Work Of Inspectors Research Articles

Interpreting and evaluating open norms of person-centred care in daily regulatory practice of the Dutch nursing home care setting

Objective:The emphasis on person-centred nursing home care poses a key challenge for inspectors who regulate quality of care, because of its situated characteristics (i.e., for each client different and changing over time). This makes it difficult to assess with predetermined norms in contrast to for example requirements of medication safety. In this paper, we therefore empirically investigate how inspectors operationalize and evaluate open norms of person-centred care in the Dutch healthcare setting.Methods:Qualitative methods were used to study the work of inspectors who assess the quality of nursing home care within the Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate. The first author7it observed the inspection process of nursing home care organizations (preparation, inspection visit, consults between inspectors and team meetings) and conducted semi-structured interviews with the observed inspectors and managers of the assessed organizations. Furthermore, different versions of the quality report were analyzed.Results:Easy made operationalizations of person-centred care (e.g., choice for meal) received more attention than other, less easily made, operationalizations of person-centered care (e.g., group dynamics). The following three exclusion mechanisms show why certain aspects of person-centred care got less attention than others: 1) not being able to triangulate information 2) doubting the trustworthiness of a person 3) not being able to deviate from the structure of the inspection program. Furthermore, there are two exclusion mechanisms that show how the assessment of person-centred care is ignored or overruled by other values in the assessment framework: 1) downplaying person-centredness by mitigating circumstances and, 2) prioritization of safety risks over risks of lacking person-centredness.Conclusion:In evaluating person-centred nursing home care using open norms, certain mechanisms are in place that exclude the assessment of quality of (certain aspects of) person-centered care. To overcome these mechanisms, a different, more reflexive approach for regulation might be needed to encourage stakeholders to engage in self-observation and self-criticism. Reflexive regulation using narrative methods can be especially helpful with complex issues, which are associated with uncertainty about standards and where different perspectives play a role. In further participative action research, we will experiment with and study the use of reflexive regulation using narrative methods in long-term care.

State inspection in contexts of cultural and sociopolitical conflict: The case of social services offered to Arab-Palestinian young women in Israel

AbstractInspectors are the executing branch of state regulation. Existing literature focuses on their tasks and operations, mostly with regard to their commitments to the state and their complex relations with inspectees. The present study explores a heretofore-unexamined issue: the playing out of inspection in a sociopolitical context of national conflict and discriminatory majority-minority relations. Namely, it focuses on the work of inspectors of social services overseen by the Israeli welfare state but provided by local or contracted agencies, offered to one of the country’s most oppressed and marginalized populations: Arab-Palestinian young women. The research was based on interviews with 25 national and district inspectors in the field of services for young women in Israel, and reveals numerous barriers hindering effective inspection, resulting from having to inspect the implementation of universalist policy in a context of local needs; and the implementation of welfare policy in a context of national sociopolitical inequality. This is discussed in terms of the severe toll that color-blind and gender-blind policy can have on the feasibility of enforcing regulation, and on the potential to ensure that Arab-Palestinian young women receive adequate social services.

UPark: a progressive web parking application

We present uPark, a progressive web parking application for the online purchase of slots of pre-paid parking time, which remains associated to client accounts rather than bounded to particular parking spots or vehicles. uPark integrates three sub-systems, one for drivers, one for inspectors and one for administrators. It optimizes the overall parking process for citizens/clients from a financial and a practical point of view and technically facilitates the work of inspectors. It is a lightweight, easy-to-use, responsive application. Moreover, as a progressive web application, uPark can be used both as a web site and a mobile app on any device. uPark can be used for various areas, like city center, mall parking area or university campus, making a time- and effort-saving, eco-friendly and useful progressive web application.

