Hospice and Palliative Care - Access for All

Published to coincide with World Hospice and Palliative Care Day 2006, this report showcases the success stories of how hospice and palliative care has been provided in the most difficult settings. It also explores how services can be made more accessible and reflects the diversity of our society and the different beliefs and attitudes to care that people have. It focuses on a number of barriers to good care provision including geography, complex needs, culture and perception, and social exclusion

Prenatal care: Access for all?

Prenatal care is an essential part of a woman’s pregnancy journey. It ensures that both mother and child are doing well, and helps to locate and diagnose any issues before they become complications. Without regular check ups, mothers will not be aware of life-threatening complications such as preeclampsia or placenta previa. Women in low socioeconomic brackets often do not have good access to prenatal care. Research studies have interviewed women and have stated many times there are no providers in the area where they live and they have to make long trips to see a doctor, which they cannot afford. As a result they will go without prenatal care entirely and do not realize how important that step of pregnancy is. The question then becomes, if education on the importance of prenatal care was made readily available and accessible to all communnities, would the amount of prenatal care visits increase, and would compilations among that population go down? To answer this question would require interventions to help these women. This project pushes to raise awareness for the importance of prenatal visits to these women by methods such as developing a prenatal health campaign to emphasize its importance, and petition for grants and government assistance for these women. Community clinics should be made available for these women to receive prenatal care that is local to their residences such as churches, community centers, and local health departments. After these interventions have been put into place, interviews with these women can be conducted to identify if their prenatal visits have increased and if they feel as though they have more opportunities for prenatal care

Affordable Internet Access for All Americans

There are times in our history where new technologies burst onto the scene and have a major impact on our lives. We live in one such time. The Internet is revolutionizing how people and organizations interact with each other. Examples of these paradigm changes include how students are now being educated online with minimal face time with their teachers; governments are being forced to adapt to the new circumstance where once formidable geographical boundaries between countries are being lowered by information technology; and the military is realizing that it needs to harness this new technology or be defeated by it

Access for all and for how long?

The paper presents a case study of the “Twitter Revolution” that took place in Moldova in April 2009. The fight for democracy in a small country with a totalitarian history received global attention also because it was portrayed as an event in which Web 2.0 tools were empowering the citizens. Online commentary through Twitter posts (that included video recordings and images of the protests) were made in tandem with the onsite events. Blogs and youtube.com provided additional venues for commentary and access for individuals following the events. However, there is no process or device to effectively gather the rich contextual information generated by these online sources in a structural way and save it for future research use. Many of the electronic documents that circulated, such as some video recordings from the events and thousands of twitter messages, cannot be accessed online anymore

Open Access for All: Uniting a University Community

Open Access is not just the distribution of journal articles and scholarly information that’s free of barriers. It’s an issue of income inequality, paywalls, supplemental course material, and research impact beyond the university. Open Access has not been thoroughly discussed throughout all members of the university. This project takes a look at the conversations going on at the university levels through the perspectives of students, teaching faculty, and library faculty. Through this research, it became apparent that the value of Open Access advocacy is multifaceted, interdisciplinary and benefits from advocacy across all levels of the university. This essay is broken up into two sections. The first is a collection of talking points, used for advocacy across audiences, while the second is an analysis of those points using scholarly articles. These advocacy points are to be used to facilitate conversation throughout members of the university to promote Open Access policy