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Background: Tshwane District Hospital (TDH) is a level-one hospital, delivering services in the centre of Pretoria since February 2006. It is unique in location, being only 100 meters away from the tertiary hospital, Pretoria Academic Hospital (PAH). In South Africa, public sector emergency units are under enormous pressure with large patient numbers, understaffing and poor resources. TDH Emergency Department (ED) is a typical example. An average of 3 900 patients per month visited this ED in 2006. Recurrent complaints and dissatisfaction shown by the patients about prolonged waiting times before consulting the medical practitioners (MPs) in the ED were one of the initial challenges faced by the newly established hospital. It was decided to undertake quality improvement (QI) cycles to analyse and improve the situation, using waiting time as a measure of improvement. Methods:A QI team was chosen to conduct two QI cycles. The allocated time for QI cycle 1 was from May to August 2006 and for QI cycle 2 from September to December 2006. A total of 150 waiting times of stable and unstable patients were evaluated. Fifty waiting times were recorded over a span of 24 hours for each data collection in May, September and December 2006. Waiting time was defined as the time from arrival of the patient in the unit until the start of the consultation by the MP. Surveys were done in May and September to analyse the problems causing prolonged waiting times. The implemented change included instituting a functional triage system, improvement of the process of up-and down-referrals to and from the tertiary hospital, easy access to stock, reorganisation of doctors' duty roster, reorganisation of the academic programme, announcement on waiting time to patients, nurses carrying out minor procedures and availability of reference books.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) brings new demand to the job market. The concern now is whether higher education institutions (HEIs) have adequately prepared young learners to work in an AI work environment. This research seeks to explore business students’ perceptions of their HEIs in the Netherlands in preparing them for AI work environments. A questionnaire-based survey was completed by 95 students from 27 HEIs in the Netherlands. The findings show that these students believe that their HEIs are not optimally equipped at this time and/or have not optimally utilized their facilities to adequately prepare them for AI work environments. This study reinforces the urgency of updating the curriculum and educational facilities for AI work environments and provides suggestions for future research.

Nowadays, strategic flexibility and its effect on organizational performance are crucial to discuss. Moreover, organizations, especially industrial companies, should estimate how flexibility as a mechanism can improve organizational performance. The Hungarian food industry is highly significant in the industrial sector of the Hungarian economy. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to evaluate how the performance of the Hungarian food industry is affected by strategic flexibility, using supply and demand uncertainty as moderators. It is a quantitative and causal study. A survey was conducted to collect the primary data from a proposed sample of managers at the target companies. As a result, 301 valid responses have been analyzed in SPSS. Regression analysis, correlation, and moderation analysis are used as well. The results indicated that strategic flexibility generally enhances the performance of the target companies, and 20.3% of changes in companies’ performance are related to strategic flexibility. The flexibility of resources affects only the operational performance, while the flexibility of coordination positively affects company performance; it has a 44.2% influence. The findings also showed that uncertainty does not moderate the relationship between strategic flexibility and target firms’ performance. Thus, strategic flexibility is considered as one-effect mechanism in a stable business environment. In all cases, strategic flexibility should be applied in addition to other managerial techniques to enhance company performance.

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