Perceptions of responsibility for clinical risk management: evidence from orthopaedics practitioners, practice managers and patients in an Australian capital city

The article describes a study of the perceptions of three groups--patients, orthopaedic surgeons and the surgeons' practice managers--concerning three types of legal risk associated with the duty of care: failure to follow up, failure to warn and failure to diagnose. The study found there is cause for concern about doctors' follow-up and documentation of patient care. Doctors may be unaware of the Australian courts' propensity to emphasise practitioner responsibility rather than patient autonomy. A further important result is the considerable disparity between the surgeons' views and the views of their practice managers about the duty of care. The article draws out implications for improved risk awareness and suggests further research.     

In Search of the Rosetta Stone of the Mediation Profession

Although people have their choice today of an ever-growing number of how-to books and articles about the mediation process, this plenitude was hardly always the case. In fact, back in the early 1950s in the United States, three young mediators with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) drafted a 62-page memo on the subject of their work which included 120 different techniques of mediation, many of which would be familiar and useful to practitioners today. Their pioneering work, however, was neither recognized nor encouraged by the FMCS; in fact, it was suppressed. This article focuses on the reasons for the suppression of that work, providing an overview of the vast changes that have taken place in mediation's history and the federal labor-management mediation agency over the past half-century.     

Implementation Studies: Time for a Revival? Personal Reflections on 20 Years of Implementation Studies

This paper presents a review of three decades of implementation studies and is constructed in the form of a personal reflection. The paper begins with a reflection upon the context within which the book Policy and Action was written, a time when both governments and policy analysts were endeavouring to systematize and improve the public decision-making process and to place such decision-making within a more strategic framework. The review ends with a discussion about how public policy planning has changed in the light of public services reform strategies. It is suggested that as a result of such reforms, interest in the processes of implementation have perhaps been superseded by a focus upon change management and performance targets. It is further argued that this has resulted in the reassertion of normative, top-down processes of policy implementation. The paper raises points that are important ones and indeed are reflected throughout all four papers in the symposium issue. These are: (1) the very real analytical difficulties of understanding the role of bureaucratic discretion and motivation; (2) the problem of evaluating policy outcomes; and (3) the need to also focus upon micro political processes that occur in public services organizations. In conclusion, the paper emphasizes the continued importance of implementation studies and the need for policy analysts to understand what actually happens at policy recipient level.     

A Brief History of SPIDR on its 25th Anniversary

Negotiation Journal -     

Changing the world: Time,space and perceptions

The vicissitudes of one small feminist organisation are used to illustrate the problems of others, even in the context of a period when attention has supposedly been directed at women. The prejudices and problems experienced have, however, come from other women as well as from men, and these require examination in order to be overcome. The objectives of the organisation are outlined, with several informal strategies that have evolved through the experience of putting the objectives into effect.