The Western liberal approach to informed consent defines autonomy as an independent choice or decision made by an individual as the final authority in medical decision-making. This approach is so dominant that one can fail to see the merits of other traditional and cultural perspectives. In this dissertation, another approach to informed consent is considered -that of communal culture of Africa, a process used in African traditional medicine (ATM) wherein patients make medical decisions and give consent in consultation with the members of their community and the ATM doctor. Often, but not necessarily, the final consent rests on the consensus reached in consultation with the group rather than on that by the individual patient alone. <br>This dissertation argues that the ATM form of consent constitutes legitimate informed consent based on the concept of relational autonomy, commonly called relational autonomy in informed consent (RAIC) in this dissertation. To interpret and enlighten the significance of the ATM approach to RAIC, the analysis in this dissertation examines the ethics of care movement in Western bioethics which also advocates a relational approach to informed consent. This movement presents a concept of persons as relational beings who are socially embedded, thereby interpreting patient autonomy in their relationships with others. This movement provides the hermeneutic to enlighten the significance of the ATM approach as a legitimate model of RAIC. <br>By comparison of the ethics of care approach with that of ATM to RAIC, this dissertation further provides a relational approach to informed consent in order to inform the restrictive emphasis on individual autonomy practiced in Western bioethics, all with a view towards fostering current discourse on global bioethics. The dissertation also provides an applied example of the contribution of ATM's RAIC approach to ethics committees in Africa, focusing in particular, on the decision-making process for patient informed consent. <br>This dissertation is distinct insofar as it focuses on informed consent in ATM, employs ethics of care as a hermeneutic to interpret ATM, advocates integrated model of healthcare ethics committees in ATM. Because ATM forms a large portion of the healthcare systems in Africa, it follows that ATM and its practices should receive more attention in bioethics in the present global era. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Health Care Ethics / PhD; / Dissertation;

Objective: Significant investments to address childhood obesity require that we understand the factors that facilitate the use of research among public health practitioners in order to support evidence-informed strategies. Therefore the objective of this study is to understand the role of the interactive support of the SHAPES-Ontario Knowledge Exchange Extension (KE Extension) on evidence-informed knowledge use concerning youth physical activity in public health. The interactive support is defined according to three components: 1) Collaborative Partnership, 2) Community of Practice, and 3) Knowledge Broker. Methods: Two different groups of Public Health Organisations were selected. The Intervention group consisted of two Ontario Public Health Units from the SHAPES-Ontario KE Extension. The Comparison group consisted of one Ontario Public Health Unit and one Manitoba Regional Health Authority. The Comparison organisations did not have the intervention of the KE Extension. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with approximately four to five staff from each organisation. Qualitative analysis identified instances of evidence-informed knowledge use, interactive processes and other factors that influenced knowledge use related to youth physical activity in public health program planning and decision-making. This resulted in comprehensive case studies for each organisation. Cross case analysis identified the dominant similarities and difference in the factors that influence evidence-informed knowledge use across the organisations and how they inter-relate. Results: The cross case analysis indicated that having access to local youth physical activity surveillance data (e.g., SHAPES data) was the most important facilitator of evidence-informed practice. Interactive processes, specifically working groups, partnerships, and knowledge brokers, were found to be an important factor across the fours organisations. These interactive processes were found to have a reciprocal relationship with the information source and the context for sue, further facilitating evidence-informed knowledge use. The specific interactive mechanisms of the KE Extension did not emerge from the data, as the intervention was not intensive enough compared to the other activities within the Intervention organisations. Conclusions: Providing public health practitioners with access to local and relevant research evidence, coupled with intensive, sustained, and consistent interactive support for planning and decision-making may be effective at encouraging evidence-informed practice related to youth physical activity.

Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur en population av potentiellt blivande föräldrar i åldrarna 20-40 år önskar att handläggning av informationen kring ultraljudsmarkörer bör se ut. Studien utformades som en pilotstudie med bekvämlighetsurval, och en enkät med parametrar fördelade på 11 scenarion utarbetades. Enkäten delades ut på föreläsningar i och omkring Stockholm i april 2012. 49 kvinnor och 36 män deltog i undersökningen. Potentiellt blivande föräldrar vill ofta få information om upptäckta softmarkers. Dock svarar en betydande del av försökspersonerna att de för vissa scenarion inte vill ta del av all tillgänglig information. Flest vill ha information vid obotliga tillstånd och när markören sitter i fostrets hjärna eller hjärta. De scenarion där flest svarar att de inte vill bli informerade är då markören sitter i fostrets tarm eller skelett samt när tillståndet är bortbart. Signifikanta skillnader uppmättes mellan olika gruppers svar. Kvinnor svarar oftare än män att de inte vill ha information om funna softmarkers. Detsamma gäller för sambos/gifta när man jämför dem med de som är singlar. De som hade barn vill oftare inte veta om att en softmarker har upptäckts jämfört med de som inte har barn. / The aim of the study was to investigate how potential new parents aged 20-40 would prefer the information about soft markers to be handled. The study was designed as a pilot study, and a questionnaire was made with parameters divided into 11 scenarios. The questionnaire was handed out at lectures in the Stockholm area in April of 2012. Answers were analyzed in SPSS with chi-2 tests. 49 women and 36 men participated in the study. Potential new parents often wish to be informed of discovered soft markers. However, a significant portion of the participants say they prefer not to know about soft markers in their foetus in some scenarios. Scenarios where the condition is incurable or where the soft marker is placed in the brain or heart of the foetus are the ones where the most people say they want the information. A soft marker placed in the foetus’ intestines or skeleton is when the most people answer that they do not wish to recieve this information. Significant differences are seen between different groups. Women more often than men say they do not want information about a discovered soft marker. The same is true for those who are married or cohabitating when compared to singles. Those who are already parents want information about a soft marker to a lower degree than those who do not have children.

According to the empirical findings from evolution of liquidity, this dissertation constructs an optimal order submission strategy model within which a mixture of market and limit orders can be submitted by both informed and uninformed traders. In the Stacklberg Game Model, informed traders with short-lived private information are regarded as leaders, and uniformed traders with learning behaviors are referred as followers. Our theoretical findings conclude as follows: Firstly, the order strategies of all traders can be characterized as coming under one of seven regimes, pure market buy orders, a combination of market and limit buy orders, pure limit buy orders, a combination of limit buy and limit sell orders, pure limit sell orders, a combination of market and limit sell orders, and pure market sell orders. Traders will select their optimal trading strategy according to the regime within which their liquidation value falls. Parlour (1998) is a special case of this study. Secondly, an increase (reduction) in liquidation value will result in a non-linear increase in the optimal proportion of market order submissions by buyers (sellers). Thirdly, the probability of submitting limit orders for uniformed traders increases when information traders get large profit from the private information. The extreme case is uniformed traders only submit limit orders. This result is consistent with Foucault (1999). Fourthly, the price interval will be much wider when limit orders are submitted by uniformed traders than by informed traders. The reasons are that uniformed traders have no private information and that they are high risk aversion. Finally, numerical illustrations confirm the reliability of this model.

This paper refers to Ma and Hung(2004) using the amount of the institutional investors to measure the competitions of trading and the order flows of the institutional investors to measure correlations of information. We filter the data on daily basis and divide the data into four groups: high competition and high correlation, high competition and low correlation, low competition and high correlation, and low competition and low correlation. From the measurements of the informed traders¡¦ intraday behavior, we find that in the sample of high competitions of trading, the informed traders trade aggressively to exploit the common private information in the early period; In the middle period, since the common private information has been revealed to the market, the informed traders trade passively to avoid other informed traders knowing his private information; In the later period, the informed trader trade aggressively again to consume their private information before the market close. So, when trading these stocks, uninformed individual investors should avoid entering the market in the early and the later periods because of the high adverse selection cost. Besides, when prior return increases (decreases), the informed traders tend to place buy (sell) orders, indicating the informed traders are momentum traders. Last but not least, we observe in the sample of low competition and low correlation, the foreign investors behave differently in intraday strategy. Given the increasing of prior return, the buy (sell) orders of the foreign investors become passive (aggressive) in the early period, but in the later period, the buy (sell) orders of the foreign investors turn to be more aggressive (passive) with the increasing of prior return. The result may relate to the strategy of proprietary traders. For this reason, when trading these stocks, uninformed individual investors should avoid following the large orders and the momentum strategy in the early period.

Following the model developed by Easley, Kiefer, O¡¦Hara and Paperman (1996), I estimated the probability of informed trading (PI) in the TSEC. The result in my study is that the probability of informed trading is highly related with the trading volume of each stock. More active stocks will have lower probability of informed trading, so investors trading with active stocks will face less information asymmetry. Feather more, my research followed the study of Easley, Hvidkjaer, and O¡¦Hara (2002), who used the Fama-French asset pricing model(1992) discussing the relationship among stock return, portfolioed market risk, size and BE/ME ratio. The result in my study is that the stock return in TSEC is affected by portfolioed market risk and size, but PI and BE/ME ratio have no effect to stock return. The result is different from the study of Easley, Hvidkjaer, and O¡¦Hara (2002). The reason could be that most investors in TSEC are individuals who lack the awareness about information asymmetry.

Family or group-owned corporations and informed trading are two features of Taiwan¡¦s capital market. Is there any relationship between the two features? Can we solve this kind of problem by some mechanism of corporate governance? These issues are common concerns for participants of capital markets and government policy makers, therefore, there are many scholars devoting themselves in the related research. This study adopts the work of McInish and Wood (1992), who measure informed trading by calculating standardized bid-ask spread. Moreover, some variables, such as trading volume, risk, stock price, company size, and listing market are taken into account because the literature indicates they may affect bid-ask spread. According to the concept of voting rights and cash flow rights introduced by La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny (2002) and the concept of fraction of cash flow rights on the voting rights introduced by Claessens, Djankov, and Lang (2000), we use the difference ratio, which is one minus the fraction of voting rights over the cash flow rights, to measure the degree of central agency problems. The corporate governance variables, such as board size, the proportion of outside directors, and institutional shareholdings are employed as moderating variables. Multiple regression models are used to test the hypotheses. According to the test results, we find that the more cash flow rights deviate from voting rights the more informed trading will be and it can be alleviated by increasing board size and hiring big CPA firms for audit purpose; while it can be worsen by adopting more outside directors and institutional shareholdings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the information content in a trading, confirm the relationship between information-trading probability (PIN) and asset returns, and apply PIN to construct an investing strategy on a point of uninformed trader¡¦s view. I develop a decision marking model about trading decision between under order-driven market which is combined on the decision tree of the concept of D. Easley et al. (1997) and Merton (1976) jump diffusion model for modifying the PIN model to apply to order-driven market. As a result, the daily PIN were positive relatively with return, and the investing strategy which was based my model could make profit significantly in the sample period at TWSE in 2003, this investing strategy can earn profit in down and up market condition both. This result supports that hedging against information asymmetric risk is potential.

At the outset, I dis-claim any knowledge or understanding what-so-ever, which is a peculiar stance to take for a nurse educator immersed in the language of “expertise,” “best practices,” and “champion” healthcare offerings. I do not dis-claim knowledge to absolve my professional accountability, nor do I absolve myself of being responsible for my text, rather I apprehend this journey of sentience and incarnation as an infant experiencing and learning the world in which it finds itself. It is only through a naïve, furtive play that I am able to proceed, through the difficulties and paradoxical tensions of constructed identities, without complete paralysis. As I play and ponder my way through multiple methodologies, a representational form emerges between repetitious moments of contemplation, remembering lived experiences, and reflecting on philosophical discourses. The difficulty or tension lies in the provocation of identities, as nurse, educator, and mother, among many other stances and formulations. Each identified discourse compels me to challenge the gaps in my knowledge in new ways. As I explore, I unravel the forms of text that are various incarnations of narrative reflection. The choices I make are about inquiring through concept, form and identification, which I both uniquely challenge as an individual and hold in common by being socially and historically situated. Each transition, contemplation and provocation is hopeful and volatile. I am always attuned to how it is that I live the spaces between each, unknowing my “self” as my otherness, letting go the ideal/real and becoming the (/) through a relational pedagogy.

Aim of the study. To evaluate mental health care institution staff’ and patients’ opinion about application of the doctrine of informed consent. Objectives: 1. To evaluate personal health care specialists’ opinion about application of the doctrine of informed consent in the health care institution. 2. To evaluate patients’ opinion about procedure of the written consent. 3. To compare personal health care specialists’ and patients’ opinion about application of the doctrine of informed consent. Methods. Anonymous survey of 138 personal health care specialists (response rate – 84 percent) and 315 patients (response rate – 90 percent) at Vilnius mental health centre was carried out. SPSS 13.0 version of statistic analysis packet was used to process the data. Diagrams and tables were prepared using Microsoft Excel 2003 program. Results. In evaluation of necessity of given information, 54,1% of personal health care specialists indicated that patient should be fully informed about his health status and diagnosis, 42,2% indicated that such information for mental health patients should be given just partially. 21,7% of patients claimed that information about prognosis and possible results of treatment given by doctors was unclear. In evaluation of procedure of written consent, 31,2% of specialists evaluated it as a manner for the doctor’s insurance and 24,9% – as an instrument for the protection of patient’s rights. Half of patients (49,9%) maintained that procedure of written consent... [to full text]