Developing a novel programme for transition to nursing and graduate study at Middlesex University London using accreditation of prior learning

Poster title: Developing a novel programme for Transition to Nursing and Graduate Study at Middlesex University London using accreditation of prior learning. Authors: Sheila Sobrany, Kevin Corbett, Marion Taylor. Institution: Department of Adult, Child and Midwifery School of Health and Education Middlesex University London. Abstract: There are reportedly many overseas qualified nurses working as Healthcare Assistants (HCAs) who, for a number of different reasons, have been unable to register with the Nursing Midwifery Council (NMC). The 26-week Transition to Nursing and Graduate Study Programme at Middlesex University London in 2015 enabled 22 students to enter the final year of the BSc (Hons) Nursing programme after successfully reaching NMC progression point 2. This newly validated programme combines accreditation of prior learning (APL) with traditionally assessed theory and practice placements. Whilst our novel programme cannot offer a universal panacea to the current nursing workforce problems, it does aim to build on local potential in order to help ameliorate the situation so offering one creative solution to the current staffing crisis. It does this by helping the NHS to capitalise on its human resources by upskilling an existing HCA workforce in partnership with the local NHS Trusts and funded by Health Education North Central and East London (HENCEL), which is responsible for ensuring high quality professional education is provided across the north central London area. We will describe the educational processes whereby these students have demonstrably enhanced their existing knowledge, skills, attitudes and academic standards by successfully attaining NMC progression point 2. We will also critically evaluate the curriculum design and the teaching and learning processes deployed, as well as the difficulties, and the requisite development areas, arising from this new programme. For nurse educators organising and delivering this new programme, a number of challenges and lessons have been learnt which are associated with meeting the learning needs of these students and designing such a programme so as to meet the requirements of both the NMC and the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA)

An evaluation of the Islington community education provider network super hub.

‘Super Hubs’ are novel initiatives which have arisen in order to aid various workforce developments and service improvements for promoting creative thinking and practice. The Islington Super Hub is a workstream of the Islington Community Education Provider Network (CEPN) which aids the learning and development of community nursing and new apprenticeships (Health Education North Central and East London 2015). In this paper we report on the findings from a realist evaluation of the Islington Super Hub (Pawson and Tilley 1997) using data from a range of provider organisations. The following areas of direct relevance to the Super Hub’s activity will be analysed: i) the factors enabling nursing staff to transfer between sectors; ii) the variety of current preceptorship and induction programmes supporting newly registered nurses moving into community roles; iii) the current links between primary/secondary care for strengthening inter-sectoral working and the core training needed for hospital-based nurses to support patient journeys; iv) the practice learning experiences of specialist practice community nurses, such as General Practice Nurses, District Nurses and Health Visitors as well as non-specialist practitioners and health care assistants; v) the current approaches for sustaining practice-based learning for enhanced learning/development; vi) the current approaches to multi-professional education across localities which contribute to establishing robust community focussed multi-professional collaborative educational approaches; vii) the availability of student nurse placements in community settings and the associated mentorship capacity. Our analysis concludes with critical reflection on the relative merits of the Super Hub’s programme of learning and development which aims to promote creative thought/practice and the contextual factors surrounding the newly emerging apprenticeship roles. References Health Education North Central and East London (2015) Nursing and Midwifery Education Strategy. London: Health Education North Central and East London. Pawson R, Tilley N (1997) Realistic Evaluation. London: Sag

