Service Matters

Why Public Service Matters conveys the importance, purpose, and nobility of a career as a civil servant in the United States. It does so, however, with an unflinching eye on the realpolitik that drives public administration in America's "compensatory state" and on the pitfalls of reformers' focus on bureaucratic, rather than democratic, administration. The book links the nation's ability to handle contemporary policy problems with the strategic, tactical, and normative quality of public management. In doing so, it offers newcomers a rare, concise, and accessible overview of the field. Readers will gain an appreciation for the challenges, choices, and opportunities facing public managers as they help advance a sense of common purpose informed by democratic constitutional values in twenty-first century America.

Winner of the EDRA 2015 Book Award! Community Matters: Service Learning in Engaged Design and Planning explores issues that resonate with a diverse group of design and planning educators drawn to the challenge of supporting greater community building and empowerment while combining learning with practice. The book explores such questions as: How do we foster mutuality and reciprocity in community-academy partnerships? What conflicts, challenges, limits and obstacles do we face in our service-learning studios and projects? What evidence do we have of our impacts on students and communities and how are we responding? How are we being attentive to the contemporary environmental and societal issues? What is our role as both designers and agents of societal change? How are we innovating to enable greater capacities for individuals, future practitioners and communities? This book provides compelling evidence that educators should be adopting engaged pedagogies, research methods and theories through which they can bring together education, practice and scholarship at the boundary of community and academy.

Examines AEC uranium enrichment service contracts and post-1968 objectives concerning U.S. sales of and safeguards for nuclear fuels and substances.

Quality Matters in Children's Services brings together authoritative research to explore critical concerns for those working with vulnerable children, young people and their families. Subjects covered include reunification, stability and wellbeing, kinship care, educating vulnerable young people, child protection, domestic violence and parental substance misuse, the participation of disabled young people and advocacy services. Mike Stein discusses key issues for policy and practice in the development of quality services including identifying and sustaining quality through involving stakeholders, integrated working and quality services, the development of policies, procedures and organisational processes and carrying out quality assessments, training and workforce reform. This book is essential reading for practitioners, senior staff, commissioners, managers and anyone involved in developing quality children's services.

The fundamental question in business and in personal life is the same: what really matters? In this book, one of America's most widely admired business leaders distills a lifetime of experience, including failures as well as successes, to reveal his answers. John Pepper, president, CEO, and chairman of Proctor & Gamble for a combined 16 years, underscores the importance of continuous change, innovation, and renewal as prerequisites for growth and sound leadership. In "What Really Matters", he suggests that a preparedness to alter perspective, rethink assumptions, or change course is central not only to understanding customer needs and keeping costs under control but also to developing talent, organizing global businesses, and supporting communities. While he discusses specific business tactics, he notes that they all centre on fundamental tenets: listen to and respect the customer, engender personal accountability and passionate ownership, encourage diversity, and create a vibrant, trusting institution that incorporates employees and their families. In his own years as an executive, Pepper has demonstrated that a profitable business can create and sustain a culture that shapes, and is shaped by, ethical behaviour. His profoundly important advice and counsel belong in the lexicon and practice of every leader.

Initially genetic disorders were all considered as rare diseases. At present, in the mid of 2009, the OMIM catalogue contains information on more than 12 000 entries of which about 2500 are available for clinical testing based on the identification of the responsible gene defect. However, altogether it has been estimated that about 8 percent of a population in the economically developed countries will during their lifetime suffer from a disease mainly as the result of their genetic constitution. Adding to that, it is estimated that all diseases have a genetic component, which will determine who will be at a higher than average risk for a certain disorder. Further it is postulated that in the near future, this genetic profiling could become useful in selecting an appropriate therapy adapted to the genetic constitution of the person. Thus, genetic disorders are not rare. Measuring quality of health care related processes became an issue in the 1990s, mainly in laboratory medicine, but also for hospitals and other health care systems. In many countries national authorities started to implement recommendations, guidelines or legal procedures regulating quality of health care delivery. In laboratory medicine, in parallel, the use of accreditation as a method assuring high quality standards in testing came in use. With the increasing possibilities of performing molecular genetic testing, genetic laboratories needed to become involved in this process. As many genetic disorders are rare, most laboratories worldwide offered analysis for a specific set of disorders, and, therefore, very early on a transborder flow of samples occurred. While international quality criteria (ISO) have been in existence for a number of years, the regulation of quality issues still may differ between countries. Based on their personal experience in the varying fields of quality research and clinical implementation of quality criteria in genetic services the authors of this book share their experience and give examples of the implementation of quality issues in national quality systems worldwide. This book, which is the result of the effort of many persons, is destined to aid laboratory managers and counsellors, health care managers and other stakeholders in national or international health care service to improve the services to the benefit of patients with suspected genetic disorders.

This guide explores visible mending techniques in both hands-on projects and thoughtful insight about how mending relates to mindful well-being. Mending Matters explores sewing on two levels: First, it includes more than twenty projects that showcase visible mending—styles that are edgy, modern, and bold, yet draw on traditional stitching. It does all this with just four simple mending techniques: exterior patches, interior patches, slow stitches, darning, and weaving. In addition, the book addresses the way mending leads to a more mindful relationship to fashion and to overall well-being. In essays that accompany each how-to chapter, Katrina Rodabaugh explores mending as a metaphor for appreciating our own naturally flawed selves. She also examines the ways in which mending teaches us new skills, self-reliance, and confidence, all gained from making things with our own hands.