Search Results (1,678)

Workplace wellbeing is a multidimensional construct shaped by psychological, physical, and organisational determinants. In higher education, human resource and governance policies influence these determinants, yet policy portfolios are often compliance-oriented rather than explicitly wellbeing-focused. Despite increasing global attention to workplace wellbeing, there remains limited empirical analysis of how institutional policy environments conceptualise and operationalise wellbeing, particularly in African higher education contexts. This study critically analysed workplace-related policies at a tertiary academic institution in Johannesburg to assess how wellbeing is conceptualised and operationalised, and to identify gaps relevant to academic employees. A qualitative single-case document study design was employed, guided by the Walt and Gilson Policy Triangle Framework (content, context, actors, processes) and complemented by a wellbeing classification lens. Policies were purposively selected based on predefined inclusion criteria relating to working conditions, inclusion, health and safety, development, and employment governance. Deductive framework analysis was followed by inductive thematic synthesis. Workplace wellbeing was not explicitly defined within the policy portfolio and was inconsistently operationalised. Most policies functioned through indirect pathways and emphasised legal compliance, governance, and procedural oversight. Five cross-cutting themes were identified, including compliance-driven policy architecture, uneven workload governance, and bounded disability inclusion. Key gaps included limited integration of psychosocial risk, insufficient support for chronic illness and non-visible disability, and lack of monitoring of wellbeing outcomes. Institutional policies provide important safeguards but do not operate as an integrated workplace wellbeing framework. Strengthening conceptual clarity, aligning policies with contemporary evidence, and embedding measurable wellbeing indicators may improve employee wellbeing and institutional sustainability. As a single-institution document analysis, the findings reflect formalities of policies rather than implementation and may therefore have limited transferability to other higher education sections. Nevertheless, the study provides a thourough framework for examining how institutional policies shape workplace wellbeing and offers a foundation for future comparative policy analyses. Full article

Molecular pathology-driven oncologic diagnostics—genomic profiling, transcriptomics, proteomics, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence applied to tissue and liquid biopsy—can only be as accurate as the biospecimens on which they are performed. Biobanks are the infrastructures that secure this foundation, linking donors, biological samples, and data to discovery and, through the pathology interface, back to diagnosis. Their scientific and diagnostic value, however, is determined less by the number of specimens stored than by the rigor of the guidelines under which those specimens are collected, processed, annotated, governed, and shared. The normative landscape has changed considerably in the last three years: the ISBER Best Practices reached their fifth edition (2023), the NCI Best Practices were comprehensively revised (2026), the Standard PREanalytical Code (SPREC) was updated to version 4.0 (2024/2025), MIABIS Core reached version 3.0 (2024), the 2024 revision of the Declaration of Helsinki explicitly anchored biobank governance to the Declaration of Taipei, the European Health Data Space Regulation (EU) 2025/327 entered into force, and ISO 20387—the accreditation standard for biobanks—is undergoing its first full revision. This review synthesizes the current (2026) status of international biobanking standards, ethical and legal frameworks, pre-analytical and quality management requirements, data and interoperability standards, and sustainability models, drawing on more than 200 sources with emphasis on the 2023–2026 literature. Standards are presented not as an inventory but as an operational system, organized along the biobanking workflow from donor consent to sample distribution and impact tracking. On this basis, we propose a phased, guideline-anchored roadmap and a start-up checklist to help new teams establish a real-world biobank—particularly hospital-integrated biobanks in settings without a mature national biobanking infrastructure—and we review comprehensively the financial, operational, regulatory, and societal challenges that determine whether a new biobank thrives or stalls. Particular attention is given to the specimen classes and quality controls on which molecular tumor diagnostics depend—FFPE tissue and its sequencing artifacts, fresh-frozen tissue, liquid biopsy analytes, and DV200-gated derivative quality—and to the interface between research biobanking and the accredited diagnostic laboratory, which is set out explicitly because the two are governed by different standards. We further provide explicit, endpoint-specific operational control of warm and cold ischemia, a quality-control framework for advanced patient-derived models (xenografts and organoids) and their interface with dedicated model cores, an explicit statement of the evidence underlying the practical recommendations, and a dedicated limitations section. The review is intended as a reference piece for biobankers, pathologists, clinician-researchers, quality managers, and institutional decision-makers building the biobanks on which the coming decade of precision oncology will depend. Full article

