Exploring communication skills training in undergraduate nurse education by means of a curriculum

This study is an attempt to investigate by means of a curriculum how nurses are trained theoretically and practically throughout their specialist education to communicate competently and professionally in interaction with colleagues and patients. Research today shows that there are many different approaches to develop professionally skilled communication in nurse-patient interaction. It indicates that this aspect of nurse education is regarded as an important feature by educators. It is therefore of interest to study, by means of analysing a curriculum, how nurses’ communicative competence is developed. To this purpose a curriculum was presented related to nursing communication skills training, selected from a University College of Health Care Sciences in Sweden. Both students and teachers need clearly defined curricula to structure their studies and to evaluate communication skills. The investigated curriculum could be further developed to direct students and teachers in effective communication skills. It is of importance to have a curriculum that could be interpreted in the same way by teachers and student

Computation of Parameters in some Mathematical Models

In computational science it is common to describe dynamic systems by mathematical models in forms of differential or integral equations. These models may contain parameters that have to be computed for the model to be complete. For the special type of ordinary differential equations studied in this thesis, the resulting parameter estimation problem is a separable nonlinear least squares problem with equality constraints. This problem can be solved by iteration, but due to complicated computations of derivatives and the existence of several local minima, so called short-cut methods may be an alternative. These methods are based on simplified versions of the original problem. An algorithm, called the modified Kaufman algorithm, is proposed and it takes the separability into account. Moreover, different kinds of discretizations and formulations of the optimization problem are discussed as well as the effect of ill-conditioning. Computation of parameters often includes as a part solution of linear system of equations Ax = b. The corresponding pseudoinverse solution depends on the properties of the matrix A and vector b. The singular value decomposition of A can then be used to construct error propagation matrices and by use of these it is possible to investigate how changes in the input data affect the solution x. Theoretical error bounds based on condition numbers indicate the worst case but the use of experimental error analysis makes it possible to also have information about the effect of a more limited amount of perturbations and in that sense be more realistic. It is shown how the effect of perturbations can be analyzed by a semi-experimental analysis. The analysis combines the theory of the error propagation matrices with an experimental error analysis based on randomly generated perturbations that takes the structure of A into accoun

The Graphical User Interface of DIFFPAR

Estimation of unknown parameters from measurements of a process modeled by a system of ordinary differential equations is an important application problem found in, e.g. control theory and chemical kinetics. The purpose of this paper is to present and describe a Matlab toolbox, called DIFFPAR (DIFF erential equations with unknown PARameters), which consists of a collection of Matlab functions that can be combined to perform different types of tasks: simulation, generation of data, sensitivity analysis, parameter estimation from data (real or generated) and statistical analysis of the parameters, etc. Keywords : parameter estimation, ODE-systems, Matlab toolbox 2 Graphical User Interface of DIFFPAR Contents 1 Introduction 4 2 The design of the GUI 4 3 How to use the GUI 7 4 Concluding remarks 8 5 References 8 A Push buttons and corresponding sub windows 9 A.1 GRAPH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 A.2 SAVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...

Computation of Parameters in Separable Nonlinear Dynamic Models by Use of Short-Cut Methods

In computational science it is common to describe dynamic systems by mathematical models in forms of di#erential or integral equations. These models may contain parameters that must be computed. For the special type of ordinary di#erential equations studied in this paper, the resulting parameter estimation problem is a separable nonlinear least squares problem with equality constraints. This problem is solved by iteration and initial values can be found by use of short-cut methods. An algorithm, called the modified Kaufman algorithm, is proposed and it takes the separability into account. Moreover, di#erent kinds of discretizations and formulations of the optimization problem are discussed as well as the e#ect of ill-conditioning

Exploring communication skills training in undergraduate nurse education by means of a curriculum

Abstract This study is an attempt to investigate by means of a curriculum how nurses are trained theoretically and practically throughout their specialist education to communicate competently and professionally in interaction with colleagues and patients. Research today shows that there are many different approaches to develop professionally skilled communication in nurse-patient interaction. It indicates that this aspect of nurse education is regarded as an important feature by educators. It is therefore of interest to study, by means of analysing a curriculum, how nurses' communicative competence is developed. To this purpose a curriculum was presented related to nursing communication skills training, selected from a University College of Health Care Sciences in Sweden. Both students and teachers need clearly defined curricula to structure their studies and to evaluate communication skills. The investigated curriculum could be further developed to direct students and teachers in effective communication skills. It is of importance to have a curriculum that could be interpreted in the same way by teachers and students