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'Performance Indicators', their construc tion, interpretation and influence on the distribution of resources, are an increas ingly prominent tool in the public sector. Howard Thomas, Chief Probation Officer of North Wales, argues that we should lose no time in grasping their significance and producing PIs which reflect Service values, without waiting for them to be imposed from above.

The heart of human factors performance research is the development of an appropriate criterion or effectiveness measure. Typical criteria employed in research from 1941 to 1963 by the U.S. Army Personnel Research Office have included grades, ratings, and situational performance measures, each selected for use according to critical methodological, operational, and administrative considerations. Emphasis is placed upon predicting individual effectiveness. Today's military manager desires an evaluation of a system or subsystem as a totality and is likely to give more wholehearted acceptance to that research product expressed in quantitative units reflecting his goals and mission. Examples are given of the roles human factors scientists play today in helping develop the systems output criterion, similar to human factors performance criteria in some respects but which requires more attention to the need for simulation and to decisions with respect to laboratory vs. field experimentation. A framework of human factors oriented systems research is presented.

Infrastructure systems are at the core of urban sustainability issues. As population growth in urban centres continues to increase, infrastructure requires both development and rehabilitation. Unsurprisingly, this challenge is more evident in urban centres across the world and Portugal is not exception. To address this issue, the technical proposal of the Portuguese Program of the Policies for Land-Use Planning (PNPOT), and according to the Council of Ministers Resolution of April 27, 2006, considers that in order for Portugal to become an equitable territory in terms of development and well-being, the territorial model and corresponding policies-program should encompass strategic options that amongst other things, define the urban system as the guiding criterion for infrastructure network and public facilities design. The European Council released the Renewed EU Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS) in June 2006, calling for sustainability research efforts that promote and are carried out via inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, with the purpose of bridging the gap between science, policy-making and implementation. As spatial distribution and structure of human activities change, so does the call for increased urbanization and associated negative environmental impacts. Therefore and predictably, a major challenge is the development of practical tools to measure and enhance urban sustainability, particularly those that concern design and management of sustainable infrastructure. Life-cycle and threshold analysis are potentially applicable tools. However, measuring the sustainable development level of a given region remains the result of a careful process of selecting and defining sustainability indicators/criteria. Though several have been proposed for a plethora of case studies, the fact remains that each case requires a specific set of indicators/criteria. Some of these indicators will be presented and explored in the paper presented herein for a case-study area of Portugal, the sub-region of ...

AbstractThe introduction of performance indicators into the field of the arts and culture has been fraught with difficulties. It is the premise of this article that many of those difficulties can be traced to tensions arising out of the actual uses of performance indicators in the arts. Based on concrete examples of the use of performance indicators, the author examines four different functions—affecting behavior, evaluating behavior, monitoring behavior, and inferring behavior—and explores some of the issues arising from each one.

Healthcare systems play a very important role in society and their role is becoming increasingly important in regard to the phenomenon of population ageing. The issue of the performance of healthcare systems should be at the forefront in terms of the interest of academic research studies and discussions among the scientifi c community. The proper functioning of the healthcare system should also be a priority in regard to public policy. These facts should encourage governments to regularly evaluate the performance of their healthcare systems and create international comparisons. Many indicators are used to measure and evaluate performance of healthcare systems – e.g. those created by the WHO, Eurostat, or OECD Health Statistics and OECD Health Policy Studies. For our paper, data from the OECD Health Policy Studies was used as a primary source. V4 states were chosen for the evaluation of the performance of healthcare systems. The reasons for this are as follows: V4 countries are transitive economies of the CEE with a poorer state of health of their populations than in more developed countries of the OECD or EU; the given systems have long been underfi nanced; and reforms are focused exclusively on economic goals and lack a broader concept in terms of long-term sustainability. For the purposes of this paper, a composite indicator of the performance of healthcare systems was designed and includes ten variables for the studied ten-year period. In order to establish a comparison of the performance of healthcare systems, three methods were used to model them: (i) using the area of a radar chart, (ii) determining performance based on order, and (iii) determining performance based on distance from the reference unit. These three methods for determining the performance of healthcare systems allow us to compare the performance of healthcare systems in V4 countries specifi cally. The goals of this paper are as follows: compare and evaluate the performance of healthcare systems among V4 countries using selected indicators from the fi eld of healthcare and establish what position the Czech Republic's healthcare system holds in comparison with other V4 countries.