Part-time Capacity Research Articles

Flexible work arrangements and their impact on women in radiology: RSNA 2021 panel discussion summary sponsored by AAWR and more

There is an ongoing trend in the direction of flexible work arrangements in which employees can decide where and when to work. Multiple studies have demonstrated a significant decrease in associated job-related stress, improved job satisfaction, job autonomy, and collaboration when flexible work arrangements exist. However, some have reported increased workload and home spillover to work.1 The American Association for Women in Radiology (AAWR) convened a panel of radiologist presenters with diverse backgrounds who shared their own experiences with flexible work arrangements at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) 2021 Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting. This manuscript summarizes the discussion and reviews various aspects of workplace flexibility.The RSNA 2021 AAWR-sponsored panel on workplace flexibility reviewed the current state of different work arrangements available for radiologists and addressed future strategies for implementing workplace flexibility. The panelists addressed the imperatives and key factors for the availability of diverse opportunities and ways to foster future opportunities. Matters discussed included differences in the availability of flexible work arrangements in the healthcare system compared to other industries, normalizing flexible work arrangements at the organization level, underutilization of currently available flexible work arrangements, part-time positions and stigma associated with them, thriving in a part-time capacity, workplace flexibility options for radiology residents and fellows and successfully implementing workplace flexibility at institutions. The panel ended with a call to action to develop toolkits with effective resources to support implementing flexible workplace opportunities.

Steunwerwing in Suid-Afrika

This article focuses on lobbying in South Africa, with special reference to the business sector. Lobbying does indeed take place in South Africa, but is on an ad hoc and unstructured basis when compared with the USA, for example. Most of the persons who perform local lobbying functions do so in a part-time capacity while maintaining major positions as interest-group officials, PROS In companies or as corporate executives. Rather than trying to measure their influence In the policy-making process, the study analyses the level of interest group activity and the lobbying techniques they employ. The institutional foci of lobbying activities are also identified. Conceptual and comparative perspectives are integrated with the empirical data.

Labour Market Attachment, Workplace Infection Control Procedures and Mental Health: A Cross-Sectional Survey of Canadian Non-healthcare Workers during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has led to large proportions of the labour market moving to remote work, while others have become unemployed. Those still at their physical workplace likely face increased risk of infection, compared to other workers. The objective of this paper is to understand the relationship between working arrangements, infection control programs (ICP), and symptoms of anxiety and depression among Canadian workers, not specifically working in healthcare. MethodsA convenience-based internet survey of Canadian non-healthcare workers was facilitated through various labour organizations between April 26 and June 6, 2020. A total of 5180 respondents started the survey, of which 3779 were assessed as employed in a full-time or part-time capacity on 2 March 2020 (prior to large-scale COVID-19 pandemic responses in Canada). Of this sample, 3305 (87.5%) had complete information on main exposures and outcomes. Anxiety symptoms were measured using the Generalised Anxiety Disorder screener (GAD-2), and depressive symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire screener (PHQ-2). For workers at their physical workplace (site-based workers) we asked questions about the adequacy and implementation of 11 different types of ICP, and the adequacy and supply of eight different types of personal protective equipment (PPE). Respondents were classified as either: working remotely; site-based workers with 100% of their ICP/PPE needs met; site-based workers with 50–99% of ICP/PPE needs met; site-based workers with 1–49% of ICP/PPE needs met; site-based workers with none of ICP/PPE needs met; or no longer employed. Regression analyses examined the association between working arrangements and ICP/PPE adequacy and having GAD-2 and PHQ-2 scores of three and higher (a common screening point in both scales). Models were adjusted for a range of demographic, occupation, workplace, and COVID-19-specific factors.ResultsA total of 42.3% (95% CI: 40.6–44.0%) of the sample had GAD-2 scores of 3 and higher, and 34.6% (95% CI: 32.–36.2%) had PHQ-2 scores of 3 and higher. In initial analyses, symptoms of anxiety and depression were lowest among those working remotely (35.4 and 27.5%), compared to site-based workers (43.5 and 34.7%) and those who had lost their jobs (44.1 and 35.9%). When adequacy of ICP and PPE was taken into account, the lowest prevalence of anxiety and depressive symptoms was observed among site-based workers with all of their ICP needs being met (29.8% prevalence for GAD-2 scores of 3 and higher, and 23.0% prevalence for PHQ-2 scores of 3 and higher), while the highest prevalence was observed among site-based workers with none of their ICP needs being met (52.3% for GAD-2 scores of 3 and higher, and 45.8% for PHQ-2 scores of 3 and higher).ConclusionOur results suggest that the adequate design and implementation of employer-based ICP have implications for the mental health of site-based workers. As economies re-open the ongoing assessment of ICP and associated mental health outcomes among the workforce is warranted.

