32,015 research outputs found
Microsoft Teams and team performance in the COVID-19 pandemic within an NHS Trust Community Service in North-West England
Purpose
This study aims to evaluate the impact the introduction of Microsoft Teams has had on team performance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic within a National Health Service (NHS) Community Service.
Design/methodology/approach
Microsoft Teams was rolled out across the NHS over a period of four days, partly in response to the need for social distancing. This case study reviews how becoming a virtual team affected team performance, the role Microsoft Teams had played in supporting staff to work in higher virtuality, understand what elements underpin a successful virtual team and how these results correlate to the technology acceptance model (Davis, 1985).
Findings
The findings indicate that Teams made a positive impact to the team at a time of heightened clinical pressures and working in unfamiliar environments without the supportive benefits of face-to-face contact with colleagues in terms of incidental knowledge sharing and health and well-being.
Originality/value
Further developments were needed to make virtual meetings more accessible for introverted colleagues, support asynchronous communication, address training needs and support leaders to adapt and operate in higher virtuality
Implementing Health Impact Assessment as a Required Component of Government Policymaking: A Multi-Level Exploration of the Determinants of Healthy Public Policy
It is widely understood that the public policies of ânon-healthâ government sectors have greater impacts on population health than those of the traditional healthcare realm. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a decision support tool that identifies and promotes the health benefits of policies while also mitigating their unintended negative consequences. Despite numerous calls to do so, the Ontario government has yet to implement HIA as a required component of policy development. This dissertation therefore sought to identify the contexts and factors that may both enable and impede HIA use at the sub-national (i.e., provincial, territorial, or state) government level.
The three integrated articles of this dissertation provide insights into specific aspects of the policy process as they relate to HIA. Chapter one details a case study of purposive information-seeking among public servants within Ontarioâs Ministry of Education (MOE). Situated within Ontarioâs Ministry of Health (MOH), chapter two presents a case study of policy collaboration between health and ânon-healthâ ministries. Finally, chapter three details a framework analysis of the political factors supporting health impact tool use in two sub-national jurisdictions â namely, QuĂ©bec and South Australia.
MOE respondents (N=9) identified four components of policymaking âdue diligenceâ, including evidence retrieval, consultation and collaboration, referencing, and risk analysis. As prospective HIA users, they also confirmed that information is not routinely sought to mitigate the potential negative health impacts of education-based policies. MOH respondents (N=8) identified the bureaucratic hierarchy as the brokering mechanism for inter-ministerial policy development. As prospective HIA stewards, they also confirmed that the ministry does not proactively flag the potential negative health impacts of non-health sector policies. Finally, âlessons learnedâ from case articles specific to QuĂ©bec (n=12) and South Australia (n=17) identified the political factors supporting tool use at different stages of the policy cycle, including agenda setting (âpolicy elitesâ and âpolitical cultureâ), implementation (âjurisdictionâ), and sustained implementation (âinstitutional powerâ).
This work provides important insights into âreal lifeâ policymaking. By highlighting existing facilitators of and barriers to HIA use, the findings offer a useful starting point from which proponents may tailor context-specific strategies to sustainably implement HIA at the sub-national government level
Towards a sociology of conspiracy theories: An investigation into conspiratorial thinking on Dönmes
This thesis investigates the social and political significance of conspiracy theories, which has been an academically neglected topic despite its historical relevance. The academic literature focuses on the methodology, social significance and political impacts of these theories in a secluded manner and lacks empirical analyses. In response, this research provides a comprehensive theoretical framework for conspiracy theories by considering their methodology, political impacts and social significance in the light of empirical data. Theoretically, the thesis uses Adorno's semi-erudition theory along with Girardian approach. It proposes that conspiracy theories are methodologically semi-erudite narratives, i.e. they are biased in favour of a belief and use reason only to prove it. It suggests that conspiracy theories appear in times of power vacuum and provide semi-erudite cognitive maps that relieve alienation and ontological insecurities of people and groups. In so doing, they enforce social control over their audience due to their essentialist, closed-to-interpretation narratives. In order to verify the theory, the study analyses empirically the social and political significance of conspiracy theories about the Dönme community in Turkey. The analysis comprises interviews with conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory readers and political parties, alongside a frame analysis of the popular conspiracy theory books on Dönmes. These confirm the theoretical framework by showing that the conspiracy theories are fed by the ontological insecurities of Turkish society. Hence, conspiracy theorists, most readers and some political parties respond to their own ontological insecurities and political frustrations through scapegoating Dönmes. Consequently, this work shows that conspiracy theories are important symptoms of society, which, while relieving ontological insecurities, do not provide politically prolific narratives
