A multi-dimensional study of organisational boundaries and silos in the healthcare sector.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to understand how healthcare practitioners experience organisational boundaries and silos in day-to-day operations. Based on a multi-dimensional scale of organisational boundaries, the study examines how organisational demarcation lines enable and constrain daily work tasks in the healthcare sector.Research design: The study is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey responses from 895 healthcare practitioners in Denmark.Results: The results indicate that tendencies toward organisational silos relate to systems and hierarchies (management-staff) rather than professions and departments. Moreover, the study identifies resource scarcity as an important undercurrent in the understanding of the respondents' perceptions of boundaries and silos.Conclusion: The study contributes to existing research by documenting the coordination and collaboration challenges linked to the multitude of demarcation lines in complex health organisations.

Relationship between citizens' perspective on digital health and underlying health risks.

Objective: Digital health has been gaining widespread attention but has not been fully integrated into the existing healthcare system. However, it remains unclear whether the new digital health solutions align with users' needs and wants. This study examines how citizens perceive the functionalities of digital health and how different health risks influence their perception. Methods: Using an online survey, data are collected from over 4000 Danish citizens. The data are analysed using linear regression models. Results: The results show how users' perceptions of digital health differ significantly. Users are highly interested in data sharing across different healthcare stakeholders but less interested in online health communities. The results also show that the support for digital health is correlated with various health risks, including age, smoking and social network. However, health risks do not have uniform relationship with the perceived value of digital health. Conclusions: While developing and implementing new digital health solutions, it is important to consider the perceptions of people who are expected to benefit from such solutions. This study contributes to the literature by deepening the knowledge of how citizens with different risk profiles perceive the multitude of digital health tools being introduced in the healthcare sector.

Are Perceptions of Health Dependant on Social Class? Studying Soft Power and Symbolic Violence in a Health Promotion Program among Young Men at Vocational Schools.

Health behaviour among young people has a social gradient, and tends to be skewed in terms of gender as well. Young men in vocational educational settings are an example where the inequality in health is apparent. Addressing this problem requires an understanding of health behaviour and its determinants in the target group in order to be able to develop interventions that can address the problem. The aim of the paper is to investigate to what extent a multicomponent intervention based on the Whole School Approach, targeting the risk behaviours, smoking, eating and physical activity that have an impact on health behaviour among male students in a disadvantaged educational setting. The paper uses self-reported longitudinal data on risk behaviours from the "Gearing up the Body" 1-year intervention program that was implemented among students at a Danish vocational school. For the analysis, we created a score model to categorise students and behaviour. Analyses suggest that interventions had only a modest impact and what evidence there is shows that the interventions reduced the health behaviour scores by 0.03 points. More specifically, we find that symbolic violence reduces the health behaviour score of the healthy types by 0.20 points, whereas soft power increases the health behaviour of the unhealthy type by 0.05 points. An explanation for the disappointing results of the "Gearing up the Body" program is tension between different understanding of what is "right" and "wrong" health behaviour. We find that the ideas of soft power and symbolic violence can contribute to a better understanding of why health and health behaviour is understood differently among vocational students. Thus, the finding demonstrates that one needs to apply a participatory approach rather than a normative approach addressing the health behaviour of disadvantaged individuals.

Does It Run in the Family? How Family Background Affects Attachment Styles for Students in Higher Education.

BACKGROUND: Socioeconomic background has traditionally been the most important determinant of an individual's social advantage. Studies have used social class and opportunities based on parental income and education to predict such advantage. There is limited evidence that stratification mechanisms other than socioeconomic background can play an important role. The purpose of the study is to examine the influence of the traditional factors (income and education) of family background on students' social attachment styles compared to other background variables (civil status and number of children). METHODS: We used the Vulnerable Attachment Style Questionnaire as an outcome measure to assess students' social attachment advantage. As a point of departure, we use theories of social psychology to categorize social relations in terms of secure or insecure bonding, respectively. RESULTS: A cross-sectional data set of 912 university students from five European countries was used. With respect to social attachment, the likelihood of being a student with robust relations increases by 23% if the students have high-income parents. Students with robust relations also have a decreased likelihood of poor body self-esteem by 19% when compared with other students. CONCLUSIONS: Stratification mechanisms other than social class, such as parental characteristics, civil status, and number of siblings, all affect the privileged students' social relations.

