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    Causal Coherence in Deaf and Hearing Students' Written Narratives

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    This study investigates the causal coherence of deaf students’ written narratives and the relation between students’ use of causal structures in narrative writing and their linguistic skills. The written narratives of 17 deaf high school students were compared with those of 2 groups of hearing writers: 17 high school tudents and 16 second graders. Participants were asked to produce a written narrative on the basis of the picture storybook Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969) and their texts were analyzed according to the causal network model. The number of psychological links and superordinate and subordinate narrative episodes were considered, and the extent to which the use of these causal structures and deaf students’ scores in a written syntax comprehension test correlated was examined. Results show that deaf writers made use of principles of causal organization in narrative writing. However, their texts were causally less coherent than those of their hearing peers and closer to young hearing writers’ texts, although with some important differences in the strategies for generating coherence. Deaf students’ written syntax skills seemed to be only partially correlated with their difficulties in generating causal coherence

    Planning and control of medical device investments by Italian public health authorities: A means to improve the decision-making process

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    Within the context of increased health care spending in Italy and governmental cost-containment efforts, attention has focused on the medical device sector also in light of the newly introduced centralized procurement policy, of Health Technology Assessment, and of the Government’s call for a more managerial-type approach by public health authorities. In this scenario, it became necessary to analyse investments in medical devices and to assess their contribution not only to the health of patients, but also to – if any – the whole economy and to the nation’s economic growth. Public health authorities must now also assess the effect of investments on profitability by evaluating investment regenerations based on the diagnosis-related group revenue for inpatients and on the Regional tariffs established by the Italian National Health Service for outpatients. Knowledge of the medical device sector, and planning and control systems, will enable public health authorities to improve their internal decision-making processes, which in turn will enable them to reach their objectives of long-term economic balance and of quality of health care services to citizens
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