The intersection of diversity, equity, and inclusion with pediatric Patient and Family Advisory Councils

Patient and family advisory councils (PFACs) advance patient- and family-centered care within children’s hospitals but may not reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. We sought to assess PFAC diversity among children’s hospitals and explore barriers, drivers, and enablers of recruitment, retention, and engagement of patient and family advisors (PFAs) with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. We performed a mixed methods study to evaluate structure, composition, recruitment, and engagement strategies of children’s hospital PFACs. Individuals likely to have knowledge of or responsibility for PFACs at each Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) member hospital were asked to complete an electronic questionnaire. A subset of respondents from hospitals varying in size and region participated in 1-hour virtual interviews. We received valid responses from 166 (73%) of 228 CHA member hospitals. Eighty-eight percent reported having at least one PFAC. Only 21% selected “definitely true” when asked if their PFACs reflected the racial and ethnic diversity of the community served. Twelve respondents from various children’s hospitals participated in qualitative interviews. Five themes emerged: 1) Importance of Diversity in PFAC Membership; 2) Targeted, Personalized Recruitment and Engagement Strategies Facilitate Diverse PFACs; 3) Importance of Supporting PFAs from Diverse Backgrounds; 4) Ample Opportunities to Engage PFAs in Institutional Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts; and 5) External Factors as Drivers for Change within PFACs. Many PFACs are working to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion, but opportunities to close gaps remain. Findings may inform strategies to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion within PFACs across hospital systems. Experience Framework This article is associated with the Patient, Family & Community Engagement lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework (https://www.theberylinstitute.org/ExperienceFramework). Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this lens

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

Learning Geomicrobiology as a Team Using Microbial Mats, a Multidisciplinary Approach

Microbial mats are one of the best suited laminar organo-sedimentary ecosystems for students from different educational backgrounds to visualize the direct relationship between microbes and minerals. We have used tropical hypersaline microbial mats from Puerto Rico as educational tools to promote active learning of geomicrobiology introductory concepts for undergraduate students organized in multidisciplinary teams with biological and geological backgrounds. Besides field trips and independent research projects focused on microbial mats, four intensive workshops and one capstone activity were designed to expose students to the different geomicrobiology subdisciplines (microbiology, molecular biology, geology, and geochemistry). The teaching-learning process was assessed using pre- and posttests, group discussions, activities including Gallery Walks and exquisite cadaver’s, case studies, and focal interviews. While the posttest showed a significant difference in conceptual understanding, the Gallery Walk and the capstone activities demonstrated increase in the depth, coherence, and thoughtfulness in answering questions, including a clear integration of the different subdisciplines during their presentations. Finally, the main themes described by the students as important outcomes of their participation in the Research at Undergraduate Institutions: Microbial Observatory (RUI-MO) program were: (i) the opportunity to study and learn new and different science disciplines, (ii) the microbial mats were excellent tools to learn from and integrate different science disciplines, and (iii) working in multidisciplinary teams gave them the opportunity to learn fro