Implementation of patient lifts can be effective in reducing occupational musculoskeletal injuries to nursing personnel in both LTC and acute care settings. Strategies to facilitate greater use of mechanical lifting devices should be explored, as further reductions in injuries may be possible with increased use.
Abstract. In emergency response organizations, information technologies are not adequately explored. Sometimes, the mere adoption of new information technologies is not productive, as their efficient use depends on other interrelated technologies and the environment where they are installed. This work describes a model to help organizations understand their capability in respect to the adoption of these technologies. The model also helps the performing of the evaluation from different perspectives, making it suitable to collaborative evaluation. Using the proposed model, an organization can measure its maturity level in different aspects of the evaluation and guide the investment on its capabilities. Part of the model has been developed for emergency response organizations and the information technology dimension of the model has been applied to two fire department installations.
Context: Advances in customization have highlighted the need for tools supporting variable content document management and generation in many domains. Current tools allow the generation of highly customized documents that are variable in both content and layout. However, most frameworks are technology-oriented, and their use requires advanced skills in implementationrelated tools, which means their use by end users (i.e. document designers) is severely limited.Objective: Starting from past and current trends for customized document authoring, our goal is to provide a document generation alternative in which variants are specified at a high level of abstraction and content reuse can be maximized in high variability scenarios.Method: Based on our experience in Document Engineering, we identified areas in the variable content document management and generation * Corresponding author. field open to further improvement. We first classified the primary sources of variability in document composition processes and then developed a methodology, which we called DPL -based on Software Product Lines principlesto support document generation in high variability scenarios.Results: In order to validate the applicability of our methodology we implemented a tool -DPLfw -to carry out DPL processes. After using this in different scenarios, we compared our proposal with other state-of-the-art tools for variable content document management and generation.Conclusion: The DPLfw showed a good capacity for the automatic generation of variable content documents equal to or in some cases surpassing other currently available approaches. To the best of our knowledge, DPLfw is the only framework that combines variable content and document workflow facilities, easing the generation of variable content documents in which multiple actors play different roles.
The study of resilience in the emergency management field is nowadays in effervescence. Traditionally, the robustness of organizations against disasters is based on several pillars: equipment, staff training, organization and, especially, planning. All of these dimensions are aimed at increasing the preparedness and recovery of organizations against disasters. While the approaches to resilience in emergency management focus on the processes that implement these dimensions, we approach resilience-building processes from a different perspective: instead of focusing on planning-related activities, we pay attention to the principal outcome of such activities, namely emergency plan. We show how the management of the emergency plan can contribute to reinforcing an organization's resilience. First, we identify the major resilience-related emergency plan components and suggest improved emergency plans that consider the characteristics that contribute to resilience. Secondly, we show how to reinforce the resilience of the organizations that have emergency plans. Our study is based on QuEP, a quality-based framework for the assessment and improvement of emergency plan management within organizations. We have extended and integrated the resilience characteristics as practices of the QuEP's maturity level hierarchy to make up QuEP+R. We describe its resilience model and give details of a supporting tool, currently under development.
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