Voluntary Agreements Research Articles

District enters into voluntary resolution agreement

District enters into voluntary resolution agreement

The effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and policy processes of regulatory, voluntary and partnership policies to improve food environments: an evidence synthesis.

Dietary factors are among the largest and costliest drivers of chronic diseases in England. As a response, the government implements a range of population interventions to promote healthy diets by targeting food environments. This study aimed to conduct a systematic review of the effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and policy process of real-world evaluations of national and state policies on improving food environments, with a focus on whether they were regulatory, voluntary or partnership approaches. Fourteen relevant English-language databases were searched in November 2020 for studies published between 2010 and 2020. Six separate evidence reviews were conducted to assess the evidence of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and policy processes of policies to improve food environments. A total of 483 primary research evaluations and 14 evidence syntheses were included. The study reveals considerable geographic, methodological and other imbalances across the literature, with, for example, 81% of publications focusing only on 12 countries. The systematic reviews also reveal the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of reviewed regulatory approaches designed to improve health, consumer behaviour and food environment outcomes while public-private partnerships and voluntary approaches to improve diets via reformulation, advertising and promotion restrictions or other changes to the environment were limited in their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. The study also revealed key enabling and impeding factors across regulatory, voluntary and public-private partnership approaches. From the available evidence reviewed, this study finds that regulatory approaches appear most effective at improving the food environment, and voluntary agreements and partnerships have limited effectiveness. These findings should be carefully considered in future public health policy development, as should the findings of geographic imbalance in the evidence and inadequate representation of equity dimensions across the policy evaluations. We find that food policies are at times driven by factors other than the evidence and shaped by compromise and pragmatism. Food policy should be first and foremost designed and driven by the evidence of greatest effectiveness to improve food environments for healthier diets. This was a complex evidence synthesis due to its scope and some policy evaluations may have been missed as the literature searches did not include specific policy names. The literature was limited to studies published in English from 2010 to 2020, potentially missing studies of interest. Priorities include the need for guidance for appraising risk of bias and quality of non-clinical studies, for reporting policy characteristics in evaluations, for supporting evaluations of real-world policies equitably across geographic regions, for capturing equity dimensions in policy evaluations, and for guideline development for quality and risk of bias of policy evaluations. This study is registered as PROSPERO CRD42020170963. This awardproject was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Public Health Research programme (NIHR award ref: NIHR128607)and is published in full in Public Health Research; Vol. 12, No. 8. See the NIHR Funding and Awards website for further awardinformation.

The legal status of off-label preparations and legal aspects of their application in The Russian Federation

For many years, the medications "outside of instruction" (the so-called "off-label" ones) had no single-valued legal status in the Russian Federation and other countries that entailed number of problems. Most of them had to do with schemes and tactics of treatment of patient, impossibility of proper medical care support, legal responsibility of physician for applying medications outside of attached instruction. The important move in resolving mentioned problem became adoption of the Federal Law "On entering changes in the Federal Law "On Fundamentals of Health Care of Citizen in The Russian Federation" that became first step on the path leading to acquisition by "off-label" its legal status. The analysis of relevant normative legal acts, the Criminal code of the Russian Federation was carried out. The basic conclusions related to application of medications in medical institutions in Russia, to physician strategy in cases requiring application of of medications "outside of instruction" were formulated. In case of applying medications "outside of instruction" without informed voluntary agreement of patient, without utmost necessity, single-handed instead of decision of medical commission or in situations which could be managed without this kind of medications i.e. under unfounded risk the physician can be prosecuted since treatment with off-label medications is considered as insecure according to legislative base currently in force.

Stakeholders' views on the global guidelines for the sustainable use of non‐native trees

Abstract A large number of non‐native trees (NNTs) have been introduced globally and widely planted, contributing significantly to the world's economy. Although some of these species present a limited risk of spreading beyond their planting sites, a growing number of NNTs are spreading and becoming invasive leading to diverse negative impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem functions and human well‐being. To help minimize the negative impacts and maximize the economic benefits of NNTs, Brundu et al. developed eight guidelines for the sustainable use of NNTs globally—the Global Guidelines for the Use of NNTs (GG‐NNTs). Here, we used an online survey to assess perceptions of key stakeholders towards NNTs, and explore their knowledge of and compliance with the GG‐NNTs. Our results show that stakeholders are generally aware that NNTs can provide benefits and cause negative impacts, often simultaneously and they consider that their organization complies with existing regulations and voluntary agreements concerning NNTs. However, they are not aware of or do not apply most of the eight recommendations included in the GG‐NNTs. We conclude that effectively managing invasions linked to NNTs requires both more communication efforts using an array of channels for improving stakeholder awareness and implementation of simple measures to reduce NNT impacts (e.g. via GG‐NNTs), and a deeper understanding of the barriers and reluctance of stakeholders to manage NNT invasions. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

District enters into voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Denton Independent School District, No. 06‐19‐5002 (OCR 04/11/24).