The Professional Identity of Doctors who Provide Abortions: A Sociological Investigation
Abortion is a medicalised problem in England and Wales, where the law places doctors at the centre of legal provision and puts doctors in control of who has an abortion. However, the sex-selection abortion scandal of 2012 presented a very real threat to 'abortion doctors', when the medical profession's values and practices were questioned in the media, society and by Members of Parliament. Doctors found themselves at the centre of a series of claims that stated doctors were acting both illegally and unethically, driven by profit rather than patient needs. Yet, the perspectives of those doctors who provide abortions has been under-researched; this thesis aims to fill that gap by examining the beliefs and values of this group of doctors. Early chapters highlight the ambiguous position of the abortion provider in Britain, where doctors are seen as a collective group of professionals motivated by medical dominance and medical autonomy. They outline how this position is then questioned and contested, with doctors being presented as unethical. By studying abortion at the macro-, meso- and micro-levels, this thesis seeks to better understand the values of the 'abortion doctor', and how these levels shape the work and experiences of abortion providers in England and Wales. This thesis thus addresses the question: 'What do abortion doctors' accounts of their professional work suggest about the contemporary dynamics of the medicalisation of abortion in Britain?'. It investigates the research question using a qualitative methodological approach: face-to-face and telephone interviews were conducted with 47 doctors who provide abortions in England and Wales. The findings from this empirical study show how doctors' values are linked to how they view the 'normalisation of abortion'. At the macro-level doctors, openly resisted the medicalisation of abortion through the position ascribed to them by the legal framework, yet at the meso-level doctors construct an identity where normalising abortion is based on further medicalising services. Finally, at the micro-level, the ambiguous position of the abortion provider is further identified in terms of being both a proud provider and a stigmatised individual. This thesis shows that while the existing medicalisation literature has some utility, it has limited explanatory power when investigating the problem of abortion. The thesis thus provides some innovative insights into the relevance and value of medicalisation through a comprehensive study on doctors' values, beliefs and practices
Clinicians' experiences of using the MCA (2005) with people with intellectual disabilities
Section A is a narrative synthesis of the empirical literature of professionalsâ knowledge of the
MCA and how they apply it when working with people with intellectual disabilities (ID).
Eleven papers were identified for inclusion in this review. Four themes, with subthemes, were
identified: âprocesses involvedâ, âworking with complexityâ, âknowledge gaps and variabilityâ
and âassessor needsâ. Methodological strengths and weaknesses are also considered. Findings
are discussed in relation to clinical implications and recommendations for future research are
outlined.
Section B is an empirical study using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to explore the
experiences of clinicians using the MCA (2005) with people with ID to assess capacity to
consent to sex. Eight clinicians, who had completed between 2 and 40-50 (mode=2) MCA
assessments regarding consent to sex. Three superordinate themes, with subthemes, are
outlined and discussed in relation to the existing literature. Limitations, clinical implications
and areas of future research are considered
Image classification over unknown and anomalous domains
A longstanding goal in computer vision research is to develop methods that are simultaneously applicable to a broad range of prediction problems. In contrast to this, models often perform best when they are specialized to some task or data type. This thesis investigates the challenges of learning models that generalize well over multiple unknown or anomalous modes and domains in data, and presents new solutions for learning robustly in this setting.
Initial investigations focus on normalization for distributions that contain multiple sources (e.g. images in different styles like cartoons or photos). Experiments demonstrate the extent to which existing modules, batch normalization in particular, struggle with such heterogeneous data, and a new solution is proposed that can better handle data from multiple visual modes, using differing sample statistics for each.
While ideas to counter the overspecialization of models have been formulated in sub-disciplines of transfer learning, e.g. multi-domain and multi-task learning, these usually rely on the existence of meta information, such as task or domain labels. Relaxing this assumption gives rise to a new transfer learning setting, called latent domain learning in this thesis, in which training and inference are carried out over data from multiple visual domains, without domain-level annotations. Customized solutions are required for this, as the performance of standard models degrades: a new data augmentation technique that interpolates between latent domains in an unsupervised way is presented, alongside a dedicated module that sparsely accounts for hidden domains in data, without requiring domain labels to do so.
