[The development of organizational comfort: organizational training as strategic instrument for changing]. / Lo sviluppo del benessere organizzativo: la formazione organizzativa come leva strategica per il cambiamento.

The organizational comfort has been defined as the relationship between people and work environment. The supervisor's functions imply organizing and relation competences, listening and observation, communication and negotiation. Unfortunately, the reality is quite different: there are often situations of communication disorder between the supervisor and the worker, where the first, unaware of his role and responsibility, doesn't understand the worker's needs, doesn't communicate rightly the risk, doesn't develop any emphatic attitude and organize work without thinking to individual inclinations and limitations. The worker perceives this situation as increasing sensation of tiredness and working stress. The workers, often involved in this organization, have to ask overtime medical examinations to obtain some limitations. Observing this big increase of limitations in some firms with working people relatively young, we have decided to elaborate an experimental project involving both the occupational doctor and the psychologist. We analyzed the relations between the supervisor and the worker, with the aim to increase organizational comfort, through the diffusion of anonymous questionnaires or training courses about behaviour analyses and communication strategies, verifying any possible modifications of the organization after our intervention.

Growth hormone release during insulin tolerance, clonidine, arginine and growth hormone releasing hormone tests in short normal children and adolescents.

This study was retrospectively performed in 574 short normal children and adolescents [328 underwent insulin tolerance test (ITT), 34 clonidine test (CLON), 64 arginine test (ARG), 19 GHRH test, 52 ITT+CLON, 30 GHRH+CLON, and 47 ITT+CLON+GHRH) in order to evaluate the effect of pubertal stage on GH response to different tests and to identify the most likely mechanism of action of different stimuli. GH peak was higher during GHRH than in all other tests. Sex or start of pubertal development did not cause any GH peak difference. Low-responder (GH peak less than 10 ng/ml) percentages were similar (ITT = 13.5%, CLON = 13.4%, ARG = 13.2%, GHRH = 10.6%) also when the subjects were divided according to sex and pubertal development. ITT+CLON showed discordant results in 42/99 subjects (30/42 = 71.4% were low-responders to ITT and 12/42 = 28.6% to CLON). GH peak appeared earlier during GHRH (85% less than 45 min) and later during CLON (78%: 60-120 min) than during all other tests; GH peak during ITT showed a wide variability of time. Negative correlations were found between GH peak during GHRH and chronological age, height and bone age and during CLON and chronological age. In conclusion our data show that these tests have similar GH secretagogue reliability.