The Gender Pay Gap: A Briefing

While the official gender pay gap figure is 9.1% for full-time workers, the pay gap between men and women aged 22-39 is negligible. The gap widens later in life, often as a result of women taking time out of the workplace to raise children, and returning to work in a part-time capacity, reducing future earning potential. Calculations that put the pay gap above 9.1% are achieved by moving away from like-for-like comparisons between men and women in the work place. The Equal Pay Day campaign calculates a figure five percentage points higher, or 55% higher, than the official figures by using the mean rather than the median of the ONS data, thereby including outlier salaries.

The Public Health Approach to TBI.

The Public Health Approach to TBI.

Faculty of Radiation Oncology 2012 trainee survey

This paper reports the key findings of the first Faculty of Radiation Oncology survey of trainees dealing with experiences and perceptions on work practices and choice of specialty. The survey was conducted in mid 2012 using a 37-question instrument. This was distributed by email to 159 current trainees and advertised through the Radiation Oncology Trainees Committee and other channels. There were six email reminders. Respondents were reassured that their responses were anonymous. The overall response rate was 82.8%. Gender was balanced among respondents with 67 (51.5%) being male and 63 (48.5%) being female. The most common age bracket was the 31 to 35 years range. There were similar proportions of trainee responders in each of the five years of training. A substantial number of trainees held other degrees besides medical degrees. The large majority were satisfied with radiation oncology as a career choice and with the Training Network within which they were training. Interest in oncology patients, lifestyle after training and work hours were given as the major reasons for choosing radiation oncology as a career. Nearly half of trainees were interested in undertaking some of their training in a part-time capacity and working part time as a radiation oncologist in the future. Over 70% of trainees stated they were working 36-55 clinical hours per week with additional non-clinical tasks, after-hours work and on-call duties. Nearly half of all trainees reported having one or less hours of protected time per week. Nonetheless, 40% of respondents indicated they had enough time to pursue outside interests. Radiation treatment planning and maintaining currency in general medicine were considered the most difficult aspects of training in radiation oncology. Most respondents were keen on the concept of fostering a research mentor. In terms of views on practice after completion of training, the majority were interested in pursuing a fellowship, and nearly all expressed an interest in maintaining an element of academic practice. The large majority of respondents preferred to work in an urban department as a component of their practice after training and nearly all wanted a component of public sector practice. There were only four per cent who preferred to work only within the private sector. Job availability was a concern for 94% of trainees, which far outweighed any other concerns. Trainees in radiation oncology are generally satisfied with their choice of specialty and their training. Most trainees are interested in fellowship positions, links with academia and largely public sector work in the future. Job availability for the future is their major concern.

Examining Student Spiritual Outcomes as a Result of a General Education Religion Course

In an era in which part-time faculty are becoming a higher proportion of the teaching faculty on most campuses, this study addressed the question of whether student learning outcomes in religious education courses are significantly influenced by whether the instructor teaches in a full- or part-time capacity in the Department of Religion. We examined student learning outcomes in light of the particular mission of a faith-based university, including both spiritual and religious outcomes. We surveyed 608 students enrolled in eight different sections of an introductory religion course at a private religious university. These students were taught by both full-time religion faculty, as well as faculty with full-time teaching assignments outside the Department of Religion and part-time teaching assignments within it (known as transfer faculty). We found that there was a significant difference in most of the religious and spiritual outcomes between classes taught by full-time religion faculty as opposed to transfer faculty, based on an independent samples t-test analysis of students’ scores on the Religious Education Survey (Plummer & Hilton, in press) that was designed for this study. We also found significant differences in students’ scores across full-time faculty members, leading to the conclusion that both hiring practices and faculty development opportunities for all faculty are deserving of further examination.

