Men and masculinity: understanding the challenges for urological cancer

Stereotypical expectations of male behaviours do not always align with the reality of serious life-threatening illness, particularly urogenital cancer. However, masculine ways of coping can be harnessed to maximise benefit when providing support for men at all stages of the cancer journey

The Information Technology Workforce: A Comparision Of Critical Skills Of Clients And Service Providers

In this article the authors explore similarities and differences in skill needs of IT service providers and the firms that providers service (clients). The results show that providers and clients are more similar than different with regard to desired skills. Client firms emphasize technical skills for new hires more than providers do despite saying that these are the skills they would outsource to providers. The results have implications for organizations’ recruiting and retention, for individuals’ career development, and for educational programs

IT Workforce Trends: Implications For IS Programs

Findings in an IT workforce study support the emphasis of business content espoused by IS curriculum guidelines. Business domain and project management skills are critical to keep in house while technical skills were cited as the top skills sourced. Paradoxically, technical skills are those cited for entry-level positions. We discuss the issues raised by these findings and recommend several approaches for IS programs to consider. IS programs must offer a functionally integrated curriculum and deliver it in an experiential business context. We provide several examples of innovative pedagogical approaches and industry alliances which demonstrate mechanisms to provide students with a stronger business orientation in applying IT. We recommend a more proactive approach to enrollment including better promotion of IS programs

Clinical practice as research for a rare condition: Systematic research review of qualitative research exploring patients' experiences of penile cancer

Background: Penile cancer is a rare but destructive malignancy. The aim of this study was to identify published qualitative research exploring patients' experiences of being diagnosed and treated for penile cancer. As only one study met our inclusion criteria and yet there were five borderline studies, a secondary aim that emerged was to discuss those studies to see what, if anything, we could learn. Methods: We searched ASSIA, CINAHL, EMBASE, PUBMED/MEDLINE, PsycINFO & Web of Science and found 313 papers published since 1990. Two reviewers independently selected 17 papers for potential inclusion using titles and abstracts, which were obtained and independently assessed. A synthesis was not possible as only one study met our inclusion criteria. Five borderline studies, covering 4 countries, invited closer inspection because they are often reported in guidelines on penile cancer. Results: The 5 borderline studies reported using a mixed methods design combining a psychometric measure with interviews. Unfortunately, none of these studies reported the method or process used for analysing qualitative data or for integrating the interview and psychometric findings, making it difficult to understand the interview element of their research. Conclusions: If we are to understand and improve the long-term consequences of treatment for penile cancer, qualitative studies of patients’ experiences need to be conducted with high quality analysis and reporting. While pen-and-paper questionnaires may take up little of the time of clinicians conducting research about rare conditions, time could be better used by using methodologies that explore patients experiences

Developing a competency-based approach to facilitate teaching and learning of antimicrobial stewardship as part of environmental sustainability in higher education.

The environmental impact of the inappropriate use of antimicrobials and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognised by global organisations, such as the World Health Organisation and the European Union. Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) is one strategy to promote appropriate use of antimicrobials to minimise AMR and is a priority for the NHS to ensure sustainable prescribing. It is therefore imperative to support and empower future health care professionals by providing them with the knowledge to be leaders in the field of AMS. National consensus-based competencies for teaching AMS to undergraduate healthcare professionals in the UK were launched in 2018. This generic framework includes competencies relating to specific aspects of antimicrobial prescribing and infection control, and also emphasizes the importance of collaborative interprofessional working. The aim of this project is to determine which AMS competencies are required to be met by student pharmacists. This pedagogic approach will provide a guiding tool for curricula development, and will allow identification of gaps and strengths within the undergraduate pharmacy curriculum. To enable the development of a UK-wide national AMS competency framework specifically for student pharmacists, a working group of academics and pharmacy practitioners with expertise in AMS was set up in September 2022. The diverse backgrounds of group members provide a healthy mix of ideas, with academics informing the group of what may be achievable within the constraints and professional requirements of the pharmacy curriculum, and pharmacy practitioners providing input into essential AMS competencies for early-career pharmacists. Student pharmacists from a national organisation are being invited to join the group to encourage co-designing of this curriculum. Considering the UN commitment to act on global antimicrobial resistance and the NHS Sustainable Development management plan, this project is timely and of great importance to support development of future pharmacists as leaders in environmental sustainability

Developing a competency-based approach to facilitate teaching and learning of antimicrobial stewardship as part of environmental sustainability in higher education

Presented at the HETL 2023 conferenceThe environmental impact of the inappropriate use of antimicrobials and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognised by global organisations such as the World Health Organisation and the European Union. Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) is one strategy to promote appropriate use of antimicrobials to minimise AMR and is a priority for the NHS to ensure sustainable prescribing. It is therefore imperative to support and empower future health care professionals by providing them with the knowledge to be leaders in the field of AMS. National consensus-based competencies for teaching AMS to undergraduate healthcare professionals in the UK were launched 2018. This generic framework includes competencies relating to specific aspects of antimicrobial prescribing, infection control and emphasizes the importance of collaborative interprofessional working. The aim of this project is to determine which AMS competencies are required to be met by student pharmacists. This pedagogic approach will provide a guiding tool for curricula development and will allow identification of gaps and strengths within the undergraduate pharmacy curriculum. To enable the development of a UK-wide national AMS competency framework specifically for student pharmacists, a working group of academics and pharmacy practitioners with expertise in AMS was set up in September 2022. The diverse background of group members allows a healthy mix of ideas with academics informing the group of what may be achievable within the constraints and professional requirements of the pharmacy curriculum, and pharmacy practitioners providing input into essential AMS competencies for early career pharmacists. Student pharmacists from a national organisation are being invited to join the group to encourage co-designing of this curriculum. Considering the UN commitment to act on global antimicrobial resistance and the NHS Sustainable Development management plan, this project is timely and of great importance to support development of future pharmacists as leaders in environmental sustainability

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe