We draw on concepts in the innovation literature namely exploration and exploitation to examine corporate sustainability practices as well as the ensuing tensions between efficiency and innovativeness in achieving organisational performance. In particular, this paper draws upon institutional theory to enhance the understanding of sustainability-related phenomena, mainly from a perspective that has not yet been widely investigated in prior empirical studies. Therefore, the paper addresses the research question of whether sustainability exploitation and sustainability exploration practices are characterized by an organisation's country of origin. . In general, the results suggest that organisations in different countries show more differences in relation to sustainability practices and organisational performance compared to organisations within the same country. Therefore, the paper contributes to the literature by providing more clarity and better understanding of how organisations may pursue sustainability practices to gain performance benefits.
COBISS.SI-ID: 7528211
Health documentation is a prerequisite for good and sustainable health and social care. It is especially important for patient involvement and their empowerment. A transition from paper to e-documentation together with the electronic patient record should be based on thorough knowledge of the current state of documentation and its usages. The main objective of this paper was to analyse which documents and work methods of documenting processes within nursing are being used within different environments. Furthermore, what are the main reasons for their discrepancies from theoretical approaches and best practices. The analysis is based on a survey carried out on all three levels of healthcare. The survey questionnaire consisted of 12 questions to which responded 286 nursing teams from community health centres, hospitals and retirement homes in Slovenia. The results point to diversity in documenting as well as lack of interoperability. This is reflected in a great number of different documents. All phases of the nursing process were being documented in only 31.8 % of cases. The main reasons for this can be attributed to work organisation, different definitions of data-set requirements and inadequate knowledge by nurses. Survey results pointed out a need for the renewal of nursing documentation towards a more uniform system based on contemporary health technologies.
COBISS.SI-ID: 5215595
Slovenian primary schools must adhere to a complex curriculum imposed by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Slovenia. This complexity makes the scheduling problem challenging. To address this problem, we developed iUrnik, an interactive and automated scheduling system, which generates near-optimal schedules using evolutionary computation. We developed our system to produce quality timetables for both students and teachers; however, contradictory goals make this task difficult. iUrnik addresses the complexity of assigning students to elective subjects and enables planners to add constraints and set their parameters. It also provides an advanced substitutions module, which determines and suggests the most appropriate teacher to substitute for an absent one. We used our system at three Slovenian primary schools, and the results we achieved indicate a significant improvement in the scheduling process in comparison to the previous processes these schools used.
COBISS.SI-ID: 7564563
The objective of the study was to: a) Analyse the causes of patient complaints on a large sample of the population of the Republic of Slovenia, and b) Develop a discrete simulation model used for the handling of patient complaints. Data obtained from the survey (N=1195), was used in the determination of parameters while legislation in the field of patient rights was employed to determine the structure of the simulation model. The model was used to simulate activities for different categories and paths of complaints. The most commonly identified causes of patient complaints were identified as follows: violation of legislative stipulations (93.6%), deterioration of health (93.1%), suspected improper treatment (91.7%), staff unavailability (91.1%), disregard of violations (90.9%) and loss of documentation (89.4%). Through improved transparency and safe electronic access, the simulation of patient complaints process enables feedback for policy makers to foster the quality of healthcare services.
COBISS.SI-ID: 5162539
This paper addresses the gap identified in the literature by exploring underlying structure of sustainability-oriented innovation practices as well as their effects on the particular performance dimensions (i.e., economic performance, quality performance, innovation performance, environmental performance and social performance). The large scale web-based survey yielded 266 usable responses encompassing both the manufacturing and service industries across five countries: Germany, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia and Spain. The results of the regression analysis demonstrate that sustainability-oriented innovation practices are positively related with the overall organizational performance. The empirical evidence suggests that when organizations strongly emphasize sustainability practices they can improve both economic and non-financial performance. From a practical perspective, the findings of the study may provide a clue regarding how organizations can embed sustainability aspects in their innovation processes with the aim of improving their performance.
COBISS.SI-ID: 7456275