In addition, the thesis studies the problem of classifying previously unseen or anomalous modes in data, a fundamental problem in one-class learning, and anomaly detection in particular. While recent ideas have been focused on developing self-supervised solutions for the one-class setting, in this thesis new methods based on transfer learning are formulated. Extensive experimental evidence demonstrates that a transfer-based perspective benefits new problems that have recently been proposed in anomaly detection literature, in particular challenging semantic detection tasks
Effects of soccer match-play on unilateral jumping and Inter-limb asymmetry: a repeated measures design
The aims of the present study were twofold: 1) determine the effects of repeated soccer match-play on unilateral jump performance and inter-limb asymmetries and, 2) examine associations between asymmetry and commonly reported external load variables collected during competition. Single leg countermovement jumps (SLCMJ) and drop jumps (SLDJ) were collected pre and immediately post five soccer matches in elite academy soccer players. GPS data was also collected each match as part of the routine match-day procedures. SLCMJ height and concentric impulse showed significant reductions post-matches (p 0.05; ES: -0.05 to -0.13). SLDJ height and reactive strength also showed significant reductions post-matches (p < 0.01; ES: -0.39 to -0.58). No meaningful reductions in asymmetry were present at the group level, but individual responses were highly variable. Significant associations between post-match reactive strength asymmetry and explosive distance (r = 0.29; p < 0.05), relative explosive distance (r = 0.34; p < 0.05), high speed running (r = 0.35; p < 0.05) and relative high speed running (r = 0.44; p < 0.01). These findings show that unilateral jump tests are more appropriate than asymmetry to detect real change post soccer competition and practitioners should be cautious about using asymmetry to inform decision-making during the temporal recovery period
DataProVe: Fully Automated Conformance Verification Between Data Protection Policies and System Architectures
Privacy and data protection by design are relevant parts of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), in which businesses and organisations are encouraged to implement measures at an early stage of the system design phase to fulfil data protection requirements. This paper addresses the policy and system architecture design and propose two variants of privacy policy language and architecture description language, respectively, for specifying and verifying data protection and privacy requirements. In addition, we develop a fully automated algorithm based on logic, for verifying three types of conformance relations (privacy, data protection, and functional conformance) between a policy and an architecture specified in our languagesâ variants. Compared to related works, this approach supports a more systematic and fine-grained analysis of the privacy, data protection, and functional properties of a system. Our theoretical methods are then implemented as a software tool called DataProVe and its feasibility is demonstrated based on the centralised and decentralised approaches of COVID-19 contact tracing applications
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âWe Really are Seeing Racism in the Hospitalsâ: Racism and Doula Care
Introduction: Poor birth outcomes are more prevalent for Black birthing people and their babies. Strong evidence shows that doula care, during labor and delivery, improves maternal and child health outcomes. Yet little is documented about racial differences, discrimination, and equity in doula care.
Methods: Between November 2020 and January 2021, 17 surveys and in-depth interviews were conducted with doulas in Georgia as part of the community-based participatory Georgia Doula Study, co-led by Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Georgia and academic researchers. The study objective was to describe the challenges and facilitators of providing doula care in Georgia. In the fall of 2021, additional measures on racism and discrimination in doula care were added to the survey and interview guide and previous participants were re-contacted.
Results: Doula participants were diverse in age (41% 25-35, 35% 36-45, and 24% 46+) and race/ethnicity (53% white, 41% Black, 6% Latinx). Six of the seven (86%) Black doulas reported that more than 85% of their clientele is Black, while all of the eight white doulas reported that 50% or less of their clientele is Black. Three (18%) of the doulas indicated more than 10% of their clientele is Latinx, while only two (12%) indicated more than 10% of their clientele is Asian-American or Pacific Islander. Discrimination scores were 51.5 for Black doulas (standard deviation 7.55) 46.7 for white doulas (standard deviation 7.48). Doulas noted that the alarming maternal mortality rate for Black women and not always being listened to causes Black clients to be less trusting of medical staff, leaving them in need of advocates. Black doulas were passionate about serving and advocating with Black clients. Doulas also described how language and cultural barriers, particularly for Asian and Latinx birthing people, reduce clientsâ ability to advocate for themselves, increasing the need for doulas.
Conclusion: Black doulas are an essential tool for improving birth outcomes for Black women. Increasing access to doula care for Asian and Latinx communities could address language and cultural barriers that can negatively impact their maternal and child health outcomes
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