APEL, APL or CPD?

Acquired prior experiential learning (APEL), acquired prior learning (APL) and/or continuous professional development (CPD) in the form of short courses or degree courses can ensure current and future employment.CPD is a requirement of regulatory and professional bodies and supported by healthcare organizations.It has been recognized that patients and healthcare institutions benefit when healthcare practitioners are competent. Through CPD health professionals can keep their skills and knowledge up to date and work safely, legally and effectively. </jats:p

Never events in gastrointestinal nursing

Gastrointestinal diseases and disorders frequently require interventions that can lead to serious consequences for patients when an organization has not put in place the correct systems and processes to prevent incidents from happening, procedures have not been followed (generally due to poor observation), or when an individual disregards protocol (generally due to lack of judgment). It has been identified that over 400,000 patients suffer potentially preventable harmful events each year (Emslie, 2002). In this article, Carol Cox describes the types of risks that can lead to never events and factors that increase the potential for error

Adherence, compliance, persistence and concordance in the management of glaucoma, Part I

Adherence is laden with difficulties in relation to the management of glaucoma. Perhaps a significant issue associated with a lack of the aforementioned is associated with the patient's failure to recognize there is a need to administer their eye drops as prescribed. Undoubtedly the greatest issue is that patients experience no pain with their debilitating eye disease. It is not until there is considerable loss of vision that awareness of the need to administer eye drops becomes a reality. Understanding the complexities of adherence and its association with compliance, persistence and concordance as discussed in this article can assist the healthcare practitioner in developing models of care that help the patient in self management of their glaucoma. This article is published in two parts. Part I addresses the background to issues associated with adherence in glaucoma management including definition of terms, assessing adherence and barriers and interventions to improve adherence. Part 2 addresses the theory of adherence and self management of chronic open angle glaucoma (COAG). It provides perspectives, theories and models that can be employed to improve adherence in the self-management of glaucoma

Designing persuasive games through competition

This case study describes a game design competition that was influenced by participatory design. We consider how successful our approach was and discuss the tensions that arose during the design and evaluation process

Interregional Analysis of Federal Milk Marketing Order Reform Proposals: Results From the UW-Madison Dairy Interregional Competition Model (IRCM95)

Agricultural and Food Policy, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

Meteorological support for remote sensing programs

Many earth-oriented remote sensing spacecraft and aircraft programs are affected by the presence of clouds. Like aerial photography, they require clear or mostly clear skies. To cope with the cloud problem, the National Weather Service through its Spaceflight Meteorology Group (SMG) of the Space Operations Support Division makes cloud cover forecasts, as part of its specialized weather service for various NASA remote sensing and other programs. Forecasting requirements vary in time from a few hours out to several days and in aerial extent from a particular locality to nearly global in coverage. Depending on the stage of program development, some remote sensing programs may involve special climatological studies for planning purposes or need ground-truth data for comparison with remotely sensed information. The importance of computer and weather satellite products to the SMG meteorologist is discussed and the nature of SMG's weather support of past, present, and future remote sensing programs is described