Priority setting for food safety management at a national level requires risks to be ranked according to defined criteria. In this study, two approaches (disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and cost of illness (COI)) were used to generate estimates of the burden of disease for certain potentially foodborne diseases (campylobacteriosis, salmonellosis, listeriosis (invasive, perinatal, and nonperinatal), infection with Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC), yersiniosis, and norovirus infection) and their sequelae in New Zealand. A modified Delphi approach was used to estimate the food-attributable proportion for these diseases. The two approaches gave a similar ranking for the selected diseases, with campylobacteriosis and its sequelae accounting for the greatest proportion of the overall burden of disease by far.

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BackgroundExtensive work has been focussed on developing and analysing different performance and quality measures in health services. However less has been published on how practitioners understand and assess performance and the quality of care in routine practice. This paper explores how health service staff understand and assess their own performance and quality of their day to day work. Asking staff how they knew they were doing a good job, it explored the values, motivations and behaviours of staff in relation to healthcare performance. The paper illustrates how staff perceptions of quality and performance are often based on different logics to the dominant notions of performance and quality embedded in current policy.MethodsUsing grounded theory and qualitative, in-depth interviews this research studied how primary care staff understood and assessed their own performance and quality in everyday practice. 21 people were interviewed, comprising of health visitors, occupational therapists, managers, human resources staff and administrators. Analytic themes were developed using open and axial coding.ResultsDiverse aspects of quality and performance in healthcare are rooted in differing organisational logics. Staff values and personal and professional standards are an essential element in understanding how quality is co-produced in everyday service interactions. Tensions can exist between patient centred, relational care and the pressures of efficiency and rationalisation.ConclusionsUnderstanding the perspectives of staff in relation to how quality in practice develops helps us to reflect on different mechanisms to manage quality. Quality in everyday practice relies upon staff values, motivations and behaviours and how staff interact with patients, putting both explicit and tacit knowledge into specific action. However organisational systems that manage quality often operate on the basis of rational measurement. These do not always incorporate the intangible, relational and tacit dimensions of care. Management models need to account for these relational and experiential aspects of care quality to support the prioritisation of patients’ needs. Services management, knowledge management and ethics of care literature can provide stronger theoretical building blocks to understand how to manage quality in practice.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-015-0788-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

‘There has never been such complete democracy in the management of industrial establishments as exists in our shops.’ F.W. Taylor [1]

Employment in UK retail banking has begun to decline as all the major institutions shed workers. Technological, organizational and market-driven reasons for the job losses in the major clearing banks are discussed. Irrevocable long-term changes in employers' industrial relations and human resource strategies are identified as necessary accompaniments to pushing the current retrenchment through in the context of a developing general crisis in employment relations.The 1990s seem set to be a watershed decade of far-reaching staffing changes for the banking industry, and particularly for the big clearing banks that are its main employers. In this article we attempt to make sense of some of these changes [l]. Firstly, we review the changing pattern of employment in terms of the differing fortunes of various categories of employees and of what we argue to be the beginnings of a long-term process of decline in numbers employed, most obviously in the big High Street clearing institutions. We isolate five reasons for the job losses, some of which are of short-term and contemporary significance and others that will be of more long-term concern in restructuring employment in the clearing banks. Following on from this, we consider the implications for banking employees and 0 Peter Cressey is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, University of Bath. Peter Scott is a Research Officer in the School of Social Sciences, University of Bath. management of the current period of manpower reductions in two key areas. These are the effects of staff reductions on the career structure, traditionally one of the main cornerstones of the stable internal labour market in banking; and the industrial relations developments and their accompanying impacts on the corporate culture of banks.Our primary data derives from a study of industrial relations and innovation in two banks: one of the 'Big Four' English clearing banks and one of the Scottish banks of issue. As one part of this, various industrial relations practitioners from company and recognised trade unions were interviewed. It became quite clear from the case-study of the English bank in particular in late 1990iearly 1991 that considerable innovations in employment and industrial relations practices were in train, but also that all the main clearing banks were treading the same path. In this article we have added statistical data and secondary sources providing information on the wider rationalisation Employment, technology and industrial relations in UK clearing banks 83

Continuing evidence of the feminising effects of xenoestrogens on a range of wildlife species increases the need to assess the human health risk of these estrogen mimics. We have estimated the exposure of New Zealand males, females and young men to a range of naturally occurring and synthetic xenoestrogens found in food. Only estrogenic compounds that act by interaction with the estrogen receptor have been included. Theoretical plasma estrogen activity levels were derived from estrogen exposure estimates and estrogenic potency data. Theoretical plasma levels were compared with published data for specific xenoestrogens. There was surprisingly close agreement. Xenoestrogenicity from dietary intake was almost equally attributed to naturally occurring and synthetic xenoestrogens. Relative contributions for a male, for example were isoflavones (genistein and daidzein) (36%) and bisphenol A (34%) with smaller contributions from alkyl phenols (18%) and the flavonoids (phloretin and kaempferol) (12%). It is suggested that dietary xenoestrogens might have a pharmacological effect on New Zealand males and postmenopausal women, but are unlikely to be significant for pre-menopausal women.

European perspectives on the learning organisationNyhan, B.; Cressey, P.; Tomassini, M.; Kelleher, M.; Poell, R.F. Published in: Journal of European Industrial Training Document version:Peer reviewed version Publication date: 2004 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA):Nyhan, B., Cressey, P., Tomassini, M., Kelleher, M., & Poell, R. F. (2004). European perspectives on the learning organisation. Journal of European Industrial Training, 28(1), 67-92. General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. AbstractThis paper, based on a publication entitled 'Facing up to the learning organisation challenge' published in April 2003, provides an overview of the main questions emerging from recent European research projects related to the topic of the learning organisation. The rationale for focusing on this topic is the belief that the European Union goals related to 'lifelong learning' and the creation of a 'knowledge-based society' can only be attained if the organisations in which people work are also organisations in which they learn. Work organisations must become, at the same time, learning organisations.This paper has four main messages. The first is that, in order to build learning organisations, one has to ensure that a) there is coherence between the 'tangible' (formal/objective) and the 'intangible' (informal/subjective) dimensions of an organisation; and b) that the organisation's learning' goals are reconciled with individuals' learning needs. The complexity involved in ensuring the right balance between these different dimensions, means that in the final analysis one cannot realistically expect more than incomplete or imperfect learning organisations. However, this does not in any way negate the validity of the quest to reconcile these competing but 'real' interests.The second message is that challenging or developmental work is a prerequisite for implementing a learning organisation. One of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it promotes human development. The third message is that the provision of support and guidance is essential to ensure that developmental work does in fact provide opportunities for developmental learning. The fourth message is that to address organisational learning there is a need for boundary...