IT Workforce Trends: Implications for Curriculum and Hiring

A panel on workforce trends in the information technology industry was held at the AMCIS meeting in Toronto, Canada, in August 2008. Panelists discussed a continuing research project about the current state of the IT workforce and future trends, sponsored by the Society for Information Management (SIM). The initial phase was a study of workforce trends in IT client companies, completed in 2006. Results from phase one revealed a shift in the mission of the information system function from delivering technology-based solutions to managing the process of delivering solutions. Client-facing capabilities were found to be critical to this mission as well as business and project-management capabilities. Phase two examined workforce trends in IT provider companies. Results indicate that provider firms are also seeking client-facing capabilities, project management and business domain knowledge over technical capabilities. Panelists compared the results of the two phases and the implications for curriculum design, hiring, and training practices. The results of this research underline a looming crisis in several areas: 1) graduates who are not trained in areas that the marketplace is seeking; 2) thin pipeline for specific technical skills; 3) increasing pressure to source IT capability; and 4) lag in university responsiveness to the needs of the marketplace

IT Workforce Trends: Implications For IS Programs

Findings in an IT workforce study support the emphasis of business content espoused by IS curriculum guidelines. Business domain and project management skills are critical to keep in house while technical skills were cited as the top skills sourced. Paradoxically, technical skills are those cited for entry-level positions. We discuss the issues raised by these findings and recommend several approaches for IS programs to consider. IS programs must offer a functionally integrated curriculum and deliver it in an experiential business context. We provide several examples of innovative pedagogical approaches and industry alliances which demonstrate mechanisms to provide students with a stronger business orientation in applying IT. We recommend a more proactive approach to enrollment including better promotion of IS programs

Developing a competency-based approach to facilitate teaching and learning of antimicrobial stewardship as part of environmental sustainability in higher education.

The environmental impact of the inappropriate use of antimicrobials and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognised by global organisations, such as the World Health Organisation and the European Union. Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) is one strategy to promote appropriate use of antimicrobials to minimise AMR and is a priority for the NHS to ensure sustainable prescribing. It is therefore imperative to support and empower future health care professionals by providing them with the knowledge to be leaders in the field of AMS. National consensus-based competencies for teaching AMS to undergraduate healthcare professionals in the UK were launched in 2018. This generic framework includes competencies relating to specific aspects of antimicrobial prescribing and infection control, and also emphasizes the importance of collaborative interprofessional working. The aim of this project is to determine which AMS competencies are required to be met by student pharmacists. This pedagogic approach will provide a guiding tool for curricula development, and will allow identification of gaps and strengths within the undergraduate pharmacy curriculum. To enable the development of a UK-wide national AMS competency framework specifically for student pharmacists, a working group of academics and pharmacy practitioners with expertise in AMS was set up in September 2022. The diverse backgrounds of group members provide a healthy mix of ideas, with academics informing the group of what may be achievable within the constraints and professional requirements of the pharmacy curriculum, and pharmacy practitioners providing input into essential AMS competencies for early-career pharmacists. Student pharmacists from a national organisation are being invited to join the group to encourage co-designing of this curriculum. Considering the UN commitment to act on global antimicrobial resistance and the NHS Sustainable Development management plan, this project is timely and of great importance to support development of future pharmacists as leaders in environmental sustainability

Doses of Nearby Nature Simultaneously Associated with Multiple Health Benefits

This is the final version of the article. Available from MDPI via the DOI in this record.Exposure to nature provides a wide range of health benefits. A significant proportion of these are delivered close to home, because this offers an immediate and easily accessible opportunity for people to experience nature. However, there is limited information to guide recommendations on its management and appropriate use. We apply a nature dose-response framework to quantify how exposure to nearby nature simultaneously potentially associates with multiple health benefits. We surveyed c.1000 respondents in Southern England, UK, to determine relationships between (a) the frequency and duration (time spent in private green space), and intensity (quantity of neighbourhood vegetation cover) of nature dose, and, (b) mental, physical and social health, physical behaviour and nature orientation. We then modelled dose-response relationships between dose type and self-reported depression. We demonstrate positive relationships between nature dose and mental and social health, increased physical behaviour and nature orientation. Dose-response analysis showed that lower levels of depression were associated with minimum thresholds of weekly nature dose. Nearby nature is associated with quantifiable health benefits, with potential for lowering the human and financial costs of ill health. Dose-response analysis has potential to guide minimal and optimal recommendations on the management and use of nearby nature for preventative healthcare

Developing a competency-based approach to facilitate teaching and learning of antimicrobial stewardship as part of environmental sustainability in higher education

Presented at the HETL 2023 conferenceThe environmental impact of the inappropriate use of antimicrobials and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is recognised by global organisations such as the World Health Organisation and the European Union. Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) is one strategy to promote appropriate use of antimicrobials to minimise AMR and is a priority for the NHS to ensure sustainable prescribing. It is therefore imperative to support and empower future health care professionals by providing them with the knowledge to be leaders in the field of AMS. National consensus-based competencies for teaching AMS to undergraduate healthcare professionals in the UK were launched 2018. This generic framework includes competencies relating to specific aspects of antimicrobial prescribing, infection control and emphasizes the importance of collaborative interprofessional working. The aim of this project is to determine which AMS competencies are required to be met by student pharmacists. This pedagogic approach will provide a guiding tool for curricula development and will allow identification of gaps and strengths within the undergraduate pharmacy curriculum. To enable the development of a UK-wide national AMS competency framework specifically for student pharmacists, a working group of academics and pharmacy practitioners with expertise in AMS was set up in September 2022. The diverse background of group members allows a healthy mix of ideas with academics informing the group of what may be achievable within the constraints and professional requirements of the pharmacy curriculum, and pharmacy practitioners providing input into essential AMS competencies for early career pharmacists. Student pharmacists from a national organisation are being invited to join the group to encourage co-designing of this curriculum. Considering the UN commitment to act on global antimicrobial resistance and the NHS Sustainable Development management plan, this project is timely and of great importance to support development of future pharmacists as leaders in environmental sustainability

