Designing a competency based program to facilitate the progression of experienced engineering technologists to professional engineer status

This paper describes the pedagogical principles that underpin the design of the Master of Engineering Practice, a distance education program offered by the University of Southern Queensland. This innovative program enables experienced engineering technologists to use their workplace learning to assemble portfolios that demonstrate their achievement of many of the competencies defined for a graduate of the program. Students are required to be self-directed learners and to use reflective practices to assess their own learning. Following a self-assessment process undertaken in the first course in the program, each student prepares a Pathway to Graduation Plan which they then follow through to graduation. Graduates of the program are able to become registered as Chartered Professional Engineers

Client Empowerment and Quality Assurance

Measurements of quality in social care services in the UK have generally been concerned with regularly measuring performance in terms of Quality Indicators or Best Value reports. Although these quality measures quite often involve user satisfaction surveys, the methodology does not allow for the user to give a holistic response about the service they have received nor is there any sense of client empowerment around measuring quality in this way. What is not measured is the link between quality assurance, quality enhancement and client empowerment, nor whether empowerment is defined as a process, an intervention or an outcome. This paper utilises qualitative methodologies that enables users and carers to tell their own stories and suggests that client empowerment as a process is central to the future direction of quality assurance and quality enhancement policies in the UK and in an international context. These studies of users' and carers' experiences of care in the UK and Eastern Europe involved over 500 individuals utilising an approach that allowed them to explain their experiences of the public care sector from their own perspective (Dowling 1997). In one follow up study, parents of children with disabilities designed the research tool and were involved in disseminating the findings from the research to social care organisations and the Social Care Institute for Excellence, (a government research organisation to promote innovative research that involves users and carers) (Dowling and Dolan 2001). The UNICEF research (2005) aims to utilise users and carers' experiences and views of their care to contribute to governments' polices concerning child disability and follow up qualitative research to this study is currently progressing in Bosnia, Bulgaria and Latvia. Users of welfare services are the least powerful of groups in whichever country is being studied. In terms of age, gender, material resources, class, education, ethnicity and disability they are likely to be in the most excluded section of their society although professionals who work with them and the staff who organise and develop services are often under paid and have low status too. The quality of social care services is considered in relation to three crucial issues: How can quality be measured? How can social service users and carers contribute to a quality service? How can the quality of services be improved so that innovative, participative and ongoing measurement of quality in social care organisations are developed through user and carer partnerships with social care managers and staff

To understand the meaning of disability for children, parents and providers in Bulgaria, Latvia and Russia

This research was commissioned by the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre as part of a larger MONEE (Monitoring Eastern Europe) project covering countries in transition – the 27 nations of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The MONEE Social Report combines qualitative and quantitative material in the 2005 Publication 'Children and Disability in Transition' (www.unicef-icdc.org) This paper is concerned with analysing in depth the findings from the qualitative research as the basis for recommendations that keep the voices of children, young people, families and medical and social care providers at the heart of the policy process. This research was conducted in three countries – Russia, Latvia and Bulgaria. The reason for choosing these three countries in consultation with the networking group included the issue of children's rights for children with disabilities in Russia which has been widely reported (UNICEF 1999, 2003). As the largest CIS country, Russia's influence in policy and practice in other neighbouring countries is likely to be significant. Latvia was one of the CEE countries who joined the EU in May 2004 and Bulgaria hope to join the EU in 2007. Thus these three countries are in different stages of transition. The organisations and systems for supporting disabled children are likely to be influenced by political and market transitions and these three countries are interesting examples from which to explore the concept of transition as it relates to disabled children and their families. The theoretical model that informs this research is concerned with applying the social model of disability to families rather than individuals. The structures, policies and processes that cause frustration and disappointment affect the whole family not just the disabled child (Dowling and Dolan 2001). The social model applied in this context aims to combat the past medical and educational ideology of 'defectology' – seeing children with disabilities as defective models – which has been evidenced particularly in Russia but also all other former communist countries (Grigorenko 1998). Defectology as a professional discourse has isolated children from their families and created hostility between medical providers and parents who believe that their disabled children have been taken away from them because professionals believed it was in the best interests of their child to do so. Many of the challenges that are described by children, young people, parents and providers are challenges that need social policy not medical solutions. Medical solutions are also very important for these children. However equally important is the need for medical and social practitioners to work alongside each other, despite their professional and theoretical differences, to provide the best social, emotional and physical opportunities for children with disabilities

The impact of gambling problems on families

Summarises the available research about how gambling problems affect family relationships and family members, how families cope with gambling problems, and the assessment and therapy options available to the family members of people with gambling problems. Summary Gambling problems can have severe personal consequences, including financial hardship, emotional difficulties, social impacts, employment difficulties and legal problems. They can also have significant impacts on families and communities. It has been estimated that the gambling problem of one Australian negatively affects at least seven other people. The impact of gambling problems on families has received relatively little research attention. Although most available information is based on intimate partners and children, gambling problems can also affect extended family members such as parents, grandparents and siblings. This discussion paper summarises the available research about how gambling problems affect family relationships and family members, how families cope with gambling problems, and the assessment and therapy options available to the family members of people with gambling problems

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Automated Derivatization of Amino Acids with Agilent 1260 Infinity II LC System

Undergraduate Basi

A sexual masquerade : the performance of desire and femininity in a Fifty Shades of Grey era : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Clinical Psychology at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Within a neoliberal Western society, sex is more visible than ever, infiltrating our digital world, media, popular culture and talk. As women are assumed to have achieved sexual ‘liberation’ and ‘equality’, there has been a shift in disciplined femininity, with women now expected to maintain positions of hypersexuality in an effort to flaunt their newfound ‘empowerment’. Research literature suggests that women’s efforts in ‘doing’ or fulfilling their sexual desires remain confined by gendered performativity, being more about looking desirable or performing desire over feeling it. This research aimed to explore how young women, sex therapists and women seeking sex therapy talk about desire. Nine young women (aged 21-25), five sex therapists (trained through Sex Therapy New Zealand) and two women seeking sex therapy engaged in semi-structured interviews. A feminist discourse analysis was applied to participants’ talk, which attended to how the women and sex therapists both reproduced and resisted a heteronormative sexual script and whether women’s sexual empowerment enabled sexually desiring subjectivities. While there were points of resistance, sex was continually reconstituted through hegemonic discourses, with women’s desire remaining a gendered performance that served men’s desires and pleasures. Any assertions of women’s desire were less about their own felt experience and more about being the ‘right kind of woman’, with women who ‘failed’ femininity positioned through ‘deficit’ or ‘disorder’. Therefore, while neoliberal ideologies emphasise ‘liberation’ and ‘agency’, these appear to be a façade, instead bringing women’s bodies and sexual desire under further regulation and oppression. While the sex therapists continually attempted to attend to gendered social power relations, they too were limited through the knowledge and practices of psy-discourse that uphold a pervasive heteronormative sexual script. This research provides an understanding of the constraints placed upon the women’s sexual bodies through unequal social power relations that regulate their expressions of desire or pleasure. It therefore opens a space to reflect on these ongoing issues and emphasises the importance of practitioners attending to heteronormativity and gender social power relations as an ethical response to women’s potential as sexually desiring subjects