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Background Current methods for oral health workforce planning lack responsiveness to dynamic needs, hampering efficiency, equity and sustainability. Effective workforce planning is vital for resilient health care systems and achieving universal health coverage. Given this context, we developed and operationalised a needs-adaptive oral health workforce planning model and explored the potential of various future scenarios. Methods Using publicly available data, including the Special Eurobarometer 330 Oral Health Survey, we applied the model in a hypothetical context focusing on the Dutch population’s dental needs from 2022 to 2050. We compared current and future provider supply and requirement and examined, in addition to a base case scenario, several alternative scenarios. These included epidemiological transition scenarios with different oral health morbidity trajectories, skill-mix scenarios with independent oral hygienists conducting check-ups and multiple dental student intake and training duration (5 instead of 6 years) scenarios. Results Based on the aforementioned historical data, our model projects that provider requirement will exceed supply for the planning period. If the percentage of people having all natural teeth increases by 10% or 20% in 2032, 34 or 68 additional full-time equivalent (FTE) dentists will be required, respectively, compared to the base case scenario. In the skill-mix scenario, the model indicates that prioritising oral hygienists for check-ups and shifting dentists’ focus to primarily complex care could address population needs more efficiently. Among the student intake and training duration scenarios, increasing intake to 375 and, to a lesser extent, reducing training to 5 years is projected to most effectively close the provider gap. Conclusions The study underscores the importance of understanding oral health morbidity trajectories for effective capacity planning. Due to limited dental epidemiological data, projections carry substantial uncertainty. Currently, demand for FTE dentists seems to exceed supply, though this may vary with epidemiological changes. Skill-mix strategies could offer efficiency gains by redistributing tasks, while adjustments in dental intake and training duration could also help address the requirement-supply gap. Resolving dentistry workforce challenges requires a multifaceted approach, including strengthening oral epidemiology projections, addressing the root causes of dental health issues and prioritising harmonious dental public health and general practice prevention measures.

Background The World Health Organization’s global strategy on human resources for health includes an objective to align investment in human resources for health with the current and future needs of the population. Although oral health is a key indicator of overall health and wellbeing, and oral diseases are the most common noncommunicable diseases affecting half the world’s population, oral health workforce planning efforts have been limited to simplistic target dentist-population or constant services-population ratios which do not account for levels of and changes in population need. Against this backdrop, our aim was to develop and operationalise an oral health needs-based workforce planning simulation tool. Methods Using a conceptual framework put forward in the literature, we aimed to build the model in Microsoft Excel and apply it in a hypothetical context to demonstrate its operability. The model incorporates a provider supply component and a provider requirement component, enabling a comparison of the current and future supply of and requirement for oral health workers. Publicly available data, including the Special Eurobarometer 330 Oral Health Survey, were used to populate the model. Assumptions were made where data were not publicly available and key assumptions were tested in scenario analyses. Results We have systematically developed a needs-based workforce planning model for the oral health workforce and applied the model in a hypothetical context over a 30-year time span. In the 2017 baseline scenario, the model produced a full-time equivalent (FTE) provider requirement figure of 899 dentists compared with an FTE provider supply figure of 1985. In the scenario analyses, the FTE provider requirement figure ranged from 1123 to 1629 illustrating the extent of the impact of changing parameter values. Conclusions In response to policy makers’ recognition of the pressing need to better plan human resources for health and the scarcity of work in this area for dentistry, we have demonstrated the feasibility of producing a workable, practical and useful needs-based workforce planning simulation tool for the oral health workforce. In doing so, we have highlighted the challenges faced in accessing timely and relevant data needed to populate such models and ensure the reliability of model outputs.

Abortion Care as Moral Work brings together the voices of abortion providers, abortion counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians to discuss how and why providing abortion care is moral work. The collection offers voices not usually heard as clinicians talk about their work and their thoughts about life and death. In four subsections--Providers, Clinics, Conscience, and The Fetus--the contributions in this anthology explore the historical context and present-day challenges to the delivery of abortion care. Contributing authors address the motivations that lead abortion providers to offer abortion care, discuss the ways in which anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the status of the fetus and the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. Together these essays provide a feminist moral foundation to reassert that abortion care is moral work.

We use coping theory to explore an underlying relationship between employee stress caused by burdensome, complex, and ambiguous information security requirements (termed \"security-related stress\" or SRS) and deliberate information security policy (ISP) violations. Results from a survey of 539 employee users suggest that SRS engenders an emotion-focused coping response in the form of moral disengagement from ISP violations, which in turn increases one's susceptibility to this behavior. Our multidimensional view of SRS-comprised of security-related overload, complexity, and uncertainty-offers a new perspective on the workplace environment factors that foster noncompliant user behavior and inspire cognitive rationalizations of such behavior. The study extends technostress research to the information systems security domain and provides a theoretical framework for the influence of SRS on user behavior. For practitioners, the results highlight the incidence of SRS in organizations and suggest potential mechanisms to counter the stressful effects of information security requirements.