Building the Evryscope: Hardware Design and Performance

The Evryscope is a telescope array designed to open a new parameter space in optical astronomy, detecting short timescale events across extremely large sky areas simultaneously. The system consists of a 780 MPix 22-camera array with an 8150 sq. deg. field of view, 13" per pixel sampling, and the ability to detect objects down to Mg=16 in each 2 minute dark-sky exposure. The Evryscope, covering 18,400 sq.deg. with hours of high-cadence exposure time each night, is designed to find the rare events that require all-sky monitoring, including transiting exoplanets around exotic stars like white dwarfs and hot subdwarfs, stellar activity of all types within our galaxy, nearby supernovae, and other transient events such as gamma ray bursts and gravitational-wave electromagnetic counterparts. The system averages 5000 images per night with ~300,000 sources per image, and to date has taken over 3.0M images, totaling 250TB of raw data. The resulting light curve database has light curves for 9.3M targets, averaging 32,600 epochs per target through 2018. This paper summarizes the hardware and performance of the Evryscope, including the lessons learned during telescope design, electronics design, a procedure for the precision polar alignment of mounts for Evryscope-like systems, robotic control and operations, and safety and performance-optimization systems. We measure the on-sky performance of the Evryscope, discuss its data-analysis pipelines, and present some example variable star and eclipsing binary discoveries from the telescope. We also discuss new discoveries of very rare objects including 2 hot subdwarf eclipsing binaries with late M-dwarf secondaries (HW Vir systems), 2 white dwarf / hot subdwarf short-period binaries, and 4 hot subdwarf reflection binaries. We conclude with the status of our transit surveys, M-dwarf flare survey, and transient detection.Comment: 24 pages, 24 figures, accepted PAS

Speedy Transactions in Multicore In-Memory Databases

Silo is a new in-memory database that achieves excellent performance and scalability on modern multicore machines. Silo was designed from the ground up to use system memory and caches efficiently. For instance, it avoids all centralized contention points, including that of centralized transaction ID assignment. Silo's key contribution is a commit protocol based on optimistic concurrency control that provides serializability while avoiding all shared-memory writes for records that were only read. Though this might seem to complicate the enforcement of a serial order, correct logging and recovery is provided by linking periodically-updated epochs with the commit protocol. Silo provides the same guarantees as any serializable database without unnecessary scalability bottlenecks or much additional latency. Silo achieves almost 700,000 transactions per second on a standard TPC-C workload mix on a 32-core machine, as well as near-linear scalability. Considered per core, this is several times higher than previously reported results.Engineering and Applied Science

EvryFlare II: Rotation Periods of the Cool Flare Stars in TESS Across Half the Southern Sky

We measure rotation periods and sinusoidal amplitudes in Evryscope light curves for 122 two-minute K5-M4 TESS targets selected for strong flaring. The Evryscope array of telescopes has observed all bright nearby stars in the South, producing two-minute cadence light curves since 2016. Long-term, high-cadence observations of rotating flare stars probe the complex relationship between stellar rotation, starspots, and superflares. We detect periods from 0.3487 to 104 d, and observe amplitudes from 0.008 to 0.216 g' mag. We find the Evryscope amplitudes are larger than those in TESS with the effect correlated to stellar mass (p-value=0.01). We compute the Rossby number (Ro), and find our sample selected for flaring has twice as many intermediate rotators (0.040.44) rotators; this may be astrophysical or a result of period-detection sensitivity. We discover 30 fast, 59 intermediate, and 33 slow rotators. We measure a median starspot coverage of 13% of the stellar hemisphere and constrain the minimum magnetic field strength consistent with our flare energies and spot coverage to be 500 G, with later-type stars exhibiting lower values than earlier-types. We observe a possible change in superflare rates at intermediate periods. However, we do not conclusively confirm the increased activity of intermediate rotators seen in previous studies. We split all rotators at Ro~0.2 into Prot10 d bins to confirm short-period rotators exhibit higher superflare rates, larger flare energies, and higher starspot coverage than do long-period rotators, at p-values of 3.2 X 10^-5, 1.0 X 10^-5, and 0.01, respectively.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. Ancillary machine-readable files included. Accepted for publication in ApJ (proofs submitted). Includes significant new material, including starspot color that depends on stellar mass, more rotation periods, potential changes in activity during spin-down, and examples of binary rotator