Stewardship and health systems strengthening: An overview

The World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the concept of stewardship to clarify the practical components of governance in the health sector. For the WHO, stewardship concentrated on how government actors take responsibility for the health system and the wellbeing of the population, fulfill health system functions, assure equity, and coordinate interaction with government and society. This article overviews the contents of this special issue, which offers examples of how health stewards in a variety of countries have addressed issues of health security, primary care expansion, family planning, and quality of care. The contributors' articles draw lessons for policy, programs, and management useful for practitioners and scholars. Our overview identifies several themes emerging from the articles: the foundational role of legal frameworks for effective stewardship, the importance of institutional arrangements as enablers, the influence of regional and global entities on national stewardship, the connection between credible decision‐making structures and stewardship, and pathways to sustainable financing and domestic resource mobilization. The discussion concludes with highlighting several gaps in knowledge and practice related to health stewardship.     

Social Anxiety and Aggression in Early Adolescents: Examining the Moderating Roles of Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking

Guided by a social information processing perspective, this study examined the unique and interactive contributions of social anxiety and two distinct components of empathy, empathic concern and perspective taking, to subsequent relational and overt aggression in early adolescents. Participants were 485 10- to 14-year old middle school students (54% female; 78% European-American) involved in two waves of a study with one year between each wave. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that higher levels of empathic concern were directly associated with decreases in subsequent relational and overt aggression one year later and buffered the impact of social anxiety on subsequent relational aggression. Although perspective taking did not moderate the impact of social anxiety on either form of aggression, it was a unique predictor of increased relational aggression one year later. Findings call for future research to assess both components of empathy separately as they relate to relational and overt aggression.     

If Brain Scans Really Detected Deception,Who Would Volunteer to be Scanned?

Abstract: Recent neuroimaging studies investigating the neural correlates of deception among healthy people, have raised the possibility that such methods may eventually be applied during legal proceedings. Were this so, who would volunteer to be scanned? We report a “natural experiment” casting some light upon this question. Following broadcast of a television series describing our team’s investigative neuroimaging of deception in 2007, we received unsolicited (public) correspondence for 12 months. Using a customized template to examine this material, three independent assessors unanimously rated 30 of an initial 56 communications as unequivocally constituting requests for a “scan” (to demonstrate their author’s “innocence”). Compared with the rest, these index communications were more likely to originate from incarcerated males, who were also more likely to engage in further correspondence. Hence, in conclusion, if neuroimaging were to become an acceptable means of demonstrating innocence then incarcerated males may well constitute those volunteering for such investigation.     

‘I'm going to get a job at the factory’: attitudes to women's employment in a mining community, 1945-65

This article examines how couples in mining households managed the increasing opportunities for women to work outside of the home in the period following the Second World War. Households in mining communities have regularly been characterised in research literature as operating strictly segregated gender roles and the lack of employment opportunities in mining areas appears to have accentuated the rigid division of labour. However, in some areas where the mining industry was in decline, new employment opportunities for married women increased, which inevitably placed a strain on the male provider model. This article explores these issues in relation to the ironstone mining district of East Cleveland and uses data generated from thirty-three semi-structured interviews. It will be argued that whilst the separation of the male provider and female homemaker role remained the ideal for many couples, others chose to avail themselves of the economic and psychological benefits of female employment. However, even amongst those couples where the women did undertake paid employment, the image of the male as provider was still preserved by the use of various strategies.     

Understandable Failure: The Eisenhower Administration's Strategic Goals in Iraq, 1953–1958

The present article contends that while the United States did not link Iraq to the West in a Northern Tier alliance aimed at containing the Soviet Union, the failure to do so was not principally a result of mistakes made by Washington. American actions in Iraq were constrained by the competing imperial ambitions of the United Kingdom and by the regional political goals of the Iraqi monarchy. The criticism that the Eisenhower administration undermined the stability of the Iraqi monarchy by not supplying it with sufficient aid, and encouraging it to join the unpopular Baghdad Pact ignores the importance that Britain and the Iraqi government itself had on fate of the Iraqi monarchy.     

Will working from home become the ‘new normal’ in the public sector?

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled large sections of the workforce out of their workplaces and into their homes to work. Many commentators suggest this has forever changed how and where we work. This article analyses how Australia's biggest employers – state and federal governments – approached the transitions to working from home, and back into regular workplaces. It considers the timing of policy responses to the pandemic as one indicator of resistance to, or acceptance of, widespread working from home. The article also demonstrates previous resistance to working from home for public servants, and questions widespread conjecture that it will become the ‘new normal’.     

Caregiver Issues and Concerns Following TBI: A Review of the Literature and Future Directions

Psychological Injury and Law - Survival following traumatic brain injury (TBI) has increased following advances in medical care. However, TBI survivors often experience significant deficits in...     

The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security

Abstract

For most observers, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States (US) came as a shock. This has been widely recast as the culmination of the American public’s long-standing dissatisfaction with the political elite and deep-seated frustrations with broader socio-economic conditions. We argue that the Trump campaign’s success also stemmed from its effective use of an emotionally charged, anti-establishment crisis narrative. With insights from political psychology, we examine the socio-linguistic mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of ‘Trump-speak’ through both quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Trump’s communications toolkit during the 2016?US presidential election campaign. We show that his leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose and explain why ‘crisis talk’ impacts on political behaviour. As we demonstrate, the crisis stories that political agents tell simultaneously instil ontological insecurity among the American public and serve to transform their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality’. Through these rhetorical mechanisms, the Trump campaign manipulated individuals’ ontological (in)security as a tool in the politics of reassurance at the broader, societal level.