Echoing the "less is more" and "choosing wisely" campaigns in the USA, the "smarter medicine" campaign launched in 2014 by the Swiss Society of General Internal Medicine listed five tests or treatments that are often prescribed in ambulatory general internal medicine, but that may not provide any meaningful benefit and may carry the risk of generating harms and costs. In the United Kingdom, the...

This paper presents an experimental study on the subject of profiling political actors through textual transcriptions of their parliamentary interventions. Supervised learning techniques were used to learn models, which attempt to classify Portuguese politicians according to their gender, their age group, or their political affiliation and orientation. Experiments were made using different type...

The relationship between biology and politics is manifold, ranging from politics within biology and implications of politics for biological research to intrinsic political dimensions of biological insights. Politics within biology plays out in the everyday practice of academic and applied science and has recently reached a new dimension in the context of priority and patent disputes, whereas po...

Political borders are controversial and contested spaces. In an attempt to better understand movement along and through political borders, we applied the metaphor of a membrane to look at how people, ideas, and things “move” through a border. More specifically, we employed this metaphor in a system dynamics framework to construct a computer model to assess legal and illegal migration on the US-...

Many capacity development interventions have been driven by the needs of technological innovation rather than the needs of institutional innovation. However, this article argues that the global challenges of the twenty-first century call for institutional innovation that entails a very different dynamic of the relations within society. Changing institutions, be it related to societal norms and ...

In this paper, we will explore the ways in which sustainable intensification interventions often overlook fundamental social dynamics in rural landscapes. We provide evidence of the underlying social, political and environmental contexts that affect farmers’ land-use decisions. While there are numerous initiatives to promote a Green Revolution for Africa, many tend to be dominated by technical ...

This article examines political empowerment related to voting. The profession of social work requires practitioners consider the roots problems and remediate them through micro macro interventions, informed by empowerment. Political involves having power, ability, critical awareness, sense group identity take action in order create change a system. Findings from qualitative study are presented ...

BACKGROUND The present study aims to test out contextually tailored interventions to increase evidence-informed health-enhancing physical activity policy-making in two Danish municipalities. METHODS The study was performed as experiments in natural settings. Based on results from a pre-intervention study defining the needs and contexts of the two settings, the interventions were developed bas...

How do we understand the public character of public health in contemporary Africa? What are the parameters of community engagement in health care delivery, medical research and disease control programmes? To what extent is public health in Africa a project led by African Governments? Through what political processes and deliberative practices can African publics influence the priorities of rese...

Objective To assess associations between national characteristics, including governance indicators, with a proxy for universal health coverage in reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health (RMNCH). Design Ecological analysis based on data from national standardised cross-sectional surveys. Setting Low-income and middle-income countries with a Demographic and Health Survey or a Multipl...