Let Me Upgrade You: Common Measures in Public Health Accreditation Action Plans

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to understand the success rates for health departments pursuing and achieving accreditation in version 1.0 and 1.5 of the Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) standards and measures. During the accreditation process, health departments that present performance gaps are asked to complete an Action Plan to specify how they plan to improve to meet the desired conformity. This study will highlight specific measures that are often included in Action Plans so that health departments pursuing accreditation can be better prepared to address these common pitfalls. Methods: This study is a non-experimental, secondary analysis of cross-sectional PHAB data available as of May 2018. This is a quantitative analysis utilizing logistic regression to determine association between variables. The sampling frame for this study includes 223 accredited health departments from 2013 to May 2018. Results: The five measures most commonly included in public health accreditation Action Plans include 5.2.4 (implementing a Community Health Improvement Plan), 5.3.3 (implementing a Strategic Plan), 9.1.3 (implementing a Performance Management System), 9.2.2 (implementing quality improvement), and 9.1.4 (implementing customer satisfaction process). The top five measures included in Action Plans are all focused on implementation of the associated plans or processes included in Domains 5 and 9. Conclusions: To avoid common pitfalls of public health accreditation, health departments still in pursuit of accreditation that want to avoid getting an Action Plan should allow one to two years between plan development and applying for accreditation to allow enough time to produce at least one annual report evaluating implementation of plan goals and objectives. Small and medium local health departments should consider this specifically for the implementation of their performance management system, which is frequently included in Action Plans

The Acquisition Of Foreign-Language Drama and Its Relevance in Learning Appreciation of Literature Through Staging Drama (Case of Non Native Speakers)

Play performance is one of those teaching skills which challenge the students to think creatively to appreciate the literature. Here, the students are strived for thinking strong and evolving their creative thoughts in reviews or reviewing the foreign language’s play that has been seen in the dramatically play. Review or evaluation is a kind of students’ creativity through literature’s criticism that is related to the play’s manuscript or letters that has been performed. Type of this review or evaluation shows the students’ creative process and shows the students’ level of appreciation to the letters. Based on hypothesis, it is built an assumption that less interested students in appreciating the letters is related to the blind side of students’ appreciation level, including play. Although the students’ appreciation level to the play is difficult enough to be measured, but this early research hopefully can give satisfactory information about the right teaching methods or media to be used in leaning the letters’ appreciation. This research used plan of Action Research. As Class Action Research context, the word “action” was understood as activity that was arranged systematically to create a raising level of teaching process and educational practices in certain class condition. In practicing Action Research, there were 4 basics that have to be concerned; they were (a) Action plan, (b) Action realization, (c) Observation, and (d) Reflection. These four aspects were connected each other and continuous. The result of students’ learning in rewriting review of the letters by benefiting the dramatic phenomenon to be the main substance for measuring the students’ appreciation level and perception to the performed play. According to the result of the research, it could be concluded that the model of play performance could be one of students’ learning models in appreciating the letters

PEI women in poverty: Obstacles to obtaining and maintaining employment

In 2011, the PEI provincial government asked PEI Islanders what they thought should be done to reduce poverty in PEI, which resulted in a follow-up plan. The goal of this plan, called the Social Action Plan to Reduce Poverty (SAPRP), is to support those in poverty enough so that they may become self-sufficient and stay out of poverty. One essential aspect of an individual’s ability to become self-sufficient is employment; thus helping Islanders to obtain and maintain employment is key to reducing poverty in PEI. The issue of employability is not simple, as is acknowledged by the SAPRP’s discussion of vulnerable groups in PEI, such as women, people with disabilities, and recent immigrants. Although SAPRP acknowledges that some groups are more vulnerable than others when it comes to poverty, it fails to take into account the ways in which such vulnerable groups experience poverty and employment barriers differently than other populations. This paper explores six Island women’s experiences of employment barriers in their own words, taken from interviews that were part of a series of liberation psychology workshops for an ongoing participatory action research project with Women’s Network PEI. These interviews were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis methods, from the standpoint of feminist psychology, which emphasizes that women’s experience has long been underrepresented in research. Major themes generated from the participants’ interviews include: society’s unrealistic standards for employment, various forms of oppression experienced by vulnerable women, the role strain of motherhood, and personal struggles. These themes as well as the literature on vulnerable populations and employability are used to make some recommendations for the provincial government’s poverty eradication strategy and shed some light on the unique experiences and life circumstances of PEI women living in poverty

Robot Learning and Execution of Collaborative Manipulation Plans from YouTube Cooking Videos

