Implementation of a National TeleStroke Program: A Unit-based Staff Education Inititative

Abstract A national telestroke program (NTSP) was implemented at a medical center in the latter half of 2020. Following two inpatient strokes, it was discovered that only 67 members of the 370-member inpatient nursing staff had been assigned the required online learning modules. A unit-based nursing educational initiative was developed utilizing available online learning modules to address the gaps in knowledge in recognizing acute stroke signs, symptoms and providing timely care. The educational initiative, however, supplemented and complimented the online learning modules by incorporating an in-person poster presentation on inpatient strokes that included a small group discussion of an inpatient stroke case study. This project sought to evaluate the effectiveness of inpatient stroke education. A fifteen-question, multiple-choice test served as both a pre and post-test for the educational intervention. The pre and post-tests aggregate results and the difference between them were analyzed using a two-tailed, paired t-test and Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Staff program evaluations were reviewed to determine the effectiveness of the unit-based educational initiative. A statistically significant increase in the mean post-test scores (t = -9.70, p \u3c 0.001) and a significant positive correlation of a large effect (rp = 0.55, p =.003, 95% CI [0.22, 0.76]) was observed. The staff program evaluations revealed that 99% of staff agreed or strongly agreed that they felt more confident or had a greater sense of self-efficacy to recognize stroke symptoms and in accessing the NTSP in part due to the appropriateness and effectiveness of the program\u27s teaching and learning methods

Historical Evolution and Future of Natural Resources Law and Policy: The Beginning of an Argument and Some Modest Predictions

8 pages. Includes bibliographical references Sally Fairfax, UC-Berkeley, Helen Ingram, UC-Irvine, and Leigh Raymond, Purdue University -- Agend

Intellectual Property Rights for New Seed Technologies: Balancing Farmers’ and Breeders’ Rights

Many cite improved seed technologies as vital to addressing the challenge of food insecurity, especially when faced with combined stresses of global climate change, population growth, and natural resource depletion (Anthony and Ferroni 2012; Lipton 2007). As improved seeds find their way into the developing world, policymakers are struggling to find the appropriate institutional mechanisms to regulate their creation and use. Arguments over intellectual property rights (IPR) are central to this debate. Some activists in the Global South are distrustful of any IPR regime that creates private ownership over seeds, whereas international financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) encourage stronger IPR protections for commercial seed breeders creating new plant varieties. Policymakers face two conflicting imperatives in making these policies: (1) promote improved seed development and distribution in ways that will encourage new seed innovations and protect the interests of commercial breeders and (2) protect the interests of farmers who serve as both a source of vital germplasm and as the potential users of these improved seeds. In this policy brief, we consider the sources of these conflicting imperatives for developing nations to protect the rights of commercial plant breeders and small farmers, as well as some examples of national policies trying to balance those demands

Review of the Gender and Social Impacts of Improved Seed Technology in Developing Countries: Policy Implications

Experts have acknowledged the limits to growth that the processes of climate change, population expansion, and resource depletion will place on agricultural producers in the 21st century (FAO 2012). In response, scientists are employing biotechnology to create new improved seed varieties. However, developing improved seed technology (IST) involves complex and controversial issues that span across disciplines in the biological and social sciences (see Box 1). In this policy brief, we emphasize the need to better examine the gender and social impacts of advancements in seed technology. Based on a detailed review of the literature, we determine that despite recent advancements, women and small farmers still face distinct challenges, particularly in developing countries. For example, farmers need to access a variety of resources to use IST but access to those resources is restricted by gender and class. Formal regulatory and property rights agreements can further hamper women’s agricultural potential. We suggest that policy makers (1) take into account existing gender and class inequalities in agricultural systems when crafting IST regulations, (2) work to understand how marginalized farmers may be lost in the gap between public and private IST distributions systems, (3) strive to increase transparency in how IST innovations are created and regulated, and (4) promote and support interdisciplinary research teams

