Professionalising management in healthcare: an organisational journey

Objectives: A current priority for UK healthcare administrations is the improvement of patient safety and the delivery of compassionate care. Following a public inquiry into failures at one hospital in England (Francis Report 2013) NHS organisations have been required to strengthen leadership and management to achieve better outcomes This poster outlines the practical steps taken by one healthcare provider to effect culture change through targeted management development, and the measured impact of change in terms of organisational performance and staff engagement and commitment. Population: The organisation provides a broad range of mental health, learning disability and community care services. Following a merger of services in 2011 the organisation doubled in size and needed to harmonise services, integrate professional groups and enhance corporate alignment with the requirements of regional funding agencies. A management development programme was established to distil the evidence base linking staff engagement and cultures of high quality care and to disseminate this learning to all staff with line management responsibility. Methods: The programme was launched in October 2013 and delivered off-site to cohorts of 18 managers at a time, as three 2 day modules. A core element is a strong focus on managing effective appraisals and giving performance based feedback, in light of the evidence of a link between appraisal and patient outcomes (West 2002) By May 2016, 570 mangers had completed the course (86% of all managers in the organisation). An action learning approach and a range of evaluation methods are used to assess the impact of the course including, participant feedback, project outcomes, results of the annual staff survey and external auditor’s reports Findings: The benefits resulting from this investment substantially outweigh the costs and challenges of sustaining the programme in face of increasing financial pressure. Specific benefits cited by attendees are: confidence building, the opportunity for collective problem solving and feeling valued by the organisation. The staff survey has seen an average increase of 18% in satisfaction in areas relating to engagement and commitment; and a 30% increase in belief that ‘we are providing high quality services to our patients/service user’ (from 43% in 2012 to 73% in 2015). At an organisational level a number of reputational benefits have been, in part, attributed to the programme: one course initiated project has been short listed for a national award. Directly attributable to the programme is an improvement in performance appraisal uptake and quality of the appraisal (with an 8 % increase in staff reporting that they had a well-structured appraisal one year after launch of the programme) Conclusion: This organisational journey is offered as a realistic, tested and evaluated model of workforce development for organisations facing similar challenges. Clear focus on evidence based management, an organisation-wide approach to management development and an explicit focus on culture change behaviours underpin the success of the programm

The spatial impact of employment centres on housing markets

The spatial impact of employment centres on housing markets. Spatial Economic Analysis. Local economic growth tends to affect neighbourhood house prices unevenly. It has been observed that prime locations experience price hikes far in excess of the surrounding local area. Yet, this phenomenon is not well captured by existing economic models. This research provides a model of spatial and temporal interactions between housing and employment markets. The results show that rapid growth of employment centres increases house prices in neighbouring locations even after adjusting for fundamentals. It is concluded that spatial clustering of companies creates an option value for existing and potential employees that goes beyond ease of access for commuting purposes.The authors thank the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) for providing funding for a project which inspired this study

Set-Membership Inference Attacks using Data Watermarking

In this work, we propose a set-membership inference attack for generative models using deep image watermarking techniques. In particular, we demonstrate how conditional sampling from a generative model can reveal the watermark that was injected into parts of the training data. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking technique is a principled approach for detecting the non-consensual use of image data in training generative models.Comment: Preliminary wor

Single-Model Attribution of Generative Models Through Final-Layer Inversion

Recent groundbreaking developments on generative modeling have sparked interest in practical single-model attribution. Such methods predict whether a sample was generated by a specific generator or not, for instance, to prove intellectual property theft. However, previous works are either limited to the closed-world setting or require undesirable changes of the generative model. We address these shortcomings by proposing FLIPAD, a new approach for single-model attribution in the open-world setting based on final-layer inversion and anomaly detection. We show that the utilized final-layer inversion can be reduced to a convex lasso optimization problem, making our approach theoretically sound and computationally efficient. The theoretical findings are accompanied by an experimental study demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming the existing methods

Benchmarking the Fairness of Image Upsampling Methods

Recent years have witnessed a rapid development of deep generative models for creating synthetic media, such as images and videos. While the practical applications of these models in everyday tasks are enticing, it is crucial to assess the inherent risks regarding their fairness. In this work, we introduce a comprehensive framework for benchmarking the performance and fairness of conditional generative models. We develop a set of metrics\unicode{x2013}inspired by their supervised fairness counterparts\unicode{x2013}to evaluate the models on their fairness and diversity. Focusing on the specific application of image upsampling, we create a benchmark covering a wide variety of modern upsampling methods. As part of the benchmark, we introduce UnfairFace, a subset of FairFace that replicates the racial distribution of common large-scale face datasets. Our empirical study highlights the importance of using an unbiased training set and reveals variations in how the algorithms respond to dataset imbalances. Alarmingly, we find that none of the considered methods produces statistically fair and diverse results. All experiments can be reproduced using our provided repository.Comment: This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published at the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '24

Lack of NWC protein (c11orf74 homolog) in murine spermatogenesis results in reduced sperm competitiveness and impaired ability to fertilize egg cells in vitro

<div><p>NWC is an uncharacterised protein containing three strongly conserved domains not found in any other known protein. Previously, we reported that the NWC protein is detected in cells in the germinal layer in murine testes (strain: C57BL/6), and its knockout results in no obvious phenotype. We determined the NWC expression pattern during spermatogenesis, and found this protein in spermatocytes and round spermatids, but not in epididymal sperm. Although NWC knockout males are fertile, we further characterised their reproductive potential employing non-standard mating that better simulates the natural conditions by including sperm competition. Such an approach revealed that the sperm of knockout males fail to successfully compete with control sperm. After analysing selected characteristics of the male reproductive system, we found that <i>NWC</i> knockout sperm had a reduced ability to fertilize cumulus-intact eggs during IVF. This is the first report describing a subtle phenotype of <i>NWC</i> knockout mice that could be detected under non-standard mating conditions. Our results indicate that NWC plays an important role in spermatogenesis and its deficiency results in the production of functionally impaired sperm.</p></div