During the financial crisis, life insurers sold long-term policies at deep discounts relative to actuarial value. The average markup was as low as—19 percent for annuities and — 57 percent for life insurance. This extraordinary pricing behavior was due to financial and product market frictions, interacting with statutory reserve regulation that allowed life insurers to record far less than a dollar of reserve per dollar of future insurance liability. We identify the shadow cost of capital through exogenous variation in required reserves across different types of policies. The shadow cost was $0.96 per dollar of statutory capital for the average company in November 2008.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is an emerging technology to consolidate network functions onto high volume storages, servers and switches located anywhere in the network. Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) are chained together to provide a specific network service, called Service Function Chains (SFCs). Regarding to Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and network features and states, SFCs are served through performing two tasks: VNF placement and link embedding on the substrate networks. Reducing deployment cost is a desired objective for all service providers in cloud/edge environments to increase their profit form demanded services. However, increasing resource utilization in order to decrease deployment cost may lead to increase the service latency and consequently increase SLA violation and decrease user satisfaction. To this end, we formulate a multi-objective optimization model to joint VNF placement and link embedding in order to reduce deployment cost and service latency with respect to a variety of constraints. We, then solve the optimization problem using two heuristic-based algorithms that perform close to optimum for large scale cloud/edge environments. Since the optimization model involves conflicting objectives, we also investigate pareto optimal solution so that it optimizes multiple objectives as much as possible. The efficiency of proposed algorithms is evaluated using both simulation and emulation. The evaluation results show that the proposed optimization approach succeed in minimizing both cost and latency while the results are as accurate as optimal solution obtained by Gurobi (5%).

Background An electronic prescription system is a mechanism that has long been implemented in many countries around the world. In the present study, we reviewed the requirements, standards, and features of an electronic prescription system for its correct and accurate execution. Methods This scoping review was conducted according to the PRISMA-SCR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews). A comprehensive literature search was performed with the related keywords in Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, and ProQuest with no time limit. The selection of papers was based on inclusion criteria. After removing duplicates, reviewing titles, abstracts, and full-text, 13 articles were included in the analysis. Results Electronic prescription system requirements extracted from the studies: Patient data, Patient selection or identification and data access, Drug Selection, Security, Privacy and administration, Transparency and accountability, Interoperability and communication, Monitoring, report, reminder, and renewals, Feedback at the prescriber level, Infrastructure: Computer equipment, Awareness of physicians and System support, Patient education and information, Usability, Standards, History of Medications / Current Medications, Data transfer and storage, Alerts and other messages to prescribers, and filtering of user-selectable alerts for possible prescription problems and Decision support. Conclusions The results of this study showed that the electronic prescription systems have several functional and technical capabilities that can provide significant benefits to all system’s stakeholders, including service providers, drug distributors, patients, and insurance organizations if used correctly.

Abortion Care as Moral Work brings together the voices of abortion providers, abortion counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians to discuss how and why providing abortion care is moral work. The collection offers voices not usually heard as clinicians talk about their work and their thoughts about life and death. In four subsections--Providers, Clinics, Conscience, and The Fetus--the contributions in this anthology explore the historical context and present-day challenges to the delivery of abortion care. Contributing authors address the motivations that lead abortion providers to offer abortion care, discuss the ways in which anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the status of the fetus and the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. Together these essays provide a feminist moral foundation to reassert that abortion care is moral work.

A modern model long-term composed service (LCS) with a group recommendation system has an indefinite lifespan. An LCS is used as a long-term business goal, and for a business committed to its customers, support will be provided to customers enabling them to book, e.g. an automotive service through online web services by providing information that the LCS then uses to offer more support. However, identifying the exact service to meet the user requirement is essential. Service composition has been identified as the key task in achieving various QoS performances. There exist various approaches that involve service composition according to the throughput and popularity. However, they fail to achieve the expected performance. Towards improving the performance of the LCS, a novel LCS that is based on the user queries of a group of persons is developed to give the best business services based on previous travel details and services. The method carries out service selection and composition according to the ratings provided by users towards any service. Additionally, the method considers the user-to-service rating and service-to-service rating, which are measured according to the coupling quality. Therefore, the proposed novel LCS provides better services based on the user ratings for particular business queries. The method ranks the services according to the rating values to perform service composition, with consideration of the detection of similar user groups and utilization of the rating values in service selection. We aim to propose a novel LCS work based on group ratings and a group of services. This work is intended to reduce the time complexity of changes in the LCS network using the group recommendation system.

Recent advancements in information technology have made cloud computing one of the most prominent technologies. It is most favorable for the bundle of services that it provides to its users. Since there is a wide range of cloud service providers (CSPs) with various services, it is challenging for the user to select a CSP that can meet all of its requirements. In this paper, we propose a composite cloud service model, which is handled by a cloud agent, to identify the best cloud services/criteria from a set of CSPs by considering the objective and subjective opinions collected from the cloud users’ feedback and reviews. Note that the cloud agent is an intermediary between the users and CSPs. Then the agent recommends the CSPs to assemble the identified services into a unified group of services to fulfil the user requirements. Our model calculates the integrated objective and subjective scores of alternatives for a set of criteria and determines the best alternative for each criterion. For this, the application of two multi-criteria decision-making techniques, namely method based on the removal effect of criteria and extended step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (extended SWARA), is used to calculate the objective and subjective scores, respectively. The proposed model is compared with the analytic hierarchy process-technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, TOPSIS-VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR), and SWARA-VIKOR to show its effectiveness.