Impact of glacial activity on the weathering of Hf isotopes – Observations from Southwest Greenland

Data for the modern oceans and their authigenic precipitates suggest incongruent release of hafnium (Hf) isotopes by chemical weathering of the continents. The fact that weathering during recent glacial periods is associated with more congruent release of Hf isotopes has led to the hypothesis that the incongruency may be controlled by retention of unradiogenic Hf by zircons, and that glacial grinding enhances release of Hf from zircons. Here we study the relationship between glacial weathering processes and Hf isotope compositions released to rivers fed by land-terminating glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet, as well as neighbouring non-glacial streams. The weathered source rocks in the studied area mostly consist of gneisses, but also include amphibolites of the same age (1.9 Ga). Hafnium and neodymium isotope compositions in catchment sediments and in the riverine suspended load are consistent with a predominantly gneissic source containing variable trace amounts of zircon and different abundances of hornblende, garnet and titanite. Glacially sourced rivers and non-glacial streams fed by precipitation and lakes show very unradiogenic Nd isotopic compositions, in a narrow range (ɛNd = −42.8 to −37.9). Hafnium isotopes, on the other hand, are much more radiogenic and variable, with ɛHf between −18.3 and −0.9 in glacial rivers, and even more radiogenic values of +15.8 to +46.3 in non-glacial streams. Although relatively unradiogenic Hf is released by glacial weathering, glacial rivers actually fall close to the seawater array in Hf-Nd isotope space and are not distinctly unradiogenic. Based on their abundance in rocks and sediments and their isotope compositions, different minerals contribute to the radiogenic Hf in solution with a decreasing relevance from garnet to titanite, hornblende and apatite. Neodymium isotopes preclude a much stronger representation of titanite, hornblende and apatite in solution, such as might result from differences in dissolution rates, than estimated from mineral abundance. The strong contrast in Hf isotope compositions between glacial rivers and non-glacial streams results mostly from different contributions from garnet and zircon, where zircon weathering is more efficient in the subglacial environment. A key difference between glacial and non-glacial waters is the water-rock interaction time. While glacial rivers receive continuous contributions from long residence time waters of distributed subglacial drainage systems, non-glacial streams are characterized by fast superficial drainage above the permafrost horizon. Therefore, the increased congruency in Hf isotope weathering in glacial systems could simply reflect the hydrological conditions at the base of the ice-sheet and glaciers, with zircon weathering contributions increasing with water-rock interaction time

Improved adherence with once-daily versus twice-daily dosing of mometasone furoate administered via a dry powder inhaler: a randomized open-label study

Background Poor adherence with prescribed asthma medication is a major barrier to positive treatment outcomes. This study was designed to determine the effect of a once-daily administration of mometasone furoate administered via a dry powder inhaler (MF-DPI) on treatment adherence compared with a twice-daily administration. Methods This was a 12-week open-label study designed to mimic an actual clinical setting in patients ≥12 years old with mild-to-moderate persistent asthma. Patients were randomized to receive MF-DPI 400 μg once-daily in the evening or MF-DPI 200 μg twice-daily. Adherence was assessed primarily using the number of actual administered doses reported from the device counter divided by the number of scheduled doses. Self-reports were also used to determine adherence. Health-related quality of life, healthcare resource utilization, and days missed from work or school were also reported. Results 1233 patients were randomized. The mean adherence rates, as measured by the automatic dose counter, were significantly better (P < 0.001) with MF-DPI 400 μg once-daily in the evening (93.3%) than with MF-DPI 200 μg twice-daily (89.5%). Mean adherence rates based on self-reports were also significantly better (P < 0.001) with MF-DPI 400 μg QD PM (97.2%) than with MF-DPI 200 μg twice-daily (95.3%). Adherence rates were lower in adolescents (12-17 years old). Health-related quality of life improved by 20% in patients using MF-DPI once-daily in the evening and by 14% in patients using MF-DPI twice-daily. Very few (<8%) patients missed work/school. Conclusion Mean adherence rates were greater with a once-daily dosing regimen of MF-DPI than with a twice-daily dosing regimen. This trial was completed prior to the ISMJE requirements for trial registration

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

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

Managing Stormwater Erosion of Unpaved Sand Roads on Fraser Island, Queensland

A network of unpaved sand roads exists on Fraser Island, to provide access to the sand dunes, rainforests and lakes of the World Heritage listed natural wonderland. During rainstorm events, overland flow can occur along sand roads causing severe rilling and gullying, and removal of sand by water erosion. Substantial effort and resources are required to maintain the roads to a useable condition. Continual degradation of the sand road network by water erosion from storm events may restrict long term access to the area. Water erosion modelling methods used for agriculture soil loss studies will be directly used to analyse the factors causing sand erosion by surface runoff. The data collected from water balance test plot studies can be used to design hydraulic structures to limit surface flow water velocities below threshold values for soil erosion, and deviate the water flow to vegetated areas having higher infiltration rates. The design and frequency of the hydraulic structures across the roads is in the form of rollover crossbanks with dimensions controlled by discharge rates of overland flow, threshold water velocities for erosion, and wheel-base dimensions of vehicles traversing the roads