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The World Health Organization emphasizes the importance of providing integrated care for older people. Taiwan is the fastest aging country in the world. In 2016, Taiwan implemented the Long-Term Care Plan 2.0 (TLTCP 2.0), aimed at providing integrated long-term care (LTC) services in communities. However, LTC service agencies have not been able to evaluate the level of integrated care they provide due to the lack of an effective assessment tool. To address this need, this study sets out to develop an integration assessment tool, namely the Self-Assessment for Service Integration in Long-Term Care (SASI-LTC), which will allow LTC agencies to self-evaluate their current level of integration from multiple perspectives. The SASI-LTC was developed based on Evashwick's framework, underwent two rounds of Delphi panels with twenty-six experts, and a pilot test with 243 valid questionnaires from administrators of Tier A agencies who are responsible for integrating LTC. The Delphi experts assessed the content with high levels of agreement using medians, the scale content validity index (SCVI) and item content validity index (ICVI). The SASI-LTC included four domains (inter-entity organization and management, integrated care coordination, integrated resources, and integrated information systems) with thirty items. The SASI-LTC showed good reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.94) and good validity, and a confirmatory factor analysis showed a good model fit index [χ2/df = 1.38; RMSEA = 0.040; CFI = 0.963; SRMR = 0.049] in pilot testing. While the SASI-LTC is a useful and feasible tool for Taiwan's LTC service agencies to evaluate their level of integration in providing LTC services, it could also be used in other countries with minor adjustments to localization of items related to financial integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical and sustainable thinking is an important competence in the engineering education to support students' abilities to act and perform in a responsible manner in corporate contexts, and consequently contribute to a sustainable future. This paper investigates engineering students' attitudes towards ethical and sustainable thinking focusing on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) principles in the context of entrepreneurship courses as a part of larger research project. Engineering students from a Finnish and an Estonian university (N = 342) responded to a self-assessment survey. The students' attitudes towards CSR principles were assessed both on the enterprise level and the individual level as expectations of potential future employees. The findings indicate that engineering students acknowledge the need to take into account responsible thinking and that it is important for enterprises to be both socially and environmentally responsible in their activities. The self-assessment tool of ethical and sustainable thinking associated with the entrepreneurship competence model and CSR principles can be helpful in practice when university teachers wish to support and assess their students' attitudes towards CSR principles among other entrepreneurship competencies when creating new course content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times, a paradigm shift is observed in the manufacturing domain through the inception of the smart manufacturing (SM) system. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries are striving hard to catch up with this transition. Thus, a need arises to assess their preparedness and subsequently develop an appropriate mechanism for transition. In this context, readiness assessment is a suitable approach that clearly depicts the quantification and qualification of readiness stages through various dimensions. To this effect, this study proposes a generic readiness assessment model with 5 stages, 6 building blocks, and 22 dimensions. Furthermore, the dimensions are ranked using 'Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA)' to understand their influence on overall readiness attainment. The practical viability of the proposed readiness assessment model is tested on five Indian SMEs. Based on the readiness level of each organization, recommendations are made to further improve their preparedness for transformation. Other SMEs can utilize this tool as a self-assessment methodology to check their status and subsequently strategize their policies for future transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quality is a multidimensional and transversal concept also in the field of higher education. This and other considerations revealed some problems during application of quality principles to study programmes, emerged from the first accreditation experience in Italy. The objective of this article is to provide a simple self-assessment tool for professors who have to implement study programme quality, in order to understand their position with respect to accreditation requirements. To do this, a general procedure to create the self-evaluation questionnaire is explained. It is composed of six points: (1) studying literature or indications about the objective; (2) creating a schema of categories and sub-categories, (3) weighting the sub-categories, (4) creating a questionnaire, (5) creating a formula in order to synthesise the questionnaire in a graduation scale and finally (6) robustness analysis. A full example, based on Italian experience, is therefore developed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2011 in Greece, a nationwide survey into the preservation status of collections of public, municipal, academic and bank libraries, including the General State Archives, was completed. The survey was part of a larger research project. This survey aimed to clarify the institutions' current preservation actions, policies and overall approach towards preservation. Based on the results of this nationwide research, the author developed a self-assessment preservation performance tool for libraries and archives, called thePreservation Policy Maturity Model. It is essentially a practical yet well-grounded preservation policy maturity model, which helps institutions to formulate a consistent preservation policy by roadmapping their actions, according to current best practice and embedded peer comparison. It is addressed to all Greek libraries and archives. Its innovative nature lies in that the level of preservation maturity that an organization is initially attributed emerges through the analysis of data deriving from the nationwide survey. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]