Background/Objectives: Artificial intelligence (AI) is entering clinical dentistry more quickly than the professional, ethical, and regulatory frameworks intended to govern it. Responsible implementation depends not only on diagnostic performance but on trust, professional autonomy, and clear accountability—dimensions rarely examined across the different stakeholder groups who shape dental care. This study assessed perceptions of trustworthy AI, accountability, and regulatory preparedness among dental and non-dental stakeholders in Romania. Methods: A multidisciplinary cross-sectional survey using purposive, non-probability sampling, reported in accordance with the CROSS guideline, was administered to dental professionals, legal professionals, forensic physicians, and other healthcare stakeholders. The instrument addressed AI literacy, governance and accountability, ethics and transparency, and clinical implementation. Responses were compared across professional groups using chi-square and Kruskal–Wallis tests with Benjamini–Hochberg or Holm correction, and the questionnaire structure was examined through an exploratory psychometric assessment. Of 304 submissions, 287 were retained for analysis. Results: Agreement on ethical and governance safeguards was high (84–91%), including testing on diverse populations, independent auditing, and patient disclosure. Between-group differences concentrated in AI awareness, literacy, and educational exposure, as well as in governance and accountability, whereas ethics and transparency items showed broad consensus. Respondents attributed responsibility for AI-related outcomes to clinicians (77.4%), developers (49.5%), and healthcare institutions (28.3%). Only a minority reported AI Act awareness (32.8%) or previous participation in AI-related courses or conferences (25.2%). Conclusions: Romanian stakeholders included in this multidisciplinary sample share strong normative expectations for trustworthy clinical AI but report limited regulatory awareness and educational exposure. These findings support the development of structured AI preparedness initiatives and clearer governance frameworks reflecting stakeholders’ perceptions of responsibility as extending across clinicians, developers, and healthcare institutions. Professional certification before clinical AI use emerged as a specific stakeholder preference. Full article

The continued expansion of digital payment technologies has encouraged Tanzanian district councils to use Point-of-Sale (POS) systems to collect service fees. In current POS systems, authorized POS terminals capture payment details, and through the centralized server, transactions are recorded on the POS database, with receipts printed as confirmation. Although this architecture supports recording and monitoring transaction revenue, it provides limited support for verifying the identity of the actor authorizing the transaction and for independent confirmation of transaction integrity during auditing. To address these limitations, this study investigated the essential requirements, standards, and protocols for integrating a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) as a blockchain-based identity solution with existing POS systems and for using a permissioned blockchain platform to verify integrity. To achieve the study objectives, an exploratory qualitative approach was used, involving 32 semi-structured interviews with POS operators, revenue accountants, internal auditors, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) administrators, a regulator, and blockchain experts. A hybrid deductive–inductive thematic analysis was used to establish three requirement themes, namely, security and identity management, legal and regulatory compliance, and data management and integrity assurance; two standard themes, namely, security and cryptographic standards, and identity and decentralized identification; and two protocol themes, namely, security and user authentication protocols, and data management and identity portability protocols. The findings were mapped to applicable legal obligations, compliance standards, technical specifications, and implementation controls, indicating how these requirements were translated into the conceptual SSI-POS integration for district-council POS systems. The proposed solution separates credential issuance, credential holder, and device POS management; verifier and POS transaction processing; blockchain and integrity evidence; and the assurance domain across defined trust boundaries. After a signed transaction is approved by the verifier, a complete transaction receipt remains in the existing POS database, while receipt hashes or the corresponding Merkle roots are anchored on the permissioned blockchain to provide tamper-evident verification. Hyperledger Besu with Quorum Byzantine Fault Tolerance (QBFT) was selected for its fit with permissioned, multi-organizational governance and for independent replication of receipt-hash evidence. The study provides a stakeholder-derived, regulatory-aligned conceptual foundation for SSI-POS integration without replacing the existing POS system workflow. Full article

Public Food Procurement can shape diets, markets, and territorial food systems, yet its strategic potential depends on how policy objectives are translated into tender design, contract management, and territorial food policy governance. The study draws on a predominantly international literature-based review of recommendations and selected country experiences to contextualize the analysis and identify relevant good practices. At the European Union and Portuguese levels, it systematically compares the applicable policy and legal frameworks and examines how they are translated into Portuguese procurement practice. It also situates Public Food Procurement within recent Portuguese debates on food transition, metropolitan food-system planning, and multifunctional agrifood parks. A qualitative documentary and regulatory analysis was conducted using a four-pillar framework—health, environmental, social and economic—operationalized through 28 criteria. The empirical corpus comprised 53 school food procurement procedures published in Portugal in 2023. Technical specifications or equivalent documents were unavailable for 15 procedures; the cases were retained in the fixed denominator of every criterion and pillar index, so the results shown are conservative full-corpus measures of publicly observable documentary incorporation. The reliability matrix retained all 53 procedures, but ordinal Krippendorff’s alpha was estimated from the 1064 units containing pairable ratings and was 0.625 (95% bootstrap CI: 0.576–0.667). Health achieved the highest aggregate index (37%), followed by environmental (17%), social (15%), and economic criteria (8%). Although 58% used Most Economically Advantageous Tender (MEAT) terminology, only 13% applied genuine multi-factor evaluation, while approximately four in five procedures were effectively price-only. The findings should therefore be interpreted as evidence of documentary incorporation and observability rather than supplier compliance or direct health and environmental outcomes. They indicate that a major documented weakness lies not in lack of legal authority, but in weak translation into measurable award criteria, contract clauses, monitoring mechanisms, and integrated local or regional food-policy strategies. Full article

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into cardiovascular medicine, with potential applications across image analysis, procedural planning, risk stratification, decision support, and workflow optimization. However, its adoption in interventional cardiology remains heterogeneous and may be influenced by several factors. We aimed to conduct a nationwide survey to assess attitudes towards AI among Italian interventional cardiologists. Methods: We conducted a nationwide, cross-sectional, web-based survey of Italian interventional cardiologists. A structured questionnaire collected information on professional characteristics, familiarity with and current use of AI, perceived clinical applications, expected benefits, trust, implementation barriers, and training needs. Conditional branching was used to obtain additional details from respondents who reported current use of AI-based tools, while all responses were collected voluntarily and analyzed in anonymized, aggregate form. Categorical variables and Likert-scale responses were summarized using descriptive statistics, with exploratory comparisons performed across prespecified professional and institutional subgroups. Results: Among 129 respondents, 70.5% reported at least moderate familiarity with AI and 77.5% reported some current use, although only 60.5% reported regular or occasional professional use, and applications were concentrated mainly in research, education, and information synthesis rather than direct procedural support. Nearly half (48.1%) expected AI to become standard in many procedures within 5 years, while 69.0% anticipated either routine use or particular value in complex cases. Attitudes were broadly favorable, with 85.3% agreeing that AI could improve diagnostic and procedural precision, 86.8% expressing strong interest in future use, and 76.7% stating that AI should support rather than replace physician judgment. The leading barriers were medico-legal uncertainty (45.0%), poor integration with existing clinical systems (34.9%), and cultural resistance or operator distrust (29.5%), whereas preservation of physician control was the most frequently cited requirement for adoption (58.9%). Greater AI familiarity was independently associated with current AI use (p < 0.001) and good or high trust (p < 0.001). Compared with no prior training, one and multiple AI training experiences were independently associated with good or high familiarity (both p < 0.05). Conclusions: Italian interventional cardiologists showed substantial exposure to AI, strong interest in future adoption, and generally favorable expectations regarding its contribution to diagnostic precision, workflow, and procedural support. Acceptance remained conditional on physician oversight, stronger clinical validation, reliable interoperability, and clear medico-legal governance, and previous AI-focused education appeared independently associated with greater familiarity. Full article

This paper examines how the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) official political discourse represents Muslims in India between 2014 and 2026, in comparison with the representation of Hindus. Earlier research on Islamophobia in India has usually emphasized security, exclusion, and the construction of Muslims as a threatening Other. This study is based on a bilingual corpus of 2205 English and Hindi documents (3,445,843 words) and speeches by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, together with BJP election manifestos, and applies corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, combining frequency, collocation, keyness, and frame analysis with close reading of representative contexts. The results identify a clear asymmetry between Hindu and Muslim communities. Hindu is associated mainly with vocabulary of civilization, culture, sacred geography, and religious tradition, while Muslim is named alongside reservation, personal law, Triple Talaq, Waqf, Pasmanda, and other terms of policy and legal reform. Security vocabulary is common across the corpus, but its co-occurrence with explicit references to Muslims varies by frame. This study also identifies three recurrent patterns of Muslim othering: security association, party-political contestation, and governance-based intervention. It proposes governance-based othering for the third pattern, whereby Muslims are repeatedly addressed as objects of law, public policy, welfare, and institutional reform rather than solely as security threats. The findings extend existing accounts of Islamophobia by showing that minority difference is constructed through governmental as well as exclusionary forms of representation. Full article

Background/Objectives: Population aging represents a major social and public health challenge in Latin America. Mexico has made significant advances in regulatory and policy frameworks. Notable progress includes accession to the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons (IACPHROP). It also includes the enactment of the Law on the Rights of Older Persons, and institutional reforms for social and cultural inclusion. This review evaluates Mexico’s alignment of aging policies with IACPHROP standards using an integrated framework of social determinants, policies, and legal obligations. This approach has not been previously reported for Mexico. Methods: Searches were conducted in electronic databases and official repositories. These included the World Health Organization, the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Human Rights System, and Mexican government regulations. Additional searches were performed in PubMed, Redalyc, SciELO, and Google Scholar. Results: Advances include universal non-contributory pensions, the expansion of healthcare coverage, and social inclusion programs. Important policy areas remain to be addressed, including the establishment of a national long-term care system, and the reduction of regional disparities in health coverage. In addition, the evidence linking specific policies to improve health outcomes remains heterogeneous. Conclusions: Mexico has built a solid foundation for the protection of older adults’ rights. The development of a long-term care system and the adoption of place-based approaches are also essential. Regional cooperation and community traditions play a pivotal role in achieving dignified, inclusive, and sustainable aging. Full article

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) across organisational and societal settings has heightened concerns about accountability, transparency, and ethical oversight. Existing governance mechanisms, including regulation and principle-based ethics frameworks, often struggle to address the scale, opacity, and socio-technical complexity of AI systems. In response, auditing has increasingly been proposed as a means of implementing accountability by translating ethical and legal expectations into structured oversight practices. The study employs a structured literature review methodology, analysing 71 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and 2025, retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest. Through thematic synthesis, the review shows that AI auditing has evolved beyond technical verification towards a socio-technical governance infrastructure grounded in transparency, independence, ethics integration, and professionalisation. However, its effectiveness is constrained by persistent challenges, including algorithmic opacity, regulatory lag, fragmented standards, capability gaps, and risks of symbolic compliance. The study positions auditing as both a central tool and a critical institutional challenge within AI governance, offering insights for scholars, regulators, and practitioners seeking durable accountability mechanisms for responsible AI. Full article

