Advanced practice nursing role development: factor analysis of a modified role delineation tool

Aim his study reports the use of exploratory factor analysis to determine construct validity of a modified advanced practice role delineation tool. Background Little research exists on specific activities and domains of practice within advanced practice nursing roles, making it difficult to define service parameters of this level of nursing practice. A valid and reliable tool would assist those responsible for employing or deploying advanced practice nurses by identifying and defining their service profile. This is the third paper from a multi-phase Australian study aimed at assigning advanced practice roles. Methods A postal survey was conducted of a random sample of state government employed Registered nurses and midwives, across various levels and grades of practice in the state of Queensland, Australia, using the modified Advanced Practice Role Delineation tool. Exploratory factor analysis, using principal axis factoring was undertaken to examine factors in the modified tool. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient determined reliability of the overall scale and identified factors. Results There were 658 responses (42% response rate). The five factors found with loadings of ≥.400 for 40 of the 41 APN activities were similar to the five domains in the Strong model. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was .94 overall and for the factors ranged from 0.83 to 0.95. Conclusion Exploratory factor analysis of the modified tool supports validity of the five domains of the original tool. Further investigation will identify use of the tool in a broader healthcare environment

A web-based tool for teaching pharmacy practice competency

Aims to implement and assess the effectiveness of the Strathclyde Computerized Randomized Interactive Prescription Tutor (SCRIPT) in teaching a competency-based undergraduate pharmacy course. Data on students' access to SCRIPT, collected by quantitative electronic data capture, were analyzed to determine student usage patterns and correlations between usage and grades in class assessments. Data on students' perceptions were collected by electronic questionnaire and semistructured interviews. Teaching staff members also were interviewed. Two hundred forty-three students accessed SCRIPT a median of 23 times each. Students accessed SCRIPT predominantly at times outside normal teaching hours and tended to access the tool more often in the 48 hours preceding class assessments. Feedback from students indicated overall satisfaction with the tool to compliment the timetabled teaching sessions but highlighted that more specific feedback on the examples was required. All staff comments were positive. Students and teaching staff members valued SCRIPT as a tool to compliment teaching of the competency-based pharmacy practice classes in the MPharm degree

Older patients' prescriptions screening in the community pharmacy: development of the Ghent Older People's Prescriptions community Pharmacy Screening (GheOP3S) tool

Background: Ageing of the population often leads to polypharmacy. Consequently, potentially inappropriate prescribing (PIP) becomes more frequent. Systematic screening for PIP in older patients in primary care could yield a large improvement in health outcomes, possibly an important task for community pharmacists. In this article, we develop an explicit screening tool to detect relevant PIP that can be used in the typical community pharmacy practice, adapted to the European market. Methods: Eleven panellists participated in a two-round RAND/UCLA (Research and Development/University of California, Los Angeles) process, including a round zero meeting, a literature review, a first written evaluation round, a second face-to-face evaluation round and, finally, a selection of those items that are applicable in the contemporary community pharmacy. Results: Eighteen published lists of PIP for older patients were retrieved from the literature, mentioning 398 different items. After the two-round RAND/UCLA process, 99 clinically relevant items were considered suitable to screen for in a community pharmacy practice. A panel of seven community pharmacists selected 83 items, feasible in the contemporary community pharmacy practice, defining the final GheOP3S tool. Conclusion: A novel explicit screening tool (GheOP3S) was developed to be used for PIP screening in the typical community pharmacy practice

Expected Practice as a Novel Antibiotic Stewardship Intervention.

"Expected practice" is a recently described method to alter clinical behavior. We implemented an expected practice around short-course antibiotic therapy, which was associated with decreased antibiotic utilization for multiple bacterial infections. Thus, we describe this expected practice as a novel, simple, and inexpensive tool to enhance antibiotic stewardship

Responsible Research and Innovation: Using the Requirements Tool for Stakeholder Engagement in Developing a Universal Design for Learning Guidelines for Practice

open access articleResponsible research and innovation (RRI) is growing in importance, and alongside this growth is an acknowledgement that for research and innovation projects to be successful, stakeholders must be involved from the outset. When developing guidelines for practice, stakeholders will often be presented with a document to ratify rather than one to develop or revise. This gap in stakeholder engagement has been recognised and addressed by the development of the requirements tool. This tool was originally created to provide a systematic approach to the development of guidelines for the governance of RRI, but it was quickly recognised that the tool can bridge the gap and involve stakeholders from the outset, thereby increasing the likelihood of buy-in. This paper presents the second validated use of the tool that was used to inform the revision of guidelines for the introduction of a universal design for learning (UDL) at a UK University. The resulting revised guidelines for practice and their adoption by those tasked with producing them provide further evidence of the value and flexibility of the tool and its potential for its continued use in the future development or revision of guidelines

Twitter: A Professional Development and Community of Practice Tool for Teachers

This article shows how a group of language teachers use Twitter as a tool for continuous professional development through the #MFLtwitterati hashtag. Based on data collected through a survey (n=116) and interviews (n=11), it describes how this collective of teachers use the hashtag and evaluates the impact of their Twitter network on their teaching practices. The results show that most users try the suggestions and ideas that they find on this network, which have a positive impact on their teaching. Finally, the article assesses whether the hashtag users can be described as a community of practice

An environment for object-oriented real-time system design

A concise object-oriented method for the development of real-time systems has been composed. Hardware components are modelled by (software) base objects; base objects are controlled by a hierarchy of coordinator objects, expressed in an organizational diagram. The behaviour of objects is specified by state transition diagrams. This approach considerably promotes requirements analysis and communication with the customer. A CASE tool has been constructed with diagram editors for graphical specifications of real-time systems. The tool can generate executable code for PLCs from these graphical specifications; reuse of previous results is supported by the repository function of the tool. Experiences attained in practice with method and tool show that time spent in system testing and installation is reduced considerabl