APEL, APL or CPD?

Acquired prior experiential learning (APEL), acquired prior learning (APL) and/or continuous professional development (CPD) in the form of short courses or degree courses can ensure current and future employment.CPD is a requirement of regulatory and professional bodies and supported by healthcare organizations.It has been recognized that patients and healthcare institutions benefit when healthcare practitioners are competent. Through CPD health professionals can keep their skills and knowledge up to date and work safely, legally and effectively. </jats:p

Never events in gastrointestinal nursing

Gastrointestinal diseases and disorders frequently require interventions that can lead to serious consequences for patients when an organization has not put in place the correct systems and processes to prevent incidents from happening, procedures have not been followed (generally due to poor observation), or when an individual disregards protocol (generally due to lack of judgment). It has been identified that over 400,000 patients suffer potentially preventable harmful events each year (Emslie, 2002). In this article, Carol Cox describes the types of risks that can lead to never events and factors that increase the potential for error

Adherence, compliance, persistence and concordance in the management of glaucoma, Part I

Adherence is laden with difficulties in relation to the management of glaucoma. Perhaps a significant issue associated with a lack of the aforementioned is associated with the patient's failure to recognize there is a need to administer their eye drops as prescribed. Undoubtedly the greatest issue is that patients experience no pain with their debilitating eye disease. It is not until there is considerable loss of vision that awareness of the need to administer eye drops becomes a reality. Understanding the complexities of adherence and its association with compliance, persistence and concordance as discussed in this article can assist the healthcare practitioner in developing models of care that help the patient in self management of their glaucoma. This article is published in two parts. Part I addresses the background to issues associated with adherence in glaucoma management including definition of terms, assessing adherence and barriers and interventions to improve adherence. Part 2 addresses the theory of adherence and self management of chronic open angle glaucoma (COAG). It provides perspectives, theories and models that can be employed to improve adherence in the self-management of glaucoma

Trust, Fear, Reciprocity, and Altruism: Theory and Experiment

This paper describes central topics in our research program on social preferences. The discussion covers experimental designs that discriminate among alternative components of preferences such as unconditional altruism, positive reciprocity, trust (in positive reciprocity), negative reciprocity, and fear (of negative reciprocity). The paper describes experimental data on effects of social distance and decision context on reciprocal behavior and male vs. female and group vs. individual differences in reciprocity. The exposition includes experimental designs that provide direct tests of alternative models of social preferences and summarizes implications of data for the models. The discussion reviews models of other-regarding preferences that are and are not conditional on othersâ?? revealed intentions and the implications of data for these models.

Some Issues of Methods, Theories, and Experimental Designs

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Barking Up the Right Tree: Are Small Groups Rational Agents?

Both mainstream economics and its critics have focused on models of individual rational agents even though most important decisions are made by small groups. Little systematic work has been done to study the behavior of small groups as decision-making agents in markets and other strategic games. This may limit the relevance of both economics and its critics to the objective of developing an understanding of how most important decisions are made. In order to gain some insight into this issue, this paper compares group and individual economic behavior. The objective of the research is to learn whether there are systematic differences between decisions made by groups and individual agents in market environments characterized by risky outcomes. A quantitative measure of deviation from minimallyrational decisions is used to compare group and individual behavior in common value auctions.