People often watch videos on the web to learn how to cook new recipes, assemble furniture or repair a computer. We wish to enable robots with the very same capability. This is challenging; there is a large variation in manipulation actions and some videos even involve multiple persons, who collaborate by sharing and exchanging objects and tools. Furthermore, the learned representations need to be general enough to be transferable to robotic systems. On the other hand, previous work has shown that the space of human manipulation actions has a linguistic, hierarchical structure that relates actions to manipulated objects and tools. Building upon this theory of language for action, we propose a framework for understanding and executing demonstrated action sequences from full-length, unconstrained cooking videos on the web. The framework takes as input a cooking video annotated with object labels and bounding boxes, and outputs a collaborative manipulation action plan for one or more robotic arms. We demonstrate performance of the system in a standardized dataset of 100 YouTube cooking videos, as well as in three full-length Youtube videos that include collaborative actions between two participants. We additionally propose an open-source platform for executing the learned plans in a simulation environment as well as with an actual robotic arm

Nursing home administrators’ perspectives on a study feedback report : a cross sectional survey

BackgroundThis project is part of the Translating Research in Elder Care (TREC) program of research, a multi-level and longitudinal research program being conducted in 36 nursing homes in three Canadian Prairie Provinces. The overall goal of TREC is to improve the quality of care for older persons living in nursing homes and the quality of work life for care providers. The purpose of this paper is to report on development and evaluation of facility annual reports (FARs) from facility administrators&rsquo; perspectives on the usefulness, meaningfulness, and understandability of selected data from the TREC survey. MethodsA cross sectional survey design was used in this study. The feedback reports were developed in collaboration with participating facility administrators. FARs presented results in four contextual areas: workplace culture, feedback processes, job satisfaction, and staff burnout. Six weeks after FARs were mailed to each administrator, we conducted structured telephone interviews with administrators to elicit their evaluation of the FARs. Administrators were also asked if they had taken any actions as a result of the FAR. Descriptive and inferential statistics, as well as content analysis for open-ended questions, were used to summarize findings. ResultsThirty-one facility administrators (representing thirty-two facilities) participated in the interviews. Six administrators had taken action and 18 were planning on taking action as a result of FARs. The majority found the four contextual areas addressed in FAR to be useful, meaningful, and understandable. They liked the comparisons made between data from years one and two and between their facility and other TREC study sites in their province. Twenty-two indicated that they would like to receive information on additional areas such as aggressive behaviours of residents and information sharing. Twenty-four administrators indicated that FARs contained enough information, while eight found FARs &lsquo;too short&rsquo;. Administrators who reported that the FAR contained enough information were more likely to take action within their facilities than administrators who reported that they needed more information. ConclusionsAlthough the FAR was brief, the presentation of the four contextual areas was relevant to the majority of administrators and prompted them to plan or to take action within their facility. <br /

ALBANIAN LAND MARKET ACTION PLAN: PURPOSES, ACHIEVEMENTS, LESSONS

The transition in Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States from command to market-oriented economies requires new land market institutions and policies. Once privatization of land has moved far enough to permit and stimulate demand for market transactions, the question becomes one of establishing dynamic land markets (i.e., a growing volume of transactions) that also "work properly." Concerning the transition in the ownership and management of real property and the resultant efforts to create new land market institutions, the experience of Albania is instructive, and this paper outlines the establishment of an Albanian land market strategy. In the discussion of a market-oriented economy in Albania, the question was how to create the land market component of the transition following privatization of land. Four market characteristics were identified as goals: (1) the land market should be dynamic, that is, there should be numerous transactions; (2) acquisition of land through these transactions should be by people who make productive investments; (3) all sectors of the population should participate in the market as buyers and sellers of land rights; and (4) people's investments in land through these market transactions should result in sustainable uses of land so as to assure the environmental rights of future generations. This paper presents the effort to address these goals through the Land Market Action Plan, prepared by Albanian government with the assistance of the Land Tenure Center.Land titles--Registration and transfer--Albania, Land use--Government policy--Albania, Institution building --Albania--Evaluation, Technical assistance--Albania--Evaluation, Land administration--Albania, Project appraisal--Albania, Land markets--Albania, Land Economics/Use,

