Rockefeller Foundation 2010 Annual Report

Contains president's letter; 2010 program highlights, including support for Africa's green revolution, sustainable and equitable transportation policy, and healthy communities; grants list; financial report; and lists of trustees and staff

Clinical governance, education and learning to manage health information

Purpose – This paper aims to suggest that the concept of clinical governance goes beyond a bureaucratic accountability structure and can be viewed as a negotiated balance between imperfectly aligned and sometimes conflicting goals within a complex adaptive system. On this view, the information system cannot be separated conceptually from the system of governance it supports or the people whose work it facilitates or hinders. Design/methodology/approach – The study, located within the English National Health Service (NHS) between 1999 and 2005, is case study based using a multi method approach to data collection within two primary care organisations (PCOs). The research strategy is conducted within a social constructionist ontological perspective. Findings – The findings reflect the following broad-based themes: mutual adjustment of a plurality of stakeholder perceptions, preferences and priorities; the development of information and communication systems, empowered by informatics; an emphasis on education and training to build capacity and capability. Research limitations/implications – Limitations of case study methodology include a tendency to provide selected accounts. These are potentially biased and risk trivialising findings. Rooted in specific context, their generalisability to other contexts is limited by the extent to which contexts are similar. Reasonable attempts were made to minimise any bias. The diversity of data collection methods used in the study was an attempt to counterbalance the limitations highlighted in one method by strength from alternative techniques. Practical implications – The paper makes recommendations in two key governance areas: education and learning to manage health information. In practice, the lessons learned provide opportunities to inform future approaches to health informatics educational programmes. Originality/value – With regard to topicality, it is suggested that many of the developmental issues highlighted during the establishment of quality improvement programmes within primary care organisations (PCGs/PCTs) are relevant in the light of current NHS reforms and move towards commissioning consortia

Towards a Post-Graduate Level Curriculum for Biodiversity Informatics. Perspectives from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) Community

Biodiversity informatics is a new and evolving field, requiring efforts to develop capacity and a curriculum for this field of science. The main objective was to summarise the level of activity and the efforts towards developing biodiversity informatics curricula, for work-based training and/or academic teaching at universities, taking place within the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) countries and its associated network. A survey approach was used to identify existing capacities and resources within the network. Most of GBIF Nodes survey respondents (80%) are engaged in onsite training activities, with a focus on work-based professionals, mostly researchers, policy-makers and students. Training topics include data mobilisation, digitisation, management, publishing, analysis and use, to enable the accessibility of analogue and digital biological data that currently reside as scattered datasets. An initial assessment of academic teaching activities highlighted that countries in most regions, to varying degrees, were already engaged in the conceptualisation, development and/or implementation of formal academic programmes in biodiversity informatics, including programmes in Benin, Colombia, Costa Rica, Finland, France, India, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan and Togo. Digital e-learning platforms were an important tool to help build capacity in many countries. In terms of the potential in the Nodes network, 60% expressed willingness to be recruited or commissioned for capacity enhancement purposes. Contributions and activities of various country nodes across the network have been highlighted and a working curriculum framework has been defined. © 2021. Parker-Allie F et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedPeer reviewe

Towards a new framework for nursing education and training in developing countries

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The advancement in ICT in recent decades has transformed every aspect of life, including medical care. The most sophisticated example of this is electronic health (e-health), which in developed counties has been a major contributor to enhancing the overall quality of healthcare services. However, e-health remains primitive in developing countries, whether they are relatively poor like Jordan or wealthy like Qatar. Barriers to successful e-health adoption in developing countries are attributable either to superimposing the technology itself while ignoring staff preparedness to integrated e-health or financial inhibitions to making such fundamental changes to healthcare delivery. Staff preparedness is related to educating or training healthcare staff, particularly nurses, who have fewer opportunities to attend training, or are sometimes ignored. Hence, the focus of this research is to evaluate the preparedness of nursing community for e-health adaption in the developing countries, taking Qatar and Jordan as case studies, in order to identify existing challenges and the key requirements to establish an educational framework that can be integrated in nursing curricula or professional development to promote e-health adaptation by nurses. This research critically reviews previous literature related to the research project, identifying the challenges to e-health preparedness, and analyses nursing and midwifery curricula from different countries with regard to e-health and ICT. The findings show that e-health modules are not generally included in any higher education nursing programme, with only a few transcripts showing basic computing or ICT modules. E-health national strategies for both Jordan and Qatar were analysed to identify whether the inclusion of professional training on e-health has been considered as part of e-heath strategy. In addition, analysis of e-health national strategies for other leading countries in the field of e-heath was conducted, finding that there is a decided gap between developed and developing countries with regard to e-health. The level of readiness in nursing was investigated and to identify the main barriers for using e-health/e-nursing in Jordan and Qatar. The results showed the top challenges facing e-health are educational-related aspects, hence a plan for promoting and providing education on the benefits and use of ehealth processes and applications is advised, with prerequisite ICT training, as the results showed that nurses lack sufficient knowledge about e-health processes and applications. The findings from earlier tasks were used to identify the requirements and then propose the framework to achieve main goal of this research in providing a roadmap. The framework was constructed in accordance to with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), followed by evaluation by different expert groups. All the groups voted for the suggested structure of the framework to be taken to the next phase of deployment. The final task was to evaluate the attitude of the nursing community working towards the possibility of implementing an e-learning system, which has been presented as the main platform in the proposed framework. The findings have demonstrated a very positive attitude from the nursing staff towards the idea of using e-learning. There also does not appear to be any apparent obstacles to deploying the concept of e-health as the audience in question have the necessary computer skills. In summary, this research project has contributed in presenting framework and some useful findings related to e-health in general and in Qatar and Jordan in particular. The proposed framework can be as a roadmap for future e-heath/e-nursing projects, in addition, it can be utilised with some modifications to foster similar electronic applications

