In the UK, many fundamentally important policy decisions that are likely to affect the relationship between citizens and care services are now made at the sublegislative level and without adequate ethical consideration and scrutiny. This is well exemplified in the proposed guidance on the disclosure of information on children. A recent consultation paper by the UK government on the subject prop...

A Publication of the Society for Research in Child Development Article begins on page 4 Over the past 30 years, welfare and other public policies for families living in poverty have developed a primary objective of increasing parents’ self-sufficiency by requiring and supporting employment, culminating in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This le...

In healthcare systems, one of the important actions is related to perishable products such as red blood cells (RBCs) units that its consumption management in different periods can contribute greatly to the optimality of the system. In this paper, main goal is to enhance the ability of medical community to organize the RBCs units’ consumption in way to deliver the unit order timely with a focus ...

The aim of this paper is to develop an optimization model for quality improvement by considering quality investment in rework policies and supply chain profit sharing. To improve product’s quality, the decision of process target and its tolerance is important since it directly affects the defective rate, manufacturing cost, and loss to customer due to the deviation of product from its specifica...

Policy can be used and experienced as a tool for social inclusion or exclusion; it empower disenfranchise. Women’s reproductive decision‐making health is impacted by policy, women’s experiences of diverse intersecting marginalised locations influence their policy. This research aimed to explore how intersectionality considered within Victorian state government policies that impact decision-maki...

OBJECTIVE Responding to an initiative advanced by the National Economic and Social Policy Council (CONPES, 3344/2005), this article presents the results of a research project concerned with environmental health in Colombian cities emphasising air pollution. METHOD The project was carried out between 2008 and 2009 for the Colombian Ministry of the Environment, Housing and Territorial Developme...

We introduce the infinite regionalized policy presentation (iRPR), as a nonparametric policy for reinforcement learning in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). The iRPR assumes an unbounded set of decision states a priori, and infers the number of states to represent the policy given the experiences. We propose algorithms for learning the number of decision states while main...

3.1 The challenges outlined in chapter 2 may seem daunting. But a growing number of countries are making significant improvements to their investment climates—and are being richly rewarded in faster growth and steeper poverty reductions. China, India, and Uganda, mentioned for their achievements in chapter 1, are hardly alone. Many countries have made progress in improving particular areas of t...

The paper aims at addressing the problem of what makes specific aiding to decide within public policy making problem situations. Under such a perspective it analyses some basic concepts such as “public policy”, “deliberation”, “legitimation”, “accountability” and shows the necessity to expand the concept of rationality which is expected to be behind the acceptability of a public policy. We then...