Suchergebnisse

Background  The Child and Special Parenting Service provides flexible assessment, long‐term domiciliary support and home‐based teaching to intellectually disabled parents. It provides key coordination between the Learning Disability Service and the Children's Service with focussed parenting assessments, where issues of child care and protection proceedings arise.Method  Semi‐structured interviews and questionnaires were designed to evaluate user satisfaction for both recipients of the service and professionals referring to the service.Results  A high level of consumer satisfaction was found and assessment reports were highly rated. The service is seen to help prevent family breakdown, to meet user needs and to be supportive and non‐threatening by the parents.Conclusions  The combined skills model proposes a small, specialized service that acts as a linchpin for complex cases that require skills from both child and learning disability workers. The Child and Special Parenting Service receives an increasing demand for assessment. It is highly valued by the users and works strongly from an inter‐agency standpoint, coordinating complex packages of domiciliary assessment and support, and is a good practice model.

Proceedings Paper (for Acquisition Research Program) ; The need for reform in the Department of Defense''s (DoD) acquisition and management of services acquisitions was recently highlighted by the Government Accountability Office and by the DoD''s top leaders in acquisition. The for-profit sector also struggles with the effective acquisition of services in which the complexities and unique nature of services render the definition of requirements and the specification and measurement of contractor performance problematic. Despite these difficulties, little research has been conducted to examine the determinants of sourcing performance in services acquisitions. This study examines the relationships between service quality and its antecedents through the use of structural equation modeling. Data were collected from 240 U.S. Air Force contract administrators. Results suggest that requirement definition sufficiency and communication strongly affect service quality and regulatory and statutory compliance. A negative relationship is found between the extent of compliance with regulations and statutes and service quality. Other results include a significant relationship between the level of commitment by the internal customer and the sufficiency of the requirement definition, as well as the deleterious effects of personnel turnover on compliance with regulations and statutes. The paper concludes with several managerial implications, limitations to the study, and directions for future research. ; Acquisition Research Program ; Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.