The climate crisis exacerbates structural inequalities and disproportionately affects women, particularly in rural and low-income contexts where limited access to resources, education and financing undermines their adaptive capacity. This article examines how gender considerations are integrated into European Union (EU) climate adaptation governance, combining doctrinal analysis of EU and international legal frameworks with a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature. The bibliometric component maps research trends and thematic gaps on gender-responsive climate adaptation. The doctrinal analysis focuses on the European Climate Law, the EU Gender Equality Strategies and selected national instruments, with Spain’s 2021–2030 PNIEC and PNACC as illustrative case studies. These frameworks are assessed against five human-rights-based criteria: substantive equality and intersectionality, participation and empowerment, accountability and access to justice, data and monitoring, and financing and institutional arrangements. The findings reveal a structural “transformation deficit” between normative commitments and operational reality: core climate instruments lack robust requirements on gender impact assessments, sex-disaggregated data, women’s participation and gender-responsive budgeting. The study argues that a truly transformative Gender-Responsive Climate Adaptation (GRCA) in the EU requires moving beyond symbolic references toward binding gender-responsive governance mechanisms derived from CEDAW and EU primary law, capable of dismantling structural barriers and ensuring an environmentally effective and substantively just transition. Full article

Territorial planning in Portugal requires the regular preparation of State of Territorial Planning Reports (REOT) to evaluate the implementation of spatial planning instruments. However, these reports are traditionally produced as static documents, limiting their effectiveness as decision-support tools. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for the dynamic generation of REOT through the integration of official spatial and administrative data within a Planning Support System (PSS). The proposed architecture combines rule-based logic, automated indicator calculation and interactive dashboards to support the on-demand production of continuously updated planning information while preserving the possibility of data aggregation and harmonisation at municipal, regional and national scales. To complement the conceptual framework, the paper presents the Cascais Experience, a pilot implementation developed within the Municipality of Cascais. Although not constituting a Dynamic REOT, the pilot demonstrates the feasibility of integrating municipal administrative data into a dynamic urban planning dashboard capable of automatically producing planning indicators and supporting on-demand monitoring. The experience also provides valuable insights into the practical challenges associated with data integration, information standardisation and indicator development. The framework is developed within the Portuguese legal and institutional context, recognising that current monitoring practices are implemented independently by each municipality, often using heterogeneous methodologies that hinder territorial comparability and multi-level analysis. The pilot implementation demonstrates that the principal barriers to dynamic territorial monitoring are organisational and informational rather than technological, highlighting the importance of data governance and administrative information management. The findings support the transition from episodic reporting towards continuous, data-driven territorial monitoring and provide a scalable framework for the future development of Dynamic REOT systems in Portugal and other planning contexts. Full article

State Council Document No. 43 and the revised Budget Law legally disclaimed Chinese local governments’ responsibility for the debts of the enterprises they own. Across 22,233 firm-year observations on 1686 listed firms from 2009 to 2023, the effective cost of debt of local state-owned firms fell by 0.33 percentage points relative to private firms, 5.5 percent of its mean. The direction was not obvious in advance: withdrawing a guarantee that lenders had been pricing should have made credit dearer, while the debt swap enacted alongside the disclaimer replaced high-cost vehicle liabilities with low-cost provincial bonds and eased the balance sheets standing behind those firms. Central state-owned enterprises, whose support the reform left untouched, serve as a falsification group and show no statistically distinguishable change. The estimate passes the joint pre-trend test, survives matching, entropy balancing and twenty specification changes, and operates through the interest paid rather than the quantity of debt, which identifies a price effect. Investment rose by 0.76 percentage points of assets, but no improvement in investment efficiency was detected, and an equivalence test cannot exclude a small one. A cross-sectional pattern consistent with fiscal relief does not survive correction for multiple testing, so that channel is reported as suggestive rather than identified. Hardening the budget constraint of local governments lowered the debt servicing burden of the firms they own without directing the freed resources toward more productive use, so the sustainability gain is fiscal rather than allocative. Full article

