An overview of the nature of the preparation of practice educators in five health care disciplines

Practice education is a core element of all educational programmes that prepare health care professionals for academic award and registration to practice. Ensuring quality and effectiveness involves partnership working between Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) and health care providers, social care communities, voluntary and independent sectors offering client care throughout the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Clearly practitioners who support, supervise and assess learners for entry to their respective professions need to be well prepared and supported in their roles as practice educators. However it would appear that the nature of this support and preparation varies across disciplines and that good practice is not easily shared. With this in mind, the Making Practice Based Learning Work (MPBLW) project aims to make practitioners more effective at supporting and supervising students in the workplace across a range of health care disciplines namely Dietetics, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy and Radiology. The Department of Employment and Learning (Northern Ireland) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England has funded this collaborative project involving staff from Ulster, Northumbria and Bournemouth Universities. The outcomes for each phase of the project are: Phase One: • Identify and document good practice on how practitioners are prepared for their educational role. Phase Two: • Develop and evaluate learning materials for use by practitioners across five health care disciplines. • Make learning materials available in a number of efficient media, e.g. paper, electronic, CD-ROM and web-based. • Develop a programme applicable to interprofessional and uniprofessional contexts. • Widen access for a multicultural workforce. Phase Three: • Embed best educational practice through the establishment of an academicpractitioner network. • Disseminate a range of materials and processes across the wider academic and health and social care communities

Listening for God as an Important and Holy Endeavor

Hillsboro Presbyterian Church (hereafter, HPC) has a history of service in our community. But our focus on meeting the needs of others, while rightly intended as mission, has inadvertently created an inability to enter into genuine relationship with others. The purpose of this project is for a small group of HPC members to intentionally engage with their neighbors in learning the theological task of awakening and becoming more mindful of the presence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the world around us. Part One describes the overall process design that has led to identifying members to endeavor listening to their own neighbors. This group was chosen from those who regularly attend our congregational worship. The need for genuine relationships with outsiders is the rationale and purpose this project will test. Part Two explains the details of the project. The group will meet on Sunday for Lectio Divina and discussion about what is being learned together during the project. Pairs of listeners will be sent to gathering places during the week to listen and attend to the stories they discover there. The process design will explain how this small group, as a part of those who gather for our worship, will create the opportunity for feedback when they return to tell us about their experiences and learning as part of our worship service. Part Three offers reflection on congregational life and practice in light of what is being learned through listening. The difficult shift to new understanding rather than results as a focus of missional life is discussed, as well as how this new understanding is shaping our church into new expressions of the gospel. This section also offers specific recommendations in light of the project that will continue to transform our church more into a missional, praxis-reflection oriented congregation. Content Reader: Alan Roxburgh, ThM, DMi

Status report on the NCRIS eResearch capability summary

Preface The period 2006 to 2014 has seen an approach to the national support of eResearch infrastructure by the Australian Government which is unprecedented. Not only has investment been at a significantly greater scale than previously, but the intent and approach has been highly innovative, shaped by a strategic approach to research support in which the critical element, the catchword, has been collaboration. The innovative directions shaped by this strategy, under the banner of the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), have led to significant and creative initiatives and activity, seminal to new research and fields of discovery. Origin This document is a Technical Report on the Status of the NCRIS eResearch Capability. It was commissioned by the Australian Government Department of Education and Training in the second half of 2014 to examine a range of questions and issues concerning the development of this infrastructure over the period 2006-2014. The infrastructure has been built and implemented over this period following investments made by the Australian Government amounting to over $430 million, under a number of funding initiatives

Summary of the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1)

Challenges related to development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software for science are becoming a growing concern. Many scientists’ research increasingly depends on the quality and availability of software upon which their works are built. To highlight some of these issues and share experiences, the First Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE1) was held in November 2013 in conjunction with the SC13 Conference. The workshop featured keynote presentations and a large number (54) of solicited extended abstracts that were grouped into three themes and presented via panels. A set of collaborative notes of the presentations and discussion was taken during the workshop. Unique perspectives were captured about issues such as comprehensive documentation, development and deployment practices, software licenses and career paths for developers. Attribution systems that account for evidence of software contribution and impact were also discussed. These include mechanisms such as Digital Object Identifiers, publication of “software papers”, and the use of online systems, for example source code repositories like GitHub. This paper summarizes the issues and shared experiences that were discussed, including cross-cutting issues and use cases. It joins a nascent literature seeking to understand what drives software work in science, and how it is impacted by the reward systems of science. These incentives can determine the extent to which developers are motivated to build software for the long-term, for the use of others, and whether to work collaboratively or separately. It also explores community building, leadership, and dynamics in relation to successful scientific software

Continuing professional development for physiotherapists: Exploring their choices in career long learning

Purpose. The purpose of the thesis is to add to the body of knowledge of continuing professional development (CPD) for physiotherapists, by exploring the views of physiotherapists employed in NHS sites within one Strategic Health Authority. Relevance. Increasingly physiotherapists are under pressure to demonstrate engagement in CPD in order to demonstrate their competence, with a statutory requirement (HPC, 2003) that requires practitioners to show evidence of having undertaken CPD and to have applied this to their practice. Research Methods. The study used an interpretive approach and a sequential multi-method exploratory design involving 2 phases of data collection. Participants: Phase 1: 357 NHS physiotherapists; phase 2: 22 respondents from the survey. Data Collection Tools: Phase 1 used a four-page self-completion postal questionnaire. Phase 2 used semi-structured individual interviews. Analysis: The survey data from 140 completed questionnaires were analysed using SPSS. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used as a data reduction technique. The interview transcripts were analysed using NVivo 7.Findings. 32 different CPD activities were identified. PCA revealed 3 components as reasons for engaging in CPD activities, and 4 components as barriers to CPD. Internal consistency using Cronbach's Alpha was acceptable to good (.653 to .891). A Friedman ranks test found that the rank order of these components was consistent across all subgroups and the significance was p<0.05.Discussion. The findings suggest that there should be a greater focus on the contribution that work-based and self-directed learning activities can have on the CPD of physiotherapists in the NHS, at a time when finding in CPD is limited, as informal learning in the workplace is not always acknowledged within current policies. Measuring the impact of CPD remains a challenge, as personal benefit and benefit to the service cannot be easily separated. Conclusion. The findings indicate that the participants' decisions to engage in CPD were influenced more strongly by values related to improving clinical skills and patient care, than by the prospect of extrinsic rewards such as increase in pay and promotion. An increased understanding of the differences in CPD requirements of physiotherapists, at different stages in their careers, and practising in different clinical specialities, should enable appropriate CPD activities to be developed to ensure that they are appropriately supported in these roles