Organisational justice and employee perceptions on hospital management.

PURPOSE: The purpose to clarify what kind of managerial challenges employees experience regarding organisational justice in hospitals. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: This exploratory study of 8,971 employees working in 14 hospitals and examines the concept of organisational justice in management with qualitative and quantitative methods. FINDINGS: An inductive content analysis of the comments revealed five integrative frames describing challenges in hospital management at respondents' workplaces. These frames should be regarded as major managerial challenges in hospitals. These findings illustrate important antecedents of organisational justice and suggest that work units tend to share the same perceptions of justice. They also reveal that individually produced comments reflect collective experiences in organisational justice. Further, the results indicate that problems in management and policies are often experienced in a complex way, and people making justice judgements do not separate procedural and interactional factors. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: Although the commentators producing qualitative data represented many organisational hierarchy levels, the results should not be generalised to apply to horizontal, informal social relationships. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: This paper gives useful information regarding challenges in human resources management in hospitals. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The paper suggests that people making fairness judgements do not make a distinction between procedural and interpersonal factors. Instead, they use any information available to judge the righteousness of the management events. This paper serves to guide hospital managers towards a better understanding of the importance of organisational justice and its collective nature.     

Schizophrenia and pregnancy: a national register-based follow-up study among Finnish women born between 1965 and 1980

Archives of Women's Mental Health - To assess psychosocial and somatic risk factors related to pregnancy, and pregnancy-related complications or disorders in women with schizophrenia compared...     

gamma-Glutamyl transferase and mean cell volume reveal maternal alcohol abuse and fetal alcohol effects

Serial measurements of gamma-glutamyl transferase and mean cell volume were done in 85 pregnant alcohol abusers (320 samples). These included 26 moderate drinkers, 30 heavy drinkers, and 29 alcoholic women. Studies of 28 pregnant women who denied the use of alcohol (138 samples) showed that pregnancy itself had no effect on gamma-glutamyl transferase and mean cell volume. However, gamma-glutamyl transferase was increased in 14.9%, 31.7% and 59.1% of the samples collected from moderate drinkers, heavy drinkers, and alcoholic women, respectively, and likewise mean cell volume was elevated in 10.8%, 17.2%, and 40.2%, respectively. Either gamma-glutamyl transferase or mean cell volume was high or both were high in 27.1% of the moderate drinkers, in 38.3% of the heavy drinkers, and in 76.3% of the alcoholic women. Fetal alcohol effects developed in 42 cases. Increased gamma-glutamyl transferase predicted fetal alcohol effects in 61.5%, with a relative risk of 2.51. Elevated mean cell volume predicted fetal alcohol effects in 40.9%, with a relative risk of 2.40. These results suggest that the assay of gamma-glutamyl transferase and mean cell volume can be valuable in monitoring pregnant women with recognized or suspected alcohol abuse.