Survival of the Protection Model? Competing Goals in Belgian Juvenile Justice
Belgium is a small (with a surface of 32.545 km2) but well-situated country in the northwest of Europe. It consists of over 10 million citizens (10,396,421 on 1 January 2004) of whom 6 million live in the Northern, Dutch-speaking part (Flanders), almost 3.4 million in the Southern, mostly French-speaking part and close to 1 million in the region of Brussels (bilingual). As in other European countries, families in Belgium are becoming smaller and smaller. The fertility rate is 1.56 children per woman. So Belgium is faced with an aging population, 15% of whom are older than 65. The portion of juveniles (0–19 years) has diminished from 24.6% in 1990 to 22.4% in 2003 and the prognosis is a further decrease to 20.2% in 2021 (VRIND, 2003). On 1 January 2004 Belgium consisted of approximately 875,000 juveniles aged 12–17,1 almost half a million of them live in the Flemish region, more than 300,000 in the Walloon part and over 75,000 in the region of Brussels.2
Restorative Dimensions in Belgian Youth Justice
The revised Belgian Youth Justice Act (YJA) (2006) is featured as a case study due to the important restorative justice dimensions that it has introduced. The legal system in Belgium is dominated by a civil law regime with a deep-seated tradition in youth justice characterized by an almost exclusively ‘treatment’-oriented approach. Whilst the implementation of the revised YJA has encountered some challenges, it has also revealed that it is possible to prioritize restorative processes within a conventional civil law regime. That being said, the fundamental change that the Act aspired to achieve is only made possible by the application of additional measures.
Study on essential drug use status and its influencing factors among cerebral infarction inpatients in county level hospitals of Anhui Province, China
Background and purpose Drug costs is one of the main components of hospitalization expenditure for cerebral infarction inpatients. In China, the National Essential Medicine System (NEMS) was created to relieve the heavy drug-cost burden for patients. The objective of this study was to investigate essential drug-use status and its influencing factors among cerebral infarction inpatients in county-level hospitals of Anhui province, China. Methods Three county-level hospitals were selected through a multi-stage cluster random sampling method. The hospitalization cost data of cerebral infarction inpatients in the three hospitals were extracted from the Anhui provincial information platform of the New Rural Cooperative Insurance System (NCMS), and whether the proportion of essential drug cost in the total drug cost reached the median value of 33.05% which was set as the evaluation index for essential drug-use status. Questionnaires for hospitals and physicians were designed and given to them to assess influencing factors. Results We retrieved the cost data of 2,189 inpatients from the NCMS platform and investigated 51 corresponding physicians in total. The drug costs accounted for 52.6% of the total hospitalization cost, and essential drug costs alone accounted for 37.0% of the total drug costs. The essential drug-cost proportion was high among physicians with a higher recognition degree on NEMS, older age, lower final academic degree, longer work experience and lower professional title. Married physicians and those with tight organizational affiliation also prescribed more essential drugs. Conclusions Increasing the proportion of essential drugs was an effective way to reduce the disease burden for cerebral infarction patients. Perfecting the NEMS, increasing government investment, reinforcing education and propaganda, and formulating relevant incentive and restrictive mechanisms were all effective ways to promote and increase the number of essential drug prescriptions written by physicians.