Express method of assessment of compliance of the object of supervision with fire safety requirements

Introduction. The paper considers the new requirements for the activities of the state fire supervision bodies. The ways of solving the problems arising during the implementation of these innovations are given. One of such solutions is the developed by the authors algorithm of the express method for assessing the compliance of the object of supervision with fire safety requirements. The article analyzes the work of inspectors of the state fire supervision during inspections of low-rise retail facilities of small area, taking into account the time spent on them, and the work of the inspector using a new express method of conducting inspections.
 Problem Statement. The purpose of the study is to increase the efficiency of managerial decision-making in ensuring fire safety based on the criterion of "fire risk", taking into account the minimum fire safety requirements determined by the calculation.
 Conclusions. The developed algorithm for supporting managerial decision-making on the compliance of the protection of commercial facilities with fire safety requirements will allow inspectors of the state fire supervision during inspections to assess the existence of a threat to human life and health and decide on further actions depending on the presence or absence of this threat.

Blaming the bureaucrat: does perceived blame risk influence inspectors’ enforcement style?

Is there a relation between street-level bureaucrats’ enforcement style and their perception of the risk of getting blamed? This article answers this question on the basis of a survey ( n = 507) among inspectors of the Netherlands Food and Product Safety Authority. We included perceived media attention on their work as a factor that might influence street-level bureaucrats’ perception of blame risk and their enforcement style. Three dimensions of enforcement style were distinguished from earlier research: legal, facilitative and accommodative. We found that when inspectors perceive more blame risk, they employ a slightly less legal style and, instead, employ a more accommodative style. Thus, they act a little less formally and less coercively (i.e. legal) and take greater account of their peers’ opinions (i.e. accommodative). However, perceived media attention did not have a significant influence on enforcement style. Points for practitioners 1. When inspectors perceive more blame risk, they tend to pay more attention to the opinion of peers (other inspectors, supervisors, etc.). 2. Blame risk does not lead to the use of a more formal inspection style. 3. Media attention does not play an important role in enhancing the blame risk perception of inspectors. 4. This media and blame risk is less important than often found in the case of politicians. This may be connected to the fact that the work of inspectors as street-level bureaucrats is less visible to the wider public (and the media).

A real-time automatic pavement crack and pothole recognition system for mobile Android-based devices

Due to the rapid growth of vehicles and traffic accidents caused by road pavement defects, road safety has become a pressing concern worldwide. For this reason, Countries and Federal States have started focusing their resources on the analysis of civil infrastructures to assess their safety and serviceability. The analyses are performed by specialized teams of inspectors and structural engineers who manually inspect road infrastructures and provide detailed reports about the detected pavement distresses and their magnitudes. This work aims at providing a new system able to detect the framed distress using solely the computational resources provided by a mobile device To reach this goal, an automatic pavement distress recognition system based on the OpenCV library is developed and embedded in a mobile application, enabling the recognition of three common pavement distresses: Pothole, Longitudinal-Transversal Cracks, and Fatigue Cracks. Our method, tested on several Android mobile platforms, is able recognize the pavement distresses of interest reaching more than 0.7 of Precision, Recall, Accuracy, and F-Measure. This application promises to improve the on-site work of inspectors by decreasing the time required to perform inspections while ensuring, at the same time, a higher level of accuracy.

Reaching a conclusion—procedures and processes of judgement formation in school inspection teams

School inspections have become an important instrument of quality assurance and quality development in many European countries. So far, the focus of empirical research on school inspections has been on the acceptance of the procedure among the school-internal actors, its influence for internal quality development and its effects on student performance. On the contrary, this paper focuses on a different aspect: the evaluation work of school inspectors. It addresses the question of how the inspectors reach their assessments within a team. To answer this question, the article describes the official procedures of the evaluation work of inspectors in Germany (Lower Saxony), England and Sweden, systematically regarding the evaluation framework (1), the inspection teams (2), the approach during the evaluative work (3) and the feedback of the results (4). In addition, current research results on evaluation work of inspectors in these three state inspection systems are presented. A recent study of the authors is reported in more detail. The data stems from qualitative interviews with 28 school inspectors from Lower Saxony. They show that inspectors try to reach a unanimous assessment within their teams. In this process, three methods of reaching a ‘consensus’ can be identified: the evaluative-positioning, the evaluative-thought-experimental and the descriptive-evaluative method. The article ends by presenting a new approach to school inspection which might serve as an opportunity to reflect about whether the aspiration to arrive at a consensus within inspection teams is still desirable.