Promoting Healthy Eating among Young People-A Review of the Evidence of the Impact of School-Based Interventions.

INTRO: Globally, the prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing among children and younger adults and is associated with unhealthy dietary habits and lack of physical activity. School food is increasingly brought forward as a policy to address the unhealthy eating patterns among young people. AIM: This study investigated the evidence for the effectiveness of school-based food and nutrition interventions on health outcomes by reviewing scientific evidence-based intervention studies amongst children at the international level. METHODS: This study was based on a systematic review using the PRISMA guidelines. Three electronic databases were systematically searched, reference lists were screened for studies evaluating school-based food and nutrition interventions that promoted children's dietary behaviour and health aiming changes in the body composition among children. Articles dating from 2014 to 2019 were selected and reported effects on anthropometry, dietary behaviour, nutritional knowledge, and attitude. RESULTS: The review showed that school-based interventions in general were able to affect attitudes, knowledge, behaviour and anthropometry, but that the design of the intervention affects the size of the effect. In general, food focused interventions taking an environmental approach seemed to be most effective. CONCLUSIONS: School-based interventions (including multicomponent interventions) can be an effective and promising means for promoting healthy eating, improving dietary behaviour, attitude and anthropometry among young children. Thus, schools as a system have the potential to make lasting improvements, ensuring healthy school environment around the globe for the betterment of children's short- and long-term health.

Student satisfaction and loyalty in Denmark: Application of EPSI methodology.

Monitoring and managing customers' satisfaction are key features to benefit from today's competitive environment. In higher education context, only a few studies are available on satisfaction and loyalty of the main customers who are the students, which signifies the need to investigate the field more thoroughly. The aim of this research is to measure the strength of determinants of students' satisfaction and the importance of antecedents in students' satisfaction and loyalty in Denmark. Our research model is the modification of European Performance Satisfaction Index (EPSI), which takes the university's image direct effects on students' expectations into account from students' perspective. The structural equation model of student satisfaction and loyalty has been evaluated using partial least square path modelling. Our findings confirm that the EPSI framework is applicable on student satisfaction and loyalty among Danish universities. We show that all the relationships among variables of the research model are significant except the relationship between quality of software and students' loyalty. Results further verify the significance of antecedents in students' satisfaction and loyalty at Danish universities; the university image and student satisfaction are the antecedents of student loyalty with a significant direct effect, while perceived value, quality of hardware, quality of software, expectations, and university image are antecedents of student satisfaction. Eventually, our findings may be of an inspiration to maintain and improve students' experiences during their study at the university. Dedicating resources to identified important factors from students' perception enable universities to attract more students, make them highly satisfied and loyal.

Identification of expressed and conserved human noncoding RNAs.

The past decade has shown mammalian genomes to be pervasively transcribed and identified thousands of noncoding (nc) transcripts. It is currently unclear to what extent these transcripts are of functional importance, as experimental functional evidence exists for only a small fraction. Here, we characterize the expression and evolutionary conservation properties of 12,115 known and novel nc transcripts, including structural RNAs, long nc RNAs (lncRNAs), antisense RNAs, EvoFold predictions, ultraconserved elements, and expressed nc regions. Expression levels are evaluated across 12 human tissues using a custom-designed microarray, supplemented with RNAseq. Conservation levels are evaluated at both the base level and at the syntenic level. We combine these measures with epigenetic mark annotations to identify subsets of novel nc transcripts that show characteristics similar to known functional ncRNAs. Few novel nc transcripts show both high expression and conservation levels. However, overall, we observe a positive correlation between expression and both conservation and epigenetic annotations, suggesting that a subset of the expressed transcripts are under purifying selection and likely functional. The identified subsets of expressed and conserved novel nc transcripts may form the basis for further functional characterization.