Dangerous people and places : a community newspaper's constructions of crime

This thesis argues that there is a clear imbalance in the representation of crime in the newspaper, Grocott’s Mail, in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The thesis concludes that the system of marginalisation and segregation which was established during the apartheid era is the foundation for the continued segregation and marginalisation of certain groups of people in Grahamstown as depicted in crime journalism. Previous research shows that not only people, but spaces are marginalised through media representations of crime. As people are represented as dangerous, so too the spaces they occupy become dangerous spaces. Importantly, the research shows that discourses of marginalisation are present in newspaper reports reproducing the discourses prominent in society, and in turn, the newspaper itself perpetuates these marginalising discourses. This extends into the coverage that different crimes receive in newspapers. For instance, the reports show that a middle-class audience will be more concerned with property crime in middle-class neighbourhoods, than other crimes in lower-class neighbourhoods. I argue that not only the type of crime, but the severity, the effect, and the necessity for justice represented by the newspaper, are all largely determined by the region of the crime. Further, I show that the criminal is not only demonised and represented as individually deviant in the reports in the newspaper, but that these representations are made by this newspaper because they are deeply imbedded as a discourse in society. This is partly because this newspaper has taken on a monitorial role, requiring neutral reporting from journalists, and a dedication to surveying the processes of state institutions, like the police and courts. As a result, the ways in which crime is reported on in the newspaper is fairly well fixed, making it difficult for journalists to conceive of different ways of reporting crime. The representations of the criminal justice system that the monitorial media, this newspaper included present, are a careful balance between the interest of the public, and the need to preserve relationships with sources. The monitorial media in general, and this newspaper in particular, represent the criminal justice system. The relationship between the police and the newspaper, and the courts and the media, therefore strongly influences the way in which crime news is reported. In particular, crime news is represented from the perspective of the criminal justice system. This research was carried out using Critical Discourse Analysis, qualitative interviews, and focus group interviews

Norm-based Governance for a New Era: Lessons from Climate Change and COVID-19

The world has surpassed three million deaths from COVID-19, and faces potentially catastrophic tipping points in the global climate system. Despite the urgency, governments have struggled to address either problem. In this paper, we argue that COVID-19 and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) are critical examples of an emerging type of governance challenge: severe collective action problems that require significant individual behavior change under conditions of hyper- partisanship and scientific misinformation. Building on foundational political science work demonstrating the potential for norms (or informal rules of behavior) to solve collective action problems, we analyze more recent work on norms from neighboring disciplines to offer novel recommendations for more difficult challenges like COVID-19 and ACC. Key insights include more attention to (1) norm-based messaging strategies that appeal to individuals across the ideological spectrum or that reframe collective action as consistent with resistant subgroups’ pre-existing values, (2) messages that emphasize both the prevalence and the social desirability of individual behaviors required to address these challenges, (3) careful use of public policies and incentives that make individual behavior change easier without threatening norm internalization, and (4) greater attention to epistemic norms governing trust in different information sources. We conclude by pointing out that COVID-19 and climate change are likely harbingers of other polarized collective action problems that governments will face in the future. By connecting work on norms and political governance with a broader, interdisciplinary literature on norm psychology, motivation, and behavior change, we aim to improve the ability of political scientists and policy makers to respond to these and future collective action challenges

Affordable Net Zero Housing and Transportation Solutions

Today the built environment expends 43% of US energy. In the past ten years the science community has begun to tackle this issue with research on the concept of net zero buildings, or buildings that combine energy efficiency and on-site renewable energy production to use no net energy from off-site sources (Dannenberg, 2007). This policy brief explores some of the issues related to net zero construction, as well as variation in state policy approaches that support a net zero construction approach. Current issues affecting net zero are the lack of definitional clarity, the broad range of policies needed to construct net zero housing, and the cost of implementation

Improving the Computational Thinking Pedagogical Capabilities of School Teachers

The idea of computational thinking as skills and universal competence which every child should possess emerged last decade and has been gaining traction ever since. This raises a number of questions, including how to integrate computational thinking into the curriculum, whether teachers have computational thinking pedagogical capabilities to teach children, and the important professional development and training areas for teachers. The aim of this paper is to address the strategic issues by illustrating a series of computational thinking workshops for Foundation to Year 8 teachers held at an Australian university. Data indicated that teachers\u27 computational thinking understanding, pedagogical capabilities, technological know-how and confidence can be improved in a relatively short period of time through targeted professional learning