Corporate environmental disclosure has become a significant approach to increasing corporate value. This study examines the relationship between government environmental subsidies and corporate environmental disclosure. The results indicate that corporate environmental disclosure is positively associated with government environmental subsidies. Further analysis reveals that corporate environmental disclosure is associated with higher levels of strategic green technology innovation rather than substantive green technology innovation, which may represent a potential channel associated with its relationship with government environmental subsidies. A subsample test of heavily polluting and non-heavily polluting enterprises reveals that environmental disclosure is positively associated with government environmental subsidies in both cases, indicating that the government provides positive feedback to green development plans reported in the MD&A of all types of enterprises. A comparative analysis suggests that the positive association between corporate environmental disclosure and government environmental subsidies was stronger before the implementation of the Environmental Protection Tax Law. This suggests that the greening of the legal system reflects the government’s greater attention to the green sector. This study uses China’s capital market data to measure corporate environmental disclosure in MD&A and the conclusions offer novel insights into improving laws and regulations on MD&A disclosures. Full article

Background/Objectives: Digital pathology is transforming diagnostic workflows through whole-slide imaging (WSI), digital archiving, artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted analysis, and remote consultation. The existing literature only partly addresses patient access to pathology records and cross-institutional sharing within a holistic governance framework. This study proposes a Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI)-based conceptual governance model that treats digital pathology archives as components of long-term clinical memory. Here, clinical memory refers to a pathology-specific information layer that preserves record context, provenance, integrity, and longitudinal links across time and institutions while supporting governed reuse and legally bounded patient-managed access. Methods: Eighty publicly available complaints from the Şikayetvar platform were examined using codebook-based thematic content analysis. Aggregated National Health Service (NHS) Written Complaints data were used to provide an illustrative external governance context. These data were not used for cross-country prevalence comparison or corroboration. Results: The main complaint themes were absent or inaccessible pathology results (66.3%) and records that remained unavailable despite notifications that the results were ready (55.0%). Complaint themes, the literature, regulatory sources, technical standards, and internal clinical review were synthesized while preserving different analytical functions, and 11 governance requirements were identified. Conclusions: Developed through Design Science Research, the model integrates verifiable credentials (VCs), a patient digital wallet, purpose- and time-limited authorization, dynamic consent and access revocation, secure off-chain storage, and blockchain-based integrity and auditing. The model was examined through an internal requirement-coverage assessment and a supplementary post hoc benchmark-oriented assessment. These analyses indicate conceptual consistency rather than independent validation. Real-world technical, clinical, usability, security, and equity validation remains necessary. Full article

Artificial intelligence systems increasingly generate conduct that appears intentional. They negotiate, advise, adapt to obstacles, and shape human decision-making. Yet they are not legal persons and lack minds in any conventional sense. We argue that the apparent impasse dissolves once legal intent is understood functionally rather than metaphysically. Across contract, tort, corporate, and criminal law, intent has never been a simple report on inner mental states. It is a normative tool used to gate legal effect, allocate blame, and manage risk, one that is routinely inferred, imputed, and even fictionalized in service of institutional goals. We reframe the AI question accordingly. Instead of treating AI systems as candidate legal subjects, we see them as non-personal agents whose conduct is attributable to identifiable human principals through doctrines of agency, respondeat superior, electronic-agent contracting, and corporate attribution that already do this work. Drawing on experimental evidence of goal persistence and emergent strategy formation in autonomous AI agents, we propose a three-layer framework distinguishing questions of legal status from questions of attribution and governance, and develop a factor-based approach for determining when AI-generated conduct should be treated as intentional for specific doctrinal purposes. We apply this framework to recent litigation, including wrongful death claims against an AI chatbot provider, and contrast U.S. and EU regulatory trajectories. Engaging with the substantial AI personhood literature, we conclude that the agency-attribution route does the practical work that personhood proposals are designed to do without importing their normative freight. Law can treat artificial agency as legally consequential without granting AI systems personhood, consciousness, or moral standing, preserving human responsibility while acknowledging that intention may no longer be exclusively human as a matter of law. Full article