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A good cooperative relationship between politics and administration is essential to good governance and efficient decision making in public organisations. This study of the cooperative relationship is based on the notion that politics and administration is intertwined, making interaction between politicians and administrators necessary. The study focuses on how political fragmentation affects cooperative relations between politics and administration. Using data from both Norwegian mayors and municipal directors (436 respondents from 303 municipalities), the effects of three different types of political fragmentation are investigated: number of political parties in council and the steering coalition, the Laakso-Taagepera index, and ideological distance between parties. The findings indicate that cooperative relationships get worse with increasing ideological distance and improves with political fragmentation in the council under the conditions of divided government (political parties in the steering coalition spanning both sides of the left–right dimensions). Implications for the study of political–administrative relations are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The alcohols methanol, ethylene glycol and diethylene glycol share many characteristics. The most important is that the compounds themselves are relatively nontoxic but are metabolized, initially by alcohol dehydrogenase, to various toxic intermediates. These compounds are readily available worldwide in commercial products as well as in homemade alcoholic beverages, both of which lead to most of the poisonings, from either unintentional or intentional ingestion. Although relatively infrequent, toxic alcohol poisonings do unfortunately occur in outbreaks and can result in severe morbidity and mortality. These poisonings have traditionally been treated with ethanol since it competes for the active site of alcohol dehydrogenase and decreases the formation of toxic metabolites. Although ethanol can be an effective antidote, there are substantial practical problems with its use. Therefore fomepizole, a potent competitive inhibitor of alcohol dehydrogenase, was developed for a hopefully better treatment for metabolically toxic alcohol poisonings. Fomepizole has few side effects and is easy to use in practice and it may obviate the need for haemodialysis in some, but not all, patients. Hence, fomepizole has largely replaced ethanol as the toxic alcohol antidote in many countries. Nevertheless, ethanol remains an important alternative because access to fomepizole can be limited, the cost may appear excessive or the physician may prefer ethanol due to experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermunicipal cooperation is often seen as a means to increase capacity and reap economic benefits of scale. Prior research, however, shows that the effects of shared service delivery diverge, leaving scholars and practitioners to question whether, under what conditions and at what expense effects of cooperation manifest. Using a panel dataset on child protection services, we analyze how cooperation affects the cost-capacity relation. The results show that cooperation increases cost. This increase is only partly explained by investments in service capacity, indicating that there are significant transaction costs linked to cooperation as a mode of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study contributes to our knowledge of leadership in public organizations on three specific areas. First, it is a unique exploration of whether managers in publicly owned organizations perceive less job autonomy than managers in privately owned and hybrid organizations. Hybrid organizations are defined in two categories: shareholder companies with both public and private owners, and public companies (organizations selling their products or services, but publicly owned). Second, the study investigates possible mechanisms - more specifically formalization and professionalization - through which organizational ownership (public, private, and hybrid) is assumed to affect managerial autonomy. Finally, the study incorporates important confounding variables – first and foremost size (number of employees), task (technology), and hierarchical level - missing from many other comparisons of public and private organizations. The main findings support the notion that perceived managerial autonomy in publicly owned organizations is lower than in both hybrid and private organization. These differences are not, however, explained by differences in formalization and professionalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Establishing government agencies outside ministerial departments is frequently justified by a need to safeguard agency autonomy. In addition to 'formal agencification', that is, erecting formal barriers between agencies and ministries, agencies are also frequently (re)located physically distant from ministries to both signal and strengthen agency autonomy. However, we know little of the effects of physical location and distance on agency autonomy. Using two large surveys from 2006 and 2016, this study examines how geographical location and distance affect agency autonomy. Our study establishes that agency autonomy is only weakly associated with physical location and distance, and is much less important than political salience. Whereas a conventional claim is that agency autonomy may be strengthened by physically (re)locating agencies at arm's length distance from the core executive, our study suggests that physical (re)location represents an in effective administrative policy design-tool when applied to agency autonomy. Points for practitioners: Physical distance between agencies and parent ministries is only remotely associated with agency autonomy. Physical location thus represents an ineffective design-tool if the purpose is to increase agency autonomy [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide attempts by violent methods (VM) can leave the patient with physical and mental trauma affecting health-related quality of life (HRQOL). There is limited knowledge about the impact and HRQOL after a suicide attempt by VM. To compare HRQOL in patients after a suicide attempt by VM, both to self-poisonings (SP) and the general population, and the association of hospital anxiety and depression to the HRQOL in the two groups. Patients admitted to hospital after a suicide attempt were included in this prospective cohort-study from 2010 to 2015. For HRQOL, Short Form Health Survey (SF-36), and Hospital anxiety and depression scale scores (HADS-A and HADS-D) were assessed during study follow-up. The VM-group scored lower HRQOL for the physical dimensions at 3 months (p<.05), compared to the SP group, and only role limitation physical at 12 months (p<.05). Both groups scored lower HRQOL than the general population (p <.05). At baseline, the VM group scored lower for HADS-A than the SP group (p <.05). Both groups had lower HADS scores one year after (p <.05). In multiple regression analyses, the HADS scores were associated with HRQOL in the VM-group (p <.05). SP group HADS scores were negatively associated with general health, vitality, social functioning, and mental health (p <.05). Both groups scored lower for HRQOL than the general population, and the VM group had worse score than the SP group in physical dimensions. Both groups had less symptoms of anxiety and depression over time, but it's association to HRQOL was strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intermunicipal cooperation (IMC) is often used as a mean to reap scale benefits. Most studies on the effects of IMC focus on cost savings, while service quality is overlooked. In this study, the focus is set on input quality in a service characterized by high asset specificity and need for redundancy: emergency primary care. We analyze how mode of governance affect performance by (1) measuring whether IMC versus single‐municipal production affects input quality and (2) identifying optimum scale of operation; effect of the number of participants in the cooperation on input quality. The findings indicate that cooperation weakens the input quality of medical workforce, but that this negative effect is balanced out as the number of participants increases, indicating that cooperation needs to reach a certain size to achieve optimum scale of operation. Concerning equipment, both cooperation in general and an increasing number of participants decrease the input quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]