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Along with the logistic planning, the important focus of international student mobility programmes in social work is on the field supervision process and measuring its outcome. Without a social work council in India for setting uniform standards in field education, this paper proposes a framework for field supervision to support inbound mobility students in India. The study predominantly explores the qualitative experiences of field supervisors from India, Israel, and Australia on fieldwork supervision. The themes evolved from the study are focused on the supervision process, strategies followed, challenges faced, and outcome measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a training programme using action learning sets designed to enhance the management abilities of health-care managers. Numerous independent reports in Australia, and around the world, have related the lack of management systems and processes to substandard health-care delivery. This has suggested a need for better approaches to the education, training and ongoing development of health-care managers, and this paper reports on an action learning approach trialled over a three-year period. Participant managers reported significantly greater levels of empowerment and self-efficacy after participation in the year-long action learning sets intervention. While too early to measure the translation of these reported individual improvements into specific management practice, the literature strongly supports more effective management practice among managers who report high levels of empowerment and self-efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: News reporting on mental illness can perpetuate stigma. An understanding of the current picture of such reporting is important to identify areas for improvement. This study investigated the quality of Australian news media coverage of complex mental illness in the context of crime and violence over a 2-year period, prior to the release of new media guidelines. Methods: This research utilised a systematic search of Australian news articles that were published between July 2018 and July 2020 and reported on mental illness in relation to violent crime. Researchers developed a Mental Illness and Crime Reporting Quality Framework to determine quality scores for news articles according to 11 relevant factors in media guidelines. An additional 11 characteristics of articles were extracted for further descriptive analysis. Results: One-hundred and twenty-eight Australian news articles met inclusion criteria. The average quality score was 50 (SD = 13.91) out of a possible maximum score of 100 (range 11–78). Strengths and weaknesses were identified as some criteria were consistently met, and other criteria were met rarely or not at all. There were emerging trends between quality scores and article characteristics, including publication source, though these analyses were not statistically significant. Conclusion: The findings indicate that Australian news coverage of complex mental illness and violent crime met half of the criteria of reporting guidelines that minimises risk of perpetuating or reinforcing stigma. This demonstrates significant opportunity to improve the overall quality of media reporting on crime and mental illness. Future research should evaluate the impact of the guidelines on the quality of news reporting after their implementation by utilising a similar methodology, using these findings as a baseline measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The financial sustainability of publicly funded health care systems is a challenge to policymakers in many countries as health care absorbs an ever increasing share of both national wealth and government spending. New technology, aging populations and increasing public expectations of the health care system are often cited as reasons why health care systems need ever increasing funding as well as reasons why universal and comprehensive public systems are unsustainable. However, increases in health care spending are not usually linked to corresponding increases in need for care within populations. Attempts to promote financial sustainability of systems such as limiting the range of services is covered or the groups of population covered may compromise their political sustainability as some groups are left to seek private cover for some or all services. In this paper, an alternative view of financial sustainability is presented which identifies the failure of planning and management of health care to reflect needs for care in populations and to integrate planning and management functions for health care expenditure, health care services and the health care workforce. We present a Health Care Sustainability Framework based on disaggregating the health care expenditure into separate planning components. Unlike other approaches to planning health care expenditure, this framework explicitly incorporates population health needs as a determinant of health care requirements, and provides a diagnostic tool for understanding the sources of expenditure increase. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses childcare services in six countries, assessing this policy instrument's potential to facilitate parents' capabilities for arranging childcare in a way they have reason to value. It draws on Sen's capability approach to conceptualize and assess childcare policy design across five key aspects of childcare provision (accessibility, availability, affordability, quality and flexibility) in a country-comparative perspective. The conceptualization of the multifaceted nature of childcare provides compelling insights into the complexity of comparing childcare services across countries. The ensuing analysis and comprehensive overview of national policies challenges the idea of a defamilialization policy cluster, which masks key distinctions between public and market service provision. The more nuanced conceptualization and operationalization of childcare policy design through the capability approach reveals parents' real opportunities for arranging childcare and the varying effects of policy design across gender and class. In addition, it goes beyond implicit commodification assumptions and opens up space for parents' potential desire for multiple care arrangement possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction of adult life course and identity has typically been built around norms of partnering and parenting, placing single women who do not have children outside the norm. Studies undertaken with single women have found that relationship status was a key factor in their identity construction. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five single women without children living in Australia. Drawing on critical discursive psychology, we found that participants negotiated two contesting discourses to construct their identities: the Heterosexual Relationship and Family Life discourse and the Independent Single Woman discourse. In crafting identities, tensions were identified between the positioning of self and the positioning of self by others, particularly with respect to the Heterosexual Relationship and Family Life discourse. This was evident in some women contesting the positions afforded by the discourse, instead drawing on an asset identity. This asset identity enabled the women to pursue positive life opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Welfare state spending cuts are effective fiscal consolidation tools, but some policymakers use other fiscal policy tools to address high levels of government debt. I argue that the economic incentive to cut welfare spending when government debt is high is undermined by the political incentive to stay in power when the median voter opposes retrenchment. Using survey data to measure the policy position of the median voter as well as hard figures on government debt and government social spending from 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, I estimate a series of regressions that show that government debt has a negative effect on social spending, but only when the median voter does not oppose retrenchment. This holds true for broad measures of social spending as well as for unemployment spending and old-age pension spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]