District enters into voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Denton Independent School District, No. 06‐19‐5002 (OCR 04/11/24).

LEGISLATIVE GAPS IN THE COLLECTION OF ALIMONY FOR MINOR CHILDREN

Protection of the rights and interests of the most vulnerable alimony recipients - minor children, is one of the most socially significant areas of family law regulation. The basic guarantees of the rights and legitimate interests of the child depend on the correctness of the normative fixation of the provisions on alimony and the quality of the mechanisms of its collection. The absence today of legal certainty in a number of provisions of alimony legislation on the forced collection of alimony, confirms the relevance of this study. Objective: to study the peculiarities of modern Russian legal regulation of judicial recovery of alimony for minor children, to identify the problems of legal regulation and to formulate specific proposals to change the legislation. Methodological basis: in the preparation of the research the general scientific dialectical method and special methods were used: system-structural, formal-legal, logical and comparative-legal. Results: the article comprehensively analyzes the shortcomings of legal technique and peculiarities of the current legislation concerning legal regulation in the field of alimony legal relations and forms proposals for their legislative elimination. The author sees that, despite the high prevalence of proceedings of a writ nature in cases of alimony collection, potentially higher efficiency of alimony payment belongs to the voluntary alimony agreement. Conclusions: the current state of legal regulation of the institute of alimony of minors, including the shortcomings of substantive and procedural nature, is characterized by imperfection and inefficiency of a number of normative provisions of the Family Code of the Russian Federation, which in turn may affect the stability and efficiency of court decisions, orders and needs to be reformed.

The politics and governance of drug production in public-private partnerships: Brazil’s response to hepatitis C

ABSTRACT The local manufacture of advanced pharmaceutical products has been a long-standing objective of health and industry policy in many developing countries, including in Latin America. This strategy has been applied to fight epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we still know little about the politics and governance that enable such arrangements, especially when there is no consent from the originator company. This study focuses on the case of Brazil, a country that is well-known for its health-industry policy, which includes the local production of direct-acting antivirals (DAAs), a new treatment for hepatitis C. We seek to explain the factors that have contributed to Brazil’s successful production of generic versions of DAAs, and, later, to the decision by the Ministry of Health (MoH) to procure drugs from multinational pharmaceutical companies rather than from local laboratories. A lack of support for domestic production by important stakeholders, the patent holder’s attempt to block domestic production and the MoH’s adoption of more modern treatment guidelines under a different procurement logic all created an unfavourable environment for local production and procurement of DAAs. Our study draws implications for middle-income countries that wish to produce drugs domestically without voluntary license agreements.

No Matter Your Age, "It's Your Life, It's Your Choice": Compulsory Persuasion and Informal Rehabilitative Support in Youth and Adult Intensive Supervision Programs.

Although existing literature identifies that public protection and risk reduction are the primary goals of intensive supervision programs (ISP), little is known about how or whether rehabilitation of high-risk offenders is prioritized outside of enforcing court-mandated conditions. Using qualitative semi-structured interviews and focus groups within two Canadian metropolitan ISPs, our study explores how rehabilitative support is offered to youth and adult high-risk offenders in the absence of formal conditions. Using the framework of late-modern rehabilitation and compulsory persuasion, we draw on themes of offender responsibilization and coercion to interrogate the provision of informal rehabilitative support. Our findings indicate that officers negotiate "voluntary agreements" with select high-risk offenders, which hierarchicalizes them into two groups: those worthy of informal support and those who "choose" not to want to rehabilitate. We also find that youth and adults are treated similarly despite substantive differences between the types of crimes committed.

Projects of establishing the Peasant land bank and its organizational-legalprinciples of functioning

The purpose of the article is to characterize the process of formation and the first steps of the Peasant Land Bank (Selianskyi pozemelnyi bank), to identify and analyze various projects of the organization of a state institution for long-term crediting of the peasantry, which preceded the emergence of the Peasant Land Bank in 1882. Research methodology is based on the fundamental principles of historical research: historicism, systematicity, objectivity in the selection of facts and documents. Scientific novelty of the article lies in the analysis of projects for the formation of the Peasant Land Bank in the Russian Empire in the context of agrarian reforms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Organizational and legal aspects and principles of functioning of this bank, its role in the implementation of the government's agrarian policy are studied. The author examines the influence of credit activity of the Peasant Land Bank on the development of agriculture and formation of a class of wealthy peasants in the context of the modernization of agriculture. Conclusions. The establishment of the Peasant Bank, to a certain extent, can be considered as an important step in the direction of public opinion at that time. The concession, which over time was tried to be significantly reduced, was the establishment of numerous restrictions, which indicated the limited effectiveness of the bank's activities. These restrictions included a five million annual transaction limit, a small maximum loan size per person, and the ability to participate in transactions only by voluntary agreement between the seller and the buyer. It was also assumed the need for significant additional payments when purchasing, which were unaffordable for poorer peasants. These restrictions significantly limited the positive influence of the bank. It was noted that the main goal of the bank was realized in a residual way, in particular, due to political reasons and commercial principles that were the basis of its activity. In addition, crediting conditions were considered absurd, as they provided for the same interest rates as in commercial banks. A prospective promise was a change in the focus of the bank's activity to credit support for peasants who intended to farm on the acquired lands, in particular by providing “ameliorative” credit.

University enters into voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: University of California, Los Angeles, No. 09‐23‐2083 (OCR 08/31/23).

College enters into voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Gateway Community College, No. 08‐22‐2304 (OCR 08/03/23).

University enters into voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: University of California, Los Angeles, No. 09‐23‐2083 (OCR 08/31/23).

Governing Integrated Health and Social Care: An Analysis of Experiences in Three European Countries.

Achieving greater health and social care integration is a policy priority in many countries, but challenges remain. We focused on governance and accountability for integrated care and explored arrangements that shape more integrated delivery models or systems in Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland. We also examined how the COVID-19 pandemic affected existing governance arrangements. A case study approach involving document review and semi-structured interviews with 35 stakeholders in 10 study sites between February 2021 and April 2022. We used the Transparency, Accountability, Participation, Integrity and Capability (TAPIC) framework to guide our analytical enquiry. Study sites ranged from bottom-up voluntary agreements in the Netherlands to top-down mandated integration in Scotland. Interviews identified seven themes that were seen to have helped or hindered integration efforts locally. Participants described a disconnect between what national or regional governments aspire to achieve and their own efforts to implement this vision. This resulted in blurred, and sometimes contradictory, lines of accountability between the centre and local sites. Flexibility and time to allow for national policies to be adapted to local contexts, and engaged local leaders, were seen to be key to delivering the integration agenda. Health care, and in particular acute hospital care, was reported to dominate social care in terms of policies, resource allocation and national monitoring systems, thereby undermining better collaboration locally. The pandemic highlighted and exacerbated existing strengths and weaknesses but was not seen as a major disruptor to the overall vision for the health and social care system. We included a relatively small number of interviews per study site, limiting our ability to explore complexities within sites. This study highlights that governance is relatively neglected as a focus of attention in this context but addressing governance challenges is key for successful collaboration.

College enters into a voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Community College of Denver, No. 08‐23‐2090 (OCR 07/10/23).

College enters into a voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Community College of Denver, No. 08‐23‐2090 (OCR 07/10/23).

College enters into voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Montgomery College, No. 03212170 (OCR 06/28/23).

College enters into voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Montgomery College, No. 03212170 (OCR 06/28/23).

College enters into a voluntary resolution agreement

Case name: Letter re: Community College of Denver, No. 08‐23‐2090 (OCR 07/10/23).

Sovereignty, ecology, and regional imperatives: formulating normative foundations for regional ecological justice

ABSTRACT I will outline four justifications of regional ecological obligations calling for different political authorities to collaborate for ecological reasons: through voluntary agreement between political entities united by an ecological region; by a shared regional history or cultural relations to an ecological region; with reference to ‘place-based’ duties with an ecological basis; or by obligations to an extended set of individual right-holders. None are conclusive reasons but show that there are normative grounds for regional collaboration of separate political authorities. The article contributes to discussion on, despite its practical relevance, a much neglected concept in political philosophy.