Curriculum renewal for interprofessional education in health

In this preface we comment on four matters that we think bode well for the future of interprofessional education in Australia. First, there is a growing articulation, nationally and globally, as to the importance of interprofessional education and its contribution to the development of interprofessional and collaborative health practices. These practices are increasingly recognised as central to delivering effective, efficient, safe and sustainable health services. Second, there is a rapidly growing interest and institutional engagement with interprofessional education as part of pre-registration health professional education. This has changed substantially in recent years. Whilst beyond the scope of our current studies, the need for similar developments in continuing professional development (CPD) for health professionals was a consistent topic in our stakeholder consultations. Third, we observe what might be termed a threshold effect occurring in the area of interprofessional education. Projects that address matters relating to IPE are now far more numerous, visible and discussed in terms of their aggregate outcomes. The impact of this momentum is visible across the higher education sector. Finally, we believe that effective collaboration is a critical mediating process through which the rich resources of disciplinary knowledge and capability are joined to add value to existing health service provision. We trust the conceptual and practical contributions and resources presented and discussed in this report contribute to these developments.Office of Learning and Teaching Australi

The Effects Of Corporate Social Responsibility On Service Recovery Evaluations In Casual Dining Restaurants.

This study examined the effects of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on service recovery in terms of customer satisfaction, repeat patronage, word of mouth, and consumer trust in casual dining restaurants. More specifically, this study proposed that CSR will have a halo effect on negative service recovery incidents and mitigate the adverse effects of the poor recovery. An experimental study consisting of a 3x2 between subjects factorial design was used. Three CSR conditions (positive, negative, and no CSR) were matched with two service recovery conditions (positive or negative). Four hundred and eighteen subjects were recruited by a reputed marketing research firm. Results of this study showed that CSR and service recovery have a significant effect on customer satisfaction, repeat patronage, word of mouth, and consumer trust in casual dining restaurants. Furthermore, the results showed that CSR enhances the positive effects of good service recovery

Perceived Leadership Style by Child Protective Services Workers and the Impact on Burnout

Few studies have analyzed worker burnout and organizational leadership styles for child protective service (CPS) workers. Many studies have focused on child welfare workers as a whole. Child welfare encompasses many different program areas. CPS is a subset of child welfare agencies. Child protective services workers have a high-stress job that exposes them, workers, to secondary trauma and burnout at a higher rate than other comparable positions. Child protective services is a program that is mandated to receive reports of child maltreatment, investigate the allegations, and provide services to the clients. Due to the job’s complexity, workers may rely on their leadership to provide guidance and support to assist them in achieving the best possible outcomes for families. Burnout may impact how effective a worker is in working with clients, negatively impacting client outcomes. This quantitative study had two purposes: (1) to further explore child protective services workers\u27 burnout and (2) to examine the relationship between burnout and organizational leadership. This research focused specifically on CPS workers in the continental United States. Participants were recruited online, and the data was collected through an online format. The Maslach Burnout Inventory and the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire were used for this study. Findings were analyzed using MANOVA and multiple linear regression analysis. Findings identified significance between a sense of personal accomplishment and CPS worker’s burnout. Age was a moderator between organizational leadership and emotional exhaustion. Future research should consider conducting a similar study with more perceived leadership types

Analysing online discussions in educational and work based settings

Networked learning is becoming more and more about connectivity of learners or professionals and connectivity to resources available online and sometimes freely. Researchers are making use of these by designing online environments where this notion of connectivity and vast resources available to learners can be exploited. Many online discussion tools are available for use in educational settings. This paper discusses means of comparing the quality of interaction in these tools. We focus on the use of an online discussion tool called InterLoc (http://www.interloc.org.uk/). InterLoc is based on research by McAlister (2004) who designed a tool for online peer discussion that guides students' dialogue towards more academic interactions and facilitates extended argument. A significant feature of the design of the tool is managed synchronous dialogue e.g. the use of sentence openers, and the facility to reply to earlier contributions. The design features of InterLoc ensure that it provides a collaborative argumentation environment for learners in higher education. We also demonstrate that it is possible to structure argumentation using InterLoc in different settings, both academic and work-place. One of our case studies was carried out with postgraduate distance learning students studying science communication and the participants were asked to consider the idea that everyone's DNA should be kept on a data base to help fight crime. The second case study was in a health and social care setting and the participants were family-support workers of a London based charity, supporting families and individuals offering practical, emotional and financial help. They were asked to consider the case of a severely obese child whom social services are considering taking into care as the parents are unable to control his eating. The participants discussed what would be the best for the child. We used two methods of comparing the quality of interaction in these sessions: We analysed the transcripts of discussion sessions using content analysis and frequency of sentence openers and compared these analyses with those using Toulmin's Argumentation Pattern (TAP). By comparing the results of these two analyses, we explored the possibility of using these measures as an indicator of the quality of the discussion taking place. Our findings have confirmed the potential of the InterLoc sentence opener analyses for future work

Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice

22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3

Changing the focus: worker-centric optimization in human-in-the-loop computations

A myriad of emerging applications from simple to complex ones involve human cognizance in the computation loop. Using the wisdom of human workers, researchers have solved a variety of problems, termed as “micro-tasks” such as, captcha recognition, sentiment analysis, image categorization, query processing, as well as “complex tasks” that are often collaborative, such as, classifying craters on planetary surfaces, discovering new galaxies (Galaxyzoo), performing text translation. The current view of “humans-in-the-loop” tends to see humans as machines, robots, or low-level agents used or exploited in the service of broader computation goals. This dissertation is developed to shift the focus back to humans, and study different data analytics problems, by recognizing characteristics of the human workers, and how to incorporate those in a principled fashion inside the computation loop. The first contribution of this dissertation is to propose an optimization framework and a real world system to personalize worker’s behavior by developing a worker model and using that to better understand and estimate task completion time. The framework judiciously frames questions and solicits worker feedback on those to update the worker model. Next, improving workers skills through peer interaction during collaborative task completion is studied. A suite of optimization problems are identified in that context considering collaborativeness between the members as it plays a major role in peer learning. Finally, “diversified” sequence of work sessions for human workers is designed to improve worker satisfaction and engagement while completing tasks