Employer-sponsored health insurance coverage limitations: results from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) will expand health insurance options for cancer survivors in the USA. It is unclear how this legislation will affect their access to employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI). We describe the health insurance experiences for survivors of childhood cancer with and without ESI. We conducted a series of qualitative interviews with 32 adult survivors from the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study to assess their employment-related concerns and decisions regarding health insurance coverage. Interviews were performed from August to December 2009 and were recorded, transcribed, and content analyzed using NVivo 8. Uninsured survivors described ongoing employment limitations, such as being employed at part-time capacity, which affected their access to ESI coverage. These survivors acknowledged they could not afford insurance without employer support. Survivors on ESI had previously been denied health insurance due to their preexisting health conditions until they obtained coverage through an employer. Survivors feared losing their ESI coverage, which created a disincentive to making career transitions. Others reported worries about insurance rescission if their cancer history was discovered. Survivors on ESI reported financial barriers in their ability to pay for health care. Childhood cancer survivors face barriers to obtaining ESI. While ACA provisions may mitigate insurance barriers for cancer survivors, many will still face cost barriers to affording health care without employer support.

Driving Strategy or Just Going through the Motions: An Empirical Study of Boardrooms in the UK

The level of interest regarding corporate board, their role and the contribution they make to organisation’s performance and success has increased in the many global settings. There is however, a gap in our knowledge about what board members do. In order to have a better understanding of boards, we need to know more about the behaviour of those who sit on boards. Many chairmen and all non-executive directors serve on corporate boards in a part-time capacity; however, such part-time service does not negate a role in strategy. The purpose of this paper is to ask how, if at all, do part-time board members influence strategy in UK companies? Data from interviews with 30 board members are interpreted using the 1999 framework of McNulty and Pettigrew which conceptualises part-time board members’ involvement in strategy as “taking strategic decisions”, “shaping strategic decisions” and shaping the content, context and conduct of strategy”. Part-time board members are able to shape both the ideas that form the content of corporation’s strategies and the methodologies and processes by which those ideas evolve. In so doing, part-time board members are capable of exerting control over management and influencing processes of strategic choice and change. Boards of directors have a role in strategy formulation, strategic decision-making and strategic control.

Job Sharing for Women Pharmacists in Academia

The pharmacist shortage, increasing numbers of female pharmacy graduates, more pharmacy schools requiring faculty members, and a lower percentage of female faculty in academia are reasons to develop unique arrangements for female academic pharmacists who wish to work part-time. Job sharing is an example of a flexible alternative work arrangement that can be successful for academic pharmacists who wish to continue in a part-time capacity. Such partnerships have worked for other professionals but have not been widely adopted in pharmacy academia. Job sharing can benefit the employer through retention of experienced employees who collectively offer a wider range of skills than a single employee. Benefits to the employee include balanced work and family lives with the ability to maintain their knowledge and skills by remaining in the workforce. We discuss the additional benefits of job-sharing as well as our experience in a non-tenure track job-sharing position at the University of Tennessee College of Pharmacy.

Registered Counsellors and Professional Work in South African Psychology

All registered counsellors on the database of the Professional Board for Psychology of the Health Professions Council of South Africa were surveyed to establish their demographic characteristics and the nature of their employment. A relatively low number of counsellors (N = 256) have registered since the creation of the category “registered counsellor”, and not many register each year. Responses were from 82 counsellors (response rate 32.8%). Of the sample, only 46% are actually working as registered counsellors. The majority are white women who work in urban areas. Results also indicate that only 12 of them are working as full-time registered counsellors, while the rest work in some part-time capacity. The majority are quite negative about their chosen profession and about the role of the Professional Board. These results cast serious doubt on the likelihood that the category will live up to initial expectations.

