Catalogue

This open textbook presents a contemporary overview of Value-based Healthcare: a healthcare delivery and reimbursement model that focuses on achieving the best possible health outcomes for patients while controlling costs. It represents a shift of focus from quantity to quality, and aims to align incentives to bring together the interests of patients, healthcare providers, and payers.

The resource covers core content in the following topics: an introduction to value based healthcare, funding models, leadership and governance, models of care, shared decision making models, case studies, global perspectives, resources management and cost control.

This text is for Masters-level courses in health administration, public health, nursing, or health information. It will also be useful more broadly for anyone studying health or working in the health sector including clinicians, managers, and policy makers.

Communication challenges abound in the 21st century. Communicators everywhere are struggling to connect with diverse, distracted audiences, in both urgent and everyday contexts. In other words, communication has never been more vital, but it’s becoming harder and harder to be heard. In this book, we make sense of communication. From multiple perspectives, we unpack the practices, politics, pleasures, and problems that are activated when meaning is shared across real and virtual spaces. This book will help you use the thinking tools of communication theory to understand why communication matters and how it impacts (and is impacted by) our rapidly changing world.

The concept of a braided river – he awa whiria – inspired the creation by pioneering educational researcher Professor Angus Macfarlane of a framework connecting Indigenous and Western perspectives.

The He Awa Whiria framework has been used to support bicultural partnership approaches to policy development, research initiatives and practices in a broad range of sectors, such as tertiary institutions, iwi locations, private corporations and government ministries. Through the 12 chapters in this book, the authors explain their rationale for adopting He Awa Whiria, and detail how they have operationalised it in their respective fields of expertise. They report on the positive impacts that the framework has had at each stage of their work – from the conceptual design stage (which includes thinking and planning activities), during the application phase (which includes implementation and monitoring), through to the conclusion of activities (which includes reflection and review).

Providing both an overview of the concept of He Awa Whiria and ‘real world’ case studies, this new volume illustrates the importance and value of drawing on two rich streams of knowledge – mātauranga Māori and Western science.

"Statistics: Meaning from data" helps Data Science and Statistics students to obtain a firm grasp on basic probability and statistical concepts, with a scientific context and examples. The textbook has general applicability across most universities in Australia, New Zealand and Asia with core units in their science, business, statistics and data science courses.

This textbook is designed to serve as an additional resource for the course “Fundamentals of Finance.” It provides an introduction to the field of finance, encompassing a broad range of key topics. These include the time value of money, bond and equity valuations, risk and returns, and various sources of capital. This book aims to enhance the learning experience by offering a thorough understanding of these fundamental financial principles.

In recent years sustainability has become central to business education and thinking. At the same time, there has been rapid growth in and demand for sustainable finance by governments, corporations, NGOs, investors and individuals. Concerns about corporations’ contribution to environmental and social problems has meant that “finance as usual” is being challenged. It is evident that the traditional view, increasing shareholder wealth as the sole metric upon which to make business decisions (“shareholder primacy”), is no longer appropriate for today.

Sustainable Finance provides a thorough introduction to the field of sustainable finance and how it is implemented today. We show the corporate and the investor viewpoint, as well as detail how government and non-government bodies have contributed to the development of sustainable financial markets. In the final segment, the book takes a “deep dive” into two pressing contemporary issues: climate change and Māori views of sustainable finance.

Throughout the textbook, readers are provided with engaging, interactive exercises and case studies to cement their learning.

This book focuses on the cost planning of building construction projects with special reference to the Australian and New Zealand context. Design development and cost planning with elemental analysis are emphasised in the pre-construction cost management process in the region. This book translates the well-established practice of pre-construction cost management process in the construction industry into a published academic and professional resource which can be used for teaching higher education students and for professional training programs.

Building cost planning is considered from the client and the design team’s perspective and focuses on the functions of a cost manager. From the overview of the construction industry and the client’s team, to the detailed cost planning process and cost planning techniques at progressive stages in the pre-construction phase, this book is ideal as a guide to cost plan building construction projects. It follows an interactive style by featuring learning outcomes, self-review questions and learning activities for each chapter. It also extends theory into applications with case studies incorporated from the Australian and New Zealand construction industries. These approaches make this book useful for both students and practitioners in construction management.

The updated 2024 edition of this guide is designed to support students undertaking legal studies and contribute to the development of research skills in Australian law schools.

The first open source and open access textbook on Australian politics, Australian Politics and Policy provides a unique, holistic coverage of politics and public topics for use in university courses.

An Australian and New Zealand Human Resource Management Guide to Work Health and Safety (WHS) is comprised of three sections: an historical overview, an introduction to theory, and a guide to WHS implementation via the adoption and enactment of a safety management system.

The socio-historical review of human ‘labour’ outlines foundational knowledge on the intertwined origins of worker labour and safety rights, while contextualising the formation and role of unions in securing labour rights that, today, are standard in Australian and New Zealand contexts.  It enhances understanding of the historical origins of the contemporary disciplines of Employment Relations and WHS to explain their commonly shared assumptions and principles.

The theoretical introduction defines key concepts for WHS management and outlines James Reasons’ Swiss Cheese Model of safety incident causation.  A systems-based approach to WHS management is proposed as a mechanism to identify, and actively resolve, latent factors before introducing organisational safety culture as fundamental to effective WHS management.

The guide to implementation outlines the leadership commitment, policies, procedures, planning, and compliance competency required before a safety management system can begin.  It explores implementation of hazard identification, risk assessment, and hazard control procedures before emphasising that this should occur parallel to establishing effective emergency response procedures.  It concludes by outlining how to use measurement and evaluation to ‘close the loop’ ready for the next iteration of the safety management system cycle.

This book affords Human Resource managers a comprehensive overview of Safety I approaches to WHS while outlining how theory and practice is shifting towards a more human-centric, Safety II, approach.  It puts workers, and their health, at the centre of WHS management while recognising the organisational constraints within which WHS practitioners operate.