Enhancing responsiveness and consistency: Comparing the collective use of discretion and discretionary room at inspectorates inEngland and theNetherlands

AbstractDiscretion used to be considered a feature of individuals, but growing literature shows that it has collective features as well. To develop an understanding of the individual and cooperative work of inspectors in using discretion and the discretionary room granted to them, we compared two inspectorates: theCareQualityCommission (CQC) inEngland and theJointInspectorate forYouth (JIY) in theNetherlands. Our analysis reveals that inspectors engage with colleagues, managers, and stakeholders to include other perspectives, gain mandate, and broaden their repertoire. At theCQC, inspectors use their discretion collectively; on their own initiative, they involve others in balancing and interpreting rules to reach judgments. At theJIY, teamwork is central and regulatory teams are granted collective discretionary room. We argue that collective work permits both responsiveness and consistency. In studying the judgments of inspectors and other street‐level bureaucrats, it is vital to look at collective work and how it combines consistency and responsiveness.

Ethical Research with Children

By Ann Farrell ( ed . ) Maidenhead : Open University Press , 2005 ISBN 0335216501 , 188 pp, £17.99 (pb) Ethical Research with Children comprises 14 chapters from acknowledged experts in the field from the UK, Australia and Canada. Several contributors provide historical overviews of the development of ethical codes in their respective national contexts. Of interest in comparative terms, these show both how new is the widespread acceptance of basic good practice and, relatedly, the ongoing evolution of this good practice. However, Gary Allen points out in chapter 2, ‘there has been little scholarly reflection on the interaction between this burgeoning governance framework and the actual practice and attitudes of researchers’. The value of this edited volume lies precisely in the richness and range of its grounded reflections. Covering theoretical and methodological issues, it will be of use to those planning, conducting and evaluating research with children. Underpinning the entire collection is a rights-based perspective which respects children as competent participants. With quality upheld as the key to ethical research with any group, the author discusses how participation of children contributes positively to the reliability and validity of data. The project to promote and protect their participation — as an ethical imperative in itself — is presented as entailing new challenges in a culture of risk and risk management. There may be a very real risk of an unduly cautious ethics committee frustrating important and valuable work. However, rather than simply lamenting an increase in laborious form-filling, the authors urge positive engagement. Persuasive arguments are advanced for ongoing dialogue between ethics committees, researchers and administrators on the issues ‘really being faced in research practice’ to inform the development of institutional frameworks. This objective is contrasted with the sometimes uneasy relationships pertaining at present, discouraging, for example, what might otherwise appear good practice — the modification of research design in the light of early findings or feedback from the children involved. Each chapter includes useful references and examples of research deemed ethical in terms of methods and, importantly, the use of findings. Chapter 3 by Priscilla Alderson provides a lucid summary of key issues arising at all stages of a project. Readers are directed to existing good practice guides in terms of informed consent and check box resources. However, posing the fundamental question, ‘Is the research worth doing?’ Alderson goes further in discussing the chalk and cheese equation of risk to children in the project versus a ‘hoped-for-but-not-yet-known benefit’ for children in the future. As she points out, ‘They might incidentally learn, or enjoy the project, but this cannot be promised and is not the purpose of the research’. The authors repeatedly demonstrate that there are no easy answers, even to such basic questions as to when it is reasonable to rely solely on children's consent. Accordingly, they reinforce the importance of reflecting on each step taken, individually and with colleagues, both before and after gaining approval from the relevant committees. While some chapters confine their focus strictly to research with children, several others discuss the complex ethical issues involved when engaging young people alongside parents and in a wider local context. In other ways, taking a wider perspective, ultimately to the benefit of the children involved, is encouraged. In chapter 11, ‘researching communities: towards beneficence’, the authors highlight how, within multi-agency service hubs, questions about the ethics of observation without consent do not arise for researchers in isolation, being equally applicable to the work of inspectors. Throughout, the contributors illustrate how children's perspectives on their involvement in research and its risks can differ from those of adults. In the light of this and given the explicit stress on cutting edge activity, greater engagement with the ethics of children in the role of peer or co-researchers would have been welcome. However, its illustration of the range and scope of relevant issues contrasts favourably with the often-limited consideration afforded to this matter within the minor sections of methods texts (but see Greig and Taylor, 1999;Lewis and Lindsay, 2000;Kellett, 2005 for useful material). Of particular value are the questions posed throughout the text: some explicitly at the end of each chapter and others provoked by the work as a whole. These days practitioners have raised expectations regarding meaningful participation, and so the use made of research findings is increasingly exposed as a key ethical issue. This book calls for two responses: firstly, thorough reflection on the ethics of each and every project, involving young people wherever possible. Secondly, a critical evaluation of the impact of their participation should encourage researchers as well as funders to focus on ethical responses to research with children.

Democracy, development and education: Working with The Gambian inspectorate

This paper begins by discussing the relationship between democracy and development in Africa and The Gambia in particular. It then examines the potential role of the school inspectorate in the Gambia in helping to put education for democracy on a sustainable footing. The inspectorate not only evaluate and advise teachers but also provide ongoing support and monitoring. This paper describes a project which explored whether democratic practice could be integrated into the work of inspectors and discusses evidence on both its possible impact and general issues concerning democracy and education in The Gambia.

Utilization of mobile test laboratories

In order to ensure a timely and economically efficient organization of testing with a maximum fulfillment of the requests of instrument owner and of the almost 40 commercial instrument-repair workshops which submit the repaired equipment for state testing, the administration of the regional GKL in cooperation with the heads of the district GKL's and the permanent branches, has compiled and approved a schedule for using the truck laboratories. A strict adherence to this schedule provides a timely checking of all the measuring and testing equipment. Over 70,000 measuring and testing instruments, including 3416 weighbridges, were State-tested in a short time at collective and state farms, stocking points, and other agricukural organizations. This is undoubtedly large-scale work. However, the inspectors' work could be more efficient if the organizations prepared for the testing of their instruments in good time. It is often inconvenient for weighing-equipment testing trucks provided with cranes to check weighbridges with a maximum load of 10 tons, because they are located in low sheds. In such cases the crane trucks have to maneuver around the weighbridge placing at its corners the weights which have then to be manhandled to its middle by the inspectors. This work could be greatly facilitated if the equipment owners had reconstructed the sheds in advance, making them sufficiently wide and high for the utilization of mechanized testing equipment. One more problem which, in our opinion, is important and requires rapid solution. As a matter of fact, the Armavir instrument-making plant produces weighbridges with maximum loads of 30 and 60 tons,and therefore, it is very necessary for the weighing equipment testing trucks to be provided with a larger weight-carrying capacity and reference weights, for instance, of 10 tons. The solution of these problems would considerably improve and facilitate the work of inspectors in agricultur

British Food Journal Volume 22 Issue 4 1920

During the year under consideration the work of inspectors of foods was continued on the special lines which have characterised it throughout the war. Opportunity for reviving the routine work of the branch on such matters as the administration of the Unsound Food and Foreign Meat Regulations, Sale of Food and Drugs Acts and other measures dealing with food subjects had not yet arisen, and the energies of the branch were directed chiefly to carrying on the work of supervising the conditions under which food for the Armies was being manufactured, and dealing with a large number of special questions arising out of the abnormal conditions of food supply and distribution which continued to exist during this period.