The man behind the CAT scanner

Allan Cormack's story is worth telling, as that of one of three 'scientific' Nobel prize-winners to whom South Africa can lay some claim. Born in Johannesburg in 1924, he was educated at Rondebosch Boys' High School and at the universities of Cape Town (UCT) and Cambridge. Appointed to a lectureship in the Physics Department at UCT in 1950, Cormack spent the next six years honing his skills as a stimulating teacher and struggling, with very limited facilities, to establish his research reputation. In 1956 he was asked to act in a part-time capacity as a medical physicist at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. He started to think about the fundamentals which lay behind the problem of calculating in detail the dose distribution in human tissues subject to X-ray bombardment, and he realised immediately that the problem was a mathematical one. In 1957 he did a simple experiment in the Physics Department at UCT on a 'phantom' comprising a cylinder of aluminium surrounded by an annulus of wood, and the results confirmed the theory he had worked out for the case of spherical symmetry.

Citation for the Down Surgical Prize 2002, Michael Corrigan.

Citation for the Down Surgical Prize 2002, Michael Corrigan.

Personal and professional development: a survey of radiographers employed in the South West Region

Purpose: To identify the personal and professional development characteristics amongst a group of qualified radiographers, employed in the South West Region.Methods: A survey design was employed to explore the characteristics relating to personal and professional development. Group interviews were conducted with both diagnostic and therapeutic radiographers, employed in a part-time capacity, in four hospitals situated outside the South West Region. These interviews were analysed, and the emergent themes used to design a structured questionnaire. The Society of Radiographers’ database was used to access members in the South West Region. In February 1999, 926 questionnaires were administered via the post to access the target population of both full- and part-time members.Results: An overall response rate of 50% was obtained. Analysis of the questionnaires revealed that full-time radiographers spent more hours engaged in personal and professional development, and attended more study days, than their part-time counterparts. Furthermore, part-timers were more likely to opt for less formal courses than their full-time colleagues. A number of other personal and professional characteristics were also identified which would appear to be common to both full- and part-time practitioners.Conclusions: A proportion of radiographers employed in a part-time capacity are either not fully accessing the opportunities to become involved in personal and professional development, or these opportunities do not exist. Part-timers have unique personal and professional development requirements, and should therefore be considered separately to their full-time colleagues. Managers, radiographers and education providers should consider these findings in their quest for more effective continuing professional development.

Equal opportunities and collective bargaining in the Netherlands: a good case in contract catering

Are there good practices of collective bargaining on equal opportunities in the Netherlands and, if so, what can we learn from them? The article answers these questions by means of extensive reference to a case-study on the Dutch contract catering sector, which has a collective agreement including detailed provisions on childcare and steps to tackle sexual harassment. Contract catering, a relatively new sector in the Netherlands, underwent rapid expansion in the nineties. The sector is characterised by a high proportion of female employees (75%), three quarters of whom are employed in a part-time capacity, and a relatively low degree of organisation. As in the rest of the Netherlands, industrial relations in this sector are strongly institutionalised and the whole process of preparation, bargaining and implementation of collective agreements takes place in a consultative body for labour and management, namely the Contract Catering Joint Committee. The attention paid to equal opportunities dates from the first bargaining round conducted in the catering sector at the end of the eighties. In that period societal attention to the topic was combined with strong economic growth in the sector and the employers'wish to attract female employees. Especially re-entering women were expected to combine the right service-directed attitude with the willingness to work flexible hours. An infrastructure of (female) experts on equal opportunities from within the trade unions activated personal involvement of some (male) negotiators in the topic. During consecutive bargaining rounds framework agreements were concluded on affirmative action, parental leave, child-care provision and sexual harassment. Especially the fact that working groups of labour and management were set up on the last two topics contributed to the relatively successful outcome in respect of these arrangements.

