planners’ industry knowledge and stakeholder relationships with academic know-how, can make a significant contribution to the healthcare simulation modelling arena

Overriding Virtue

If you focus your charitable giving on global causes where it will do the most good, how should you feel about passing by the local soup kitchen? Would the ideally virtuous agent have their (local) empathy still activated, but simply overridden by the recognition that distant others are in even greater need, leaving the agent feeling torn? Or would their empathetic impulses be wholeheartedly redirected towards the greatest needs? This chapter suggests a way to revise an outdated conception of moral virtue to better meet the demands of a cosmopolitan moral outlook

Ten myths about character, virtue and virtue education – plus three well-founded misgivings

Initiatives to cultivate character and virtue in moral education at school continue to provoke sceptical responses. Most of those echo familiar misgivings about the notions of character, virtue and education in virtue – as unclear, redundant, old-fashioned, religious, paternalistic, anti-democratic, conservative, individualistic, relative and situation dependent. I expose those misgivings as ‘myths’, while at the same time acknowledging three better-founded historical, methodological and practical concerns about the notions in question

What is a Relational Virtue?

In this paper, I introduce what I call relational virtue and defend it as an important subcategory of virtue. In particular, I argue that it offers a valuable resource for answering questions concerning the value of intimate relationships such as parent-child relationship or friendship. After briefly sketching what I mean by relational virtue, I show why it is a virtue and in what sense we can meaningfully distinguish it from other sorts of virtue. I then describe some distinctive features of relational virtue in more detail and discuss their implications. Next, I present filial piety as the paradigmatic example of relational virtue. I argue that a child s being filial should be understood as an appropriate response to her parent s being virtuous as a parent. I conclude by showing how my relational virtue theory of filial piety can avoid the difficulties faced by previous theories of filial piety such as gratitude theory and friendship theory

Virtues of historiography

In this paper, I take up Herman Paul's suggestion to analyze the process of writing history in terms of virtues. In contrast to Paul, however, I argue that the concept of virtue used here should not be based on virtue epistemology, but rather on virtue ethics. The reason is that virtue epistemology is discriminative towards non-cognitive virtues and incompatible with the Ankersmitian/Whitean view of historiography as a multivocal path from historical reality to historical representation. Virtue ethics on the other hand, more specif.ically those forms of virtue ethics which emphasize the uncodifiability thesis, is very capable of providing such an account. In order to make this somewhat more concrete, I distinguish four important traits of virtue ethics, and I try to make clear how these can be interpreted with respect to the writing of history

Confucian Virtue Jurisprudence

Virtue jurisprudence is an approach to legal theory that develops the implications of virtue ethics and virtue politics for the law. Recent work on virtue jurisprudence has emphasized a NeoAristotelian approach. This essay develops a virtue jurisprudence in the Confucian tradition. The title of this essay, “Confucian Virtue Jurisprudence,” reflects the central aim of our work, to build a contemporary theory of law that is both virtue-centered and that provides a contemporary reconstruction of the central ideas of the early Confucian intellectual tradition. This essay provides a sketch of our contemporary version of Confucian virtue jurisprudence, including a view of (1) the ends of law, (2) legislation and the judiciary, (3) the nature of law. We shall argue that the highest value of Confucian ethical, political theory is the virtue of citizens and the harmony of society and individuals. From the perspective of the use of evaluative language, the Confucian doctrine of Correcting Names gives us an explanation of the mechanism of internalization of legal rules in terms of the relationship among social norms, law and thick evaluative concepts. This might throw light on our normative understanding of legislation and the judiciary,and it also provides a functional account of the nature of law

Virtue and austerity

Virtue ethics is often proposed as a third way in health-care ethics, that while consequentialism and deontology focus on action guidelines, virtue focuses on character; all three aim to help agents discern morally right action although virtue seems to have least to contribute to political issues, such as austerity. I claim: (1) This is a bad way to characterize virtue ethics. The 20th century renaissance of virtue ethics was first proposed as a response to the difficulty of making sense of ‘moral rightness’ outside a religious context. For Aristotle the right action is that which is practically best; that means best for the agent in order to live a flourishing life.There are no moral considerations besides this. (2) Properly characterized, virtue ethics can contribute to discussion of austerity. A criticism of virtue ethics is that fixed characteristics seem a bad idea in ever-changing environments; perhaps we should be generous in prosperity, selfish in austerity. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that people indeed do change with their environment. However, I argue that virtues concern fixed values not fixed behaviour; the values underlying virtue allow for different behaviour in different circumstances: in austerity, virtues still give the agent the best chance of flourishing. Two questions arise. (a) In austere environments might not injustice help an individual flourish by, say, obtaining material goods? No, because unjust acts undermine the type of society the agent needs for flourishing. (b) What good is virtue to those lacking the other means to flourish? The notion of degrees of flourishing shows that most people would benefit somewhat from virtue. However, in extreme circumstances virtue might harm rather than benefit the agent: such circumstances are to be avoided; virtue ethics thus has a political agenda to enable flourishing. This requires justice, a fortiori when in austerity