Collaborative learning: a connected community approach

Collaborative Learning in group settings currently occurs across a substantial portion of the UK Higher Education curriculum. This style of learning has many roots including: Enterprise in Higher Education, Action Learning and Action Research, Problem Based Learning, and Practice Based Learning. As such our focus on Collaborative Learning development can be viewed as an evolutionary. This collaborative and active group learning provides the foundation for what can be collectively called connectivist ‘Learning Communities’. In this setting a primary feature of a ‘Learning Community’ is one that carries a responsibility to promote one another’s learning. This paper will outline a developmental collaborative learning approach and describe a supporting software environment, known as the Salford Personal Development Environment (SPDE), that has been developed and implemented to assist in delivering collaborative learning for post graduate and other provision. This is done against a background of much research evidence that group based activity can enhance learning. These findings cover many approaches to group based learning and over a significant period of time. This paper reports on work-in-progress and the features of the environment that are designed to help promote individual and group or community learning that have been influenced by the broad base of research findings in this area

Responsible research and innovation in science education: insights from evaluating the impact of using digital media and arts-based methods on RRI values

The European Commission policy approach of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is gaining momentum in European research planning and development as a strategy to align scientific and technological progress with socially desirable and acceptable ends. One of the RRI agendas is science education, aiming to foster future generations' acquisition of skills and values needed to engage in society responsibly. To this end, it is argued that RRI-based science education can benefit from more interdisciplinary methods such as those based on arts and digital technologies. However, the evidence existing on the impact of science education activities using digital media and arts-based methods on RRI values remains underexplored. This article comparatively reviews previous evidence on the evaluation of these activities, from primary to higher education, to examine whether and how RRI-related learning outcomes are evaluated and how these activities impact on students' learning. Forty academic publications were selected and its content analysed according to five RRI values: creative and critical thinking, engagement, inclusiveness, gender equality and integration of ethical issues. When evaluating the impact of digital and arts-based methods in science education activities, creative and critical thinking, engagement and partly inclusiveness are the RRI values mainly addressed. In contrast, gender equality and ethics integration are neglected. Digital-based methods seem to be more focused on students' questioning and inquiry skills, whereas those using arts often examine imagination, curiosity and autonomy. Differences in the evaluation focus between studies on digital media and those on arts partly explain differences in their impact on RRI values, but also result in non-documented outcomes and undermine their potential. Further developments in interdisciplinary approaches to science education following the RRI policy agenda should reinforce the design of the activities as well as procedural aspects of the evaluation research

Challenges and Opportunities for the Advancement of GIS Education in TANZANIA

Rapid developments in science and technology have driven utilization of Geographical Information Science (GIS) in various fields of Planning, Management, and exploitation of environmental resources and provision of social services. As information technology gains momentum, GIS uses information science infrastructure to address the problems of geography, cartography, geosciences locations and related branches of science and engineering; that is shortly referred to as Geo-informatics. Increased application of GIS calls for more demand of advanced Geo-informatics education worldwide. This study has established major challenges for the advancement of Geo-informatics education in Tanzania and any possible opportunities which can be utilized for the improvement of the same. Prominent challenges identified could be associated with lack of reliable power, internet connection, computer system and accessories and appropriate software. Other challenges were related to the nature of the school curriculum and insufficient knowledge and skills of the human resources. Opportunities identified involve available government plans for increasing power supply, increasing mobile phones networks, Tanzania ICT and education and training policy with a major aim of improving ICT education and the competency based school curriculum under implementation. But the government should further support directly or indirectly all efforts by various groups that participate in advancing Geo-informatics education in the country. Keywords: Education, Geo-informatics, Tanzania, GIS, Transfer of Technology IC