Writing as Outsiders: Academic Discourse and Marginalized Faculty

One-third of all teachers at the college or university level are now temporary or part-time faculty. We do fifteen percent of all the teaching in higher education today. According to the American Association of University Professors, constitute a substantial minority of all full-time faculty in some academic disciplines (for example, in political science, where comprise about one-third of all fulltime hires), and a majority in others (as in English, where now number twothirds of all new full-time appointments) (Pollack 19-21; Abel 72; Chell 57-58). The Conference on College Composition and Communication has estimated that about one out of every three English faculty at four-year colleges and one out of two at two-year colleges is a temporary or part-time employee. We are cheap in an era of contracting resources. We are available in an era when American universities produce PhDs faster than they are willing to employ them in any permanent capacity. And are abundant in a work climate that still makes few concessions to the fact that intimate relationships today often involve two individuals of equal professional aspiration and training. We are the fastest growing category of workers in academe, and are also disproportionately female. In the California state system in the early 1980s, for example, 38% of all women employed as faculty worked in a part-time capacity (Abel 91). Of the full-time workers employed in a temporary capacity during the academic year 1988-89, 61% were women (Kasper 10). As I began to explore this subject, I discovered that my rhetorical we covers a multitude of groups. Their reasons and motives for working in conditions widely acknowledged to be less than optimal may differ substantially. June Salz Pollack, in a study of the erosion of tenure in the California State University system in 1986, discovered that a number of conditions have given rise to the cur-

A Survey of Work Profiles and Histories of Physiotherapy Graduates from the University of Queensland

The year 1988 marked the 50th anniversary of the commencement of physiotherapy education at the University of Queensland. A survey was conducted to record the work profiles and histories of Queensland graduates. Surveys were sent to 1,689 of the 1,897 graduates with a good response rate of 62.5 per cent. In 1987, 80 per cent of respondents were practising as physiotherapists, being reasonably evenly distributed between hospital practice, private practice and other more community based centres. With the exception of recent decade graduates, half of these predominantly female physiotherapists worked in a part-time capacity. The results of this survey do not reveal major manpower wastage. Although temporary absences from the profession for family reasons were common, only 15.1 per cent of all respondents have permanently withdrawn from the profession.

An Assessment of APB Voting Patterns

The Accounting Principles Board (APB) served as the official promulgator of accounting principles from 1959 to 1973, issuing a total of thirtyone opinions. During its tenure, fifty-seven men were members of the APB, all serving in a part-time capacity while retaining their affiliation with their firms. All were members of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and were appointed by the president of the AICPA. Their professional affiliations included twenty-three associated with Big Eight firms, nineteen with other CPA firms, seven with universities, seven with industrial firms, and one with government.

The Quality of Mutual Fund Portfolio Supervision

D URING THE 1942-1946 BULL MARKET, a security analyst for a New York brokerage firm who acted in a part-time capacity as an oil industry field expert for a mutual investment fund, submitted a particularly glowing report on one of the oil-producing companies. Departing from usual practice, he strongly urged that its stock be acquired. The mutual fund's investment staff, largely on the strength of the analyst's recommendation, passed up five other issues of similar quality under consideration at the time and purchased a sizable block of the stock. In less than a year it increased in value from $20 to $30 a share. The analyst was elated and at the first opportunity called the results of his astuteness to the attention of the fund's officials. They were far from enthusiastic. They pointed out that, although it was true that the stock had appreciated 50% in value since it had been purchased, 36 of the 42 stocks in the fund portfolio had shown greater appreciation for the same period. Furthermore, the average increase for all 42 issues was 68%.

Fisheries Adviser at the Colonial Office: Mr. C. F. Hickling

THE Secretary of State for the Colonies has appointed Mr. C. F. Hickling to be his fisheries adviser. This is the first time that the position has been filled on a permanent and full-time basis, Mr. Hickling's predecessor, Dr. E. S. Russell, having acted in a part-time capacity during a period of approximately two years. The possibilities for development and research in Colonial fisheries are very considerable, and the post of fisheries adviser is one of great opportunity. Mr. Hickling, who will take up his duties immediately, will be assisted and supported in his task by the Colonial Fisheries Advisory Committee which was appointed in 1943.