Increasing Students’ Awareness in Speaking Participation

The lack of students’ activities seems to be the main reasons why the teacher failed to maximize the participation of the students in a senior high school in a small city in East Java Indonesia. The unification of two different basic competences into one lesson plan also makes the indicator of the lesson plan become not too clear and not specific enough. Thus the research questions of this study are: 1. How is the implementation of the teaching and learning process based on the revised lesson plan conducted by the teacher? 2. How is the teaching and learning process based on the revised lesson plan followed by the students? 3. How is the students’ participation in learning speaking after the teaching and learning process based on the revised lesson plan conducted? This research is a classroom action research with one cycle only. The first data is in the form of description of the teacher’s activities during the teaching and learning process, the source of the data is the teacher who conducts the revised teaching-learning process. The second data is the description of students’ activities during the teaching and learning process, the source of the second data is the students who follow the teaching and learning process based on the revised lesson plan. The third data is the participation of the students when they are taught using the revised lesson plan, the third source of the data is also the students who follow the teaching and learning process based on the revised lesson plan. The researcher used unstructured field notes to write all the information which were seen and heard and also everything that happened during teaching and learning process conducted by the teacher. The data need to be sorted and classified to know the relevant data and non-relevant data. Then the relevant data were classified based on each research question to be analyzed. The students’ participation in the teaching and learning process of speaking narrative text based on the revised lesson plan was better, because the students could follow the instructions and do the activities of speaking narrative text smoothly, every student was able to present their stories in the group and in front of the class, they were active in the group discussion for asking and answering their friends’ question, they were also active in asking questions to the teacher and answering questions from the teacher

Istikhdām Kitāb al-`Arabiyyah Baina Yaday Aulādinā Bi al-Ṭarīqah al-Mubāsyarah Li Tarqiyah Qudrah al-Ṭalabah `Alā Mahārah al-Kalām (Dirāsah Ijrāiyyah bi MAN 4 Aceh Utara)

MAN 4 Aceh Utara students learn a variety of subjects, including lessons to speak Arabic (Kalam). This lesson aims to make students be able to speak Arabic properly and correctly. However, in practice, students face many problems and difficult to Arabic speak resulted in the learning outcomes that have not reached the cut score (KKM). One of the reasons is that the teacher has not applied a good method and is in accordance with the student's condition, nor is there suitable learning media in learning. Researchers assume that the direct method and Arabiyah Baina Yadai Auladina text books can improve the skills of students in speaking. Therefore, Researchers to examine the use of Arabiyah Baina Yadai Auladina text books with a direct method to increase skills Arabic speaking (Classroom Action Research in MAN 4 Aceh Utara). The purpose of research is to determine the implementation of Arabiyah Baina Yadai Auladina text books and direct methods to improve the skills of students in Arabic speaking and its effect on students and student responses to this learning. Classroom action research methods is used in this study. Researchers collected data using observations, questionnaires and tests. Student of first grade who became the subject of research with the 20 students. The results show indicate that the implementation of learning is in accordance with the plan with a percentage of 57.69% (enough) in the first cycle and increased in the second cycle to 92.3% (very good). The ability of students in Arabic speaking increases after the application of this book and method. This is evident from the average score in the first cycle is 57.75 (enough) and in the second cycle increased is 79.25 (very good). The level of improvement in students' abilities or N-GAIN 1.03 is in the high interpretation. And finally, students responses to this application was positiv

Maximizing Community Action: An Internship with Be The Change

From 3 April 2013 to 28 April 2013, I interned with the Brisbane branch of Be The Change, an organization that promotes ecological, social and spiritual sustainability through their empowering symposiums, in Australia. I focused on creating a tool to help symposium participants take community action after the event. My goal was to create a resource for Be The Change to use across Australia to further its impact, attend a symposium and implement sustainable actions in my everyday life. In the 140 total hours of work I completed, I helped plan a symposium, participated in workshops and events within the Brisbane sustainability community, conducted extensive research on community organization, compiled web and print resources for an action guide and observed the work of Be The Change. To gather data I used participant observation and conducted four interviews: three with Be The Change facilitators and one with the founders of Food Connect. I also had the opportunity to present my final action guide to participants at a symposium on April 27th. Within the context of a disconnected world, it is difficult for people to feel empowered enough to take action; they need the support of like-minded individuals and organizations. Many organizations understand this and thus provide their members with tools to engage with one another and the local, sustainable community. Currently, Be The Change does not have the infrastructure to provide this. However, I observed that the mission of Be The Change is extremely powerful and the symposiums, moving. Their role, in educating and helping participants see potential solutions within themselves, is an important one. By uniting with other local sustainable organizations, both parties would greatly benefit. Working alongside Fiona Leiper, a Be The Change facilitator, I experienced the importance of communication, organization, commitment and the significance of a physical space for creating community. Above all I learned about embodying one’s vision, rather than simply acting on it