Quality Improvement Project for Antibiotic Stewardship in Urgent Care

Overprescribing antibiotics is currently a major issue in the outpatient setting. Inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions are leading to costly adverse effects, including antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic stewardship interventions are adaptable tools that are readily available to prescribers to reduce the overuse of antibiotic prescriptions. The purpose of this project was to implement an Antibiotic Stewardship Bundle in an urgent care clinic. The overall aims of this project were to decrease the amount of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed and increase best prescribing practice. The results of the quality improvement project showed inappropriate antibiotic prescription rates decreased from 54.7% to 35.4% (P = 0.0006).

The development of a behavioural competency framework for school principals

Orientation: More than two and a half decades into South Africa's democracy, the majority of the country's learners receive low-quality school education, adversely affecting upward social mobility. Ensuring quality education for all South Africans requires a combined approach of equitable resource allocation and effective school leadership that transforms resources into educational outcomes. Research purpose: The objective of the study was to develop a behavioural competency framework for school principals. Motivation for the study: While past studies highlight school leadership and management to be pivotal in the establishment and maintenance of well-performing schools, less is known about the behavioural competencies required by school principals. Research approach and method: Guided by a synthesis of literature on school management, critical incident interviews were conducted with a sample of 10 school principals with good track records. The salience of the literature-derived competencies was established, and the content supplemented by contextualising the competencies with specific behavioural denotations from the interviews. Main findings: Eleven key competencies emerged from the data: creating a school vision and setting strategic direction, setting goals and expectations, developing school staff, influencing and communicating, resourcing strategically, leading with compassion, maintaining a student-centred learning environment, making decisions, managing self, managing teaching and learning, and leading across school boundaries. Managerial implications: The competencies identified provide a blueprint to guide human resource management interventions aimed at establishing effective school leadership. Contribution: The study provides a rich source of information about critical school principal behaviours, explored from an integrated perspective that acknowledges the school context.

A method for the dynamic collaboration of the public and experts in large-scale group emergency decision-making: Using social media data to evaluate the decision-making quality

Aiming at the complex and changeable environment and the low public participation in emergency decision making, this article proposes a method for the dynamic collaboration of the public and experts in large-scale group emergency decision-making (LSGEDM) based on social media data. First, sentiment analysis is carried out on text data from social media platforms to evaluate the quality of LSGEDM at both the attribute and comprehensive levels. Then, according to the decision-making quality at the attribute level, a method for the dynamic updating of attribute weights is proposed. Next, in the social network environment, the trust relationship between experts is dynamically updated based on the comprehensive quality of decision-making and the distance between the expert and group preferences, and expert weights are calculated by the improved PageRank algorithm. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are verified via its application to the COVID-19 epidemic in China and a comparative analysis.

A method for the dynamic collaboration of the public and experts in large-scale group emergency decision-making: Using social media data to evaluate the decision-making quality

Aiming at the complex and changeable environment and the low public participation in emergency decision-making, this article proposes a method for the dynamic collaboration of the public and experts in large-scale group emergency decision-making (LSGEDM) based on social media data. First, sentiment analysis is carried out on text data from social media platforms to evaluate the quality of LSGEDM at both the attribute and comprehensive levels. Then, according to the decision-making quality at the attribute level, a method for the dynamic updating of attribute weights is proposed. Next, in the social network environment, the trust relationship between experts is dynamically updated based on the comprehensive quality of decision-making and the distance between the expert and group preferences, and expert weights are calculated by the improved PageRank algorithm. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are verified via its application to the COVID-19 epidemic in China and a comparative analysis.

Mediating Role of Intra-Team Conflict between Paternalistic Leadership and Decision-Making Quality among China University's CMT during COVID-19.

Universities across China have set up crisis management teams (CMTS) to deal with the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study focuses on how the paternalistic leadership practices of a Chinese university CMT influence crisis strategic decisions by managing conflict. These relationships were verified using hierarchical regression analysis on 312 samples from the surveyed university during the pandemic and found the following: benevolent leadership and moral leadership have positive effects on decision quality. However, unlike most studies on paternalistic leadership, in crisis situations, the negative effects of authoritarian leadership disappear under the mediating effect of affective conflict. This means that affective conflict within CMT fully mediates the relationship between authoritarian leadership and decision quality, and partially mediates the relationship between moral leadership and decision quality, while cognitive conflict partially mediates the relationship between benevolent leadership and crisis decision quality. It indicates that a CMT must stimulate and maintain a certain level of cognitive conflict while suppressing affective conflict to achieve high-quality crisis decision-making. This state can be achieved by practicing lower levels of authoritarian leadership and maintaining high levels of moral and benevolent leadership practices.