An exploration of predictors of children's nurses' attitudes, knowledge, confidence and clinical behavioural intentions towards children and young people who self-harm

Aims and objectives: To explore the potential predictors of children's nurses? attitudes, knowledge and confidence towards caring for children and young people admitted to hospital with self-harm. Background Admissions to paediatric inpatient settings for individuals who have self-harmed are growing. Limited previous research suggests that nurses have mixed attitudes towards people who have self-harmed and potentially lack the confidence to provide effective care. There is a specific paucity of research in this area for children's nurses. Design: A cross-sectional descriptive survey was used to gather data for exploration of variables associated with attitudes, confidence, knowledge and clinical behavioural intentions of 98 registered children's nurses in a single tertiary children's hospital, colocated in a large acute NHS Trust in the UK. Methods: Data were collected over a 4 weeks in 2015, using an online survey tool. The predictive effect of several demographic variables was tested on the outcomes of attitudes, knowledge, confidence and behavioural intentions, which were collected using relevant, previously used outcome measures. Results: Increased experience was found to be associated with improved attitudes relating to negativity. Previous training in caring for children who had self-harmed was found to be associated with improved attitudes around perceived effectiveness of their care. Higher academic qualifications and having undertaken previous training on self-harm were each found to be associated with increased knowledge of self-harm, and increased age was associated with reduced knowledge of self-harm. Conclusions: This study provides an initial exploration of variables associated with attitudes, knowledge, confidence and behaviour intentions of registered children's nurses in relation to caring for CYP who have self-harmed. Relevance to clinical practice: Targeted training on caring for CYP who have self-harmed should be considered as a component of continuing education for registered children's nurses in the UK to improve the experience and outcomes for this patient group

Measurements of greenhouse gases and related tracers at Bialystok tall tower station in Poland

Quasi-continuous, in-situ measurements of atmospheric CO2, O2/N2, CH4, CO, N2O, and SF6 have been performed since August 2005 at the tall tower station near Bialystok, in Eastern Poland, from five heights up to 300 m. Besides the in-situ measurements, flask samples are filled approximately weekly and measured at Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry for the same species and, in addition, for H2, Ar/N2 and the stable isotopes 13C and 18O in CO2. The in-situ measurement system was built based on commercially available analysers: a LiCor 7000 for CO2, a Sable Systems "Oxzilla" FC-2 for O2, and an Agilent 6890 gas chromatograph for CH4, CO, N2O and SF6. The system was optimized to run continuously with very little maintenance and to fulfill the precision requirements of the CHIOTTO project. The O2/N2 measurements in particular required special attention in terms of technical setup and quality assurance. The evaluation of the performance after more than three years of operation gave overall satisfactory results, proving that this setup is suitable for long term remote operation with little maintenance. The precision achieved for all species is within or close to the project requirements. The comparison between the in-situ and flask sample results, used to verify the accuracy of the in-situ measurements, showed no significant difference for CO2, O2/N2, CH4 and N2O, and a very small difference for SF6. The same comparison however revealed a statistically significant difference for CO, of about 6.5 ppb, for which the cause could not be fully explained. From more than three years of data, the main features at Bialystok have been characterized in terms of variability, trends, and seasonal and diurnal variations. CO2 and O2/N2 show large short term variability, and large diurnal signals during the warm seasons, which attenuate with the increase of sampling height. The trends calculated from this dataset, over the period August 2005 to December 2008, are 2.02±0.46 ppm/year for CO2 and -23.2±2.5 per meg/year for O2/N2. CH4, CO and N2O show also higher variability at the lower sampling levels, which in the case of CO is strongly seasonal. Diurnal variations in CH4, CO and N2O mole fractions can be observed during the warm season, due to the periodicity of vertical mixing combined with the diurnal cycle of anthropogenic emissions. We calculated increase rates of 10.1±4.4 ppb/year for CH4, (-8.3)±5.3 ppb/year for CO and 0.67±0.08 ppb/year for N2O. SF6 shows only few events, and generally no vertical gradients, which suggests that there are no significant local sources. A weak SF6 seasonal cycle has been detected, which most probably is due to the seasonality of atmospheric circulation. SF6 increased during the time of our measurement at an average rate of 0.29±0.01 ppt/year

Transgender students in post-compulsory education: a systematic review

Students identifying on the transgender spectrum are significantly under-researched and underreported in the education literature. Long term detrimental effects of gender-identity based discrimination and violence requires us to find more inclusive ways of supporting students with transgender identities. We report findings from a systematic review of the international research on transgender students in post-compulsory education. A standardised review protocol was used to synthesise findings from twenty empirical studies to: 1) describe the complexities of gender identities within education; 2) situate the importance of targeting equality issues for transgender students, and; 3) highlight emerging innovations and the need for further research. We recommend more critical engagement and dialogue with transgender issues to challenge institutional policies, processes in education with those involved

Gold Standard Online Debates Summaries and First Experiments Towards Automatic Summarization of Online Debate Data

Usage of online textual media is steadily increasing. Daily, more and more news stories, blog posts and scientific articles are added to the online volumes. These are all freely accessible and have been employed extensively in multiple research areas, e.g. automatic text summarization, information retrieval, information extraction, etc. Meanwhile, online debate forums have recently become popular, but have remained largely unexplored. For this reason, there are no sufficient resources of annotated debate data available for conducting research in this genre. In this paper, we collected and annotated debate data for an automatic summarization task. Similar to extractive gold standard summary generation our data contains sentences worthy to include into a summary. Five human annotators performed this task. Inter-annotator agreement, based on semantic similarity, is 36% for Cohen's kappa and 48% for Krippendorff's alpha. Moreover, we also implement an extractive summarization system for online debates and discuss prominent features for the task of summarizing online debate data automatically.Comment: accepted and presented at the CICLING 2017 - 18th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistic