Shifting gears in career: identifying drivers of career development for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers in the health sector

This paper explores how the Australian health sector might improve opportunities for career development for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers. It considers the current evidence surrounding career development in the health sector, along with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander worker experiences, to develop a usable conceptual framework for change. The following framework is explicitly designed to provide a practical diagnostic tool for stakeholders (policy makers, health organisations and workers) to consider, analyse and identify challenges to career formation across a wide range of diverse health care service settings. The conceptual framework presented herein nominates five key drivers or agents of change in the production of career opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers in the health sector: policy frameworks workplace process individual characteristics intermediary behaviour professional association interventions. The analogy of ‘shifting gears’ is used to identify and explain the key factors (agents) involved in driving career formation, and describe the level of interconnectedness between these drivers. In this context,the analogy is instructive because it demonstrates that gears must work together simultaneously in order to create motion. As one gear turns, the others within the system move as well in response to the pressure being applied. In the health sector, and particularly the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health sector/s, policy is identified in this analysis as the largest and most influential of all the drivers or gears. Policy frameworks are pivotal to almost every aspect of health care delivery including the funding, direction and focus of delivery efforts, and the structures that govern practice guidelines for key disciplines. Policy frameworks also shape employer decision-making processes surrounding patient and practitioner engagement, the legal parameters for patient care and how funding is disbursed. The ability of the health system to maintain high-quality standards of patient care emerges directly from the sector’s ability to source, recognise, retain and reward appropriately skilled labour—in this instance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers in health. A range of skill development policies and program initiatives have emerged at federal, state and local levels of government, each designed to maintain a supply of appropriately skilled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers for the health sector. Specifically, a number of sector-wide initiatives have previously been identified by policy makers as essential: increasing the foundation levels of education for Australia’s First People lifting the job-specific education and training of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers within the health sector enticing new workers into the sector increasing the resilience of workers through the provision of additional supports (e.g., mentoring). This paper argues that while these kinds of initiatives are important, it must also be recognised that they all present a somewhat skewed response to career development. While this paper does not discount theimportance of skill development policy, and other supply-side focused efforts, this paper also asserts that skill development is not synonymous with career development. In other words, systemic-level challenges to career development require systemic-level responses. Innovative and effective responses to the challenges faced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers in health  can, therefore, only emerge from a more detailed examination of the demand-side factors underpinning career formation and development. A key finding to emerge from this paper highlights that the working conditions and service delivery practices associated with contemporary health settings present diverse challenges for the formation and development of career. The multiple disadvantages faced by many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the labour market means that these workers in the health sector are particularly vulnerable to the threats to career development that have emerged in the health sector over the past 20 years

Homelessness and Gender Reconsidered

Although research has been sporadic, the available evidence indicates that gender is consistently associated with differentiated trajectories through homelessness in Europe. Women’s pathways through homelessness have been linked to domestic violence, women being ‘protected’ by welfare systems when dependent children are living with them and an apparently greater tendency for women to use and exhaust informal support, rather than homelessness or welfare services. This evidence is frequently disregarded in current European homelessness research, which often uses conceptualisa- tions, definitions and methodologies developed when homelessness was seen predominantly as a social problem among lone adult men. The sites at which homelessness is studied and the ways in which data are collected, limit accuracy of measurement and inhibit understanding, but, this paper contends, the real issues centre on how mainstream definitions of homelessness exclude women. Women, who lack any security of tenure, physical safety, privacy and whose living conditions are otherwise unacceptable – who are homeless – are too often outside the scope of contemporary European homelessness research. Drawing on recent UK studies and the wider European literature, this paper argues that there is a need to cease a longstanding focus on the streets, homelessness services and (predominantly) male experience and to look instead at the more nuanced interrelationships between gender and agency to fully understand the nature of homelessness in Europe

A Mass-Flux Scheme View of a High-Resolution Simulation of a Transition from Shallow to Deep Cumulus Convection

In this paper, an idealized, high-resolution simulation of a gradually forced transition from shallow, nonprecipitating to deep, precipitating cumulus convection is described; how the cloud and transport statistics evolve as the convection deepens is explored; and the collected statistics are used to evaluate assumptions in current cumulus schemes. The statistical analysis methodologies that are used do not require tracing the history of individual clouds or air parcels; instead they rely on probing the ensemble characteristics of cumulus convection in the large model dataset. They appear to be an attractive way for analyzing outputs from cloud-resolving numerical experiments. Throughout the simulation, it is found that 1) the initial thermodynamic properties of the updrafts at the cloud base have rather tight distributions; 2) contrary to the assumption made in many cumulus schemes, nearly undiluted air parcels are too infrequent to be relevant to any stage of the simulated convection; and 3) a simple model with a spectrum of entraining plumes appears to reproduce most features of the cloudy updrafts, but significantly overpredicts the mass flux as the updrafts approach their levels of zero buoyancy. A buoyancy-sorting model was suggested as a potential remedy. The organized circulations of cold pools seem to create clouds with larger-sized bases and may correspondingly contribute to their smaller lateral entrainment rates. Our results do not support a mass-flux closure based solely on convective available potential energy (CAPE), and are in general agreement with a convective inhibition (CIN)-based closure. The general similarity in the ensemble characteristics of shallow and deep convection and the continuous evolution of the thermodynamic structure during the transition provide justification for developing a single unified cumulus parameterization that encompasses both shallow and deep convection

Spatially Extended Tests of a Neural Network Parametrization Trained by Coarse-graining

General circulation models (GCMs) typically have a grid size of 25--200 km. Parametrizations are used to represent diabatic processes such as radiative transfer and cloud microphysics and account for sub-grid-scale motions and variability. Unlike traditional approaches, neural networks (NNs) can readily exploit recent observational datasets and global cloud-system resolving model (CRM) simulations to learn subgrid variability. This article describes an NN parametrization trained by coarse-graining a near-global CRM simulation with a 4~km horizontal grid spacing. The NN predicts the residual heating and moistening averaged over (160 km)^2 grid boxes as a function of the coarse-resolution fields within the same atmospheric column. This NN is coupled to the dynamical core of a GCM with the same 160 km resolution. A recent study described how to train such an NN to be numerically stable when coupled to specified time-evolving advective forcings in a single column model, but feedbacks between NN and GCM components cause spatially-extended simulations to crash within a few days. Analyzing the linearized response of such an NN reveals that it learns to exploit a strong synchrony between precipitation and the atmospheric state above 10 km. Removing these variables from the NN's inputs stabilizes the coupled simulations, which predict the future state more accurately than a coarse-resolution simulation without any parametrizations of sub-grid-scale variability, although the mean state slowly drifts

Simulations and observations of cloudtop processes

Turbulent entrainment at zero mean shear stratified interfaces has been studied extensively in the laboratory and theoretically for the classical situation in which density is a passive tracer of the mixing and the turbulent motions producing the entrainment are directed toward the interface. It is the purpose of the numerical simulations and data analysis to investigate these processes and, specifically, to focus on the following questions: (1) Can local cooling below cloudtop play an important role in setting up convective circulations within the cloud, and bringing about entrainment; (2) Can Cloudtop Entrainment Instability (CEI) alone lead to runaway entrainment under geophysically realistic conditions; and (3) What are the important mechanisms of entrainment at cloudtop under zero or low mean shear conditions

Scaling state of dry two-dimensional froths: universal angle deviations and structure

We characterize the late-time scaling state of dry, coarsening, two-dimensional froths using a detailed, force-based vertex model. We find that the slow evolution of bubbles leads to systematic deviations from 120degree angles at three-fold vertices in the froth, with an amplitude proportional to the vertex speed, v ~ sqrt(t), but with a side-number dependence that is independent of time. We also find that a significant number of T1 side-switching processes occur for macroscopic bubbles in the scaling state, though most bubble annihilations involve four-sided bubbles at microscopic scales.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure