Background The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted healthcare systems worldwide. In addition to the direct impact of the virus on patient morbidity and mortality, the effect of lockdown strategies on health and healthcare utilization have become apparent. Little is known on the effect of the pandemic on pediatric and adolescent medicine. We examined the impact of the pandemic on pediatric emergency healthcare utilization. Methods We conducted a monocentric, retrospective analysis of n = 5,424 pediatric emergency department visits between January 1st and April 19th of 2019 and 2020, and compared healthcare utilization during the pandemic in 2020 to the same period in 2019. Results In the four weeks after lockdown in Germany began, we observed a massive drop of 63.8% in pediatric emergency healthcare utilization (mean daily visits 26.8 ± SEM 1.5 in 2019 vs. 9.7 ± SEM 1 in 2020, p < 0.005). This drop in cases occurred for both communicable and non-communicable diseases. A larger proportion of patients under one year old (daily mean of 16.6% ±SEM 1.4 in 2019 vs. 23.1% ±SEM 1.7 in 2020, p < 0.01) and of cases requiring hospitalisation (mean of 13.9% ±SEM 1.6 in 2019 vs. 26.6% ±SEM 3.3 in 2020, p < 0.001) occurred during the pandemic. During the analysed time periods, few intensive care admissions and no fatalities occurred. Conclusions Our data illustrate a significant decrease in pediatric emergency department visits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Public outreach is needed to encourage parents and guardians to seek medical attention for pediatric emergencies in spite of the pandemic.

The paper proposes an evolutionary approach to strategic human resources. This means that, first of all, truly valuable strategic assets are unlikely to result directly from senior management policies. Rather, what is truly valuable is the 'social architecture' that results from ongoing skill formation activities, forms of spontaneous co-operation, the tacit knowledge that accumulates as the unplanned sideeffect of intentional corporate behaviour. Thus, corporate prosperity not seldom rests in the social architecture that has emerged slowly and incrementally over time, and may even predate the tenure of current senior management. Given the low visibility of such spontaneous co-operation, it is even more likely to be resistant to easy imitation and therefore a valuable strategic asset.

This article draws on insights from a variety of fields, including discursive psychology, ethnomethodology, dramatism, rhetoric, ante-narrative analysis and conversation analysis, to examine the discursive devices employed in the storytelling surrounding the recent financial crisis. Discursive devices refer to the linguistic styles, phrases, tropes and figures of speech that, we propose, are central to the development of a compelling story. We focus our analysis on the moral stories constructed during a public hearing involving senior banking executives in the UK. The analysis suggests that two competing storylines were used by the bankers and their questioners to emplot the events preceding the financial crisis. We propose that a discursive devices approach contributes to the understanding of storytelling by highlighting the power of microlinguistic tools in laying out the moral landscape of the story. We argue that the stories surrounding the financial crisis are important because they shaped how the crisis was made sense of and acted upon.

This paper argues that traditional contrasts between countries as depicted by the societal effect approach, among others, may have been over-emphasized. Diverse evidence suggests that aspects of work organization, government policies and training arrangements have changed substantially over the last decade or so, and multinational companies have been effective in diffusing best practices across borders. One implication is that organizational and globalization effects may complement or even counteract the societal effect. This suggests that some cases, where the presumption has been that societal effects are dominant, may be open to a modified analysis.

This introductory chapter looks at the antecedents, the nature and the various dimensions of'teamworking'. Teamworking is drawing on a variety of traditions, which has resulted in a number of different types and designs of teams. It is necessary to keep all dimensions in mind in order to reach a historically informed judgement of the current forms of teamworking and their shortcomings. Variants of teams need to be analysed by employing a multidimensional framework - teamworking will be more appropriate in some settings than in others. This caution, which had been an aspect of sociotechnical systems thinking from its inception, is shared by all the papers selected for this special issue.