Roles and competences for educators of undergraduate dental students: a discussion paper

Introduction Dental educators are important people who contribute to the development of every aspect of dental education. In part due to the lack of understanding of their roles and competences, dental educator development has so far received little consideration. With the aim of enhancing the dental profession's contribution to the development of undergraduate dental education, this article explores common roles of educators of undergraduate dental students and the competences needed to be effective educators. Methods This is a discussion paper based on a wide reading of the literature on the education of health professionals with a specific focus on roles and competences of educators. Results and discussion Roles of educators of undergraduate dental students typically encompass four areas: teaching, research, administration and providing healthcare. Educators may not be involved in every role; they normally perform the roles relevant to their work contexts. Competences for dental educators based on the four main roles comprise 12 domains: educational theories and principles; modes of education; learner issues; educational materials and instructional design; assessment and feedback; curriculum matters; evaluation; educational research; educational management; quality assurance; patient care and healthcare system and professionalism. Not all competences are required by all educators although educators need to be competent in the areas related to their roles and duties. Conclusion Understanding the roles and competences for educators of undergraduate dental students can help individual educators to improve their personal effectiveness and institutions to tailor staff development programmes appropriate to the needs of their staff. Faculty development contributes to sustained enhancement of undergraduate dental education

Coaching as a support function for potential entrepreneurs

Background: There is a longstanding debate on whether the practice of coaching support is useful for entrepreneurs who lack the skills and assistance needed to make a success of their businesses. Aim: To gain a better understanding of the benefits derived from coaching support, this study explores the debate on whether coaching is useful as a support function for entrepreneurs. Setting: Entrepreneurs who participated in a support intervention programme to assist them with the development or growth of their business. Methods: This study employed a qualitative research design and used 12 semi-structured, face-to-face interviews that were conducted with entrepreneurs from the Pretoria region, who received support intervention for business purposes between August and October 2015. Results: The study found that confusion still exists around the concepts of coaching and mentoring. Furthermore, it was found that both mentoring and coaching are useful as a support function for entrepreneurs, as evidenced through the benefits derived from the intervention. These benefits mainly include the development of skills, particularly of 21st-century skills, new perspectives, enhanced communication, increased self-awareness and learning, and were facilitated by learning. Conclusion: Both mentoring and coaching can benefit potential entrepreneurs; however, each form contributes different benefits. Coaching contributes to the self-development of entrepreneurs, whilst mentoring assists in the development of managerial functions needed to successfully start and grow a business. It is clear that these different forms of support intervention aid in developing different skills, and therefore, entrepreneurs should articulate their required needs before engaging support

Robust Data-driven Macro-socioeconomic-energy Model, 7see-GB, 2016

In a resource-constrained world with growing population and demand for energy, goods, and services with commensurate environmental impacts, we need to understand how these trends relate to various aspects of economic activity. 7see-GB is a computational model that links energy demand through to final economic consumption, and is used to explore decadal scenarios for the UK macroeconomy. This dataset includes the published model (*.vpm) from the source model 7see-GB, version 5-20(16Nov16). They show how results were created for the paper “Combining a computational macroeconomic model with trending of socio‐economic and energy relationships to generate business‐as‐usual scenarios”. The source model was developed in Vensim® (5.8b) and these published models can be viewed with the Vensim Reader, as provided with this dataset. There are instructions on how to navigate the published models and inspect variables shown in the paper. The .exe and .dmg files are free "Model Reader" executables for Windows/OSX which allow a user to run the model without buying the Vensim simulator.Roberts, Simon; Axon, Colin; Foran, Barney; Goddard, Nigel; Warr, Benjamin. (2016). Robust Data-driven Macro-socioeconomic-energy Model, 7see-GB, 2016, 1990-2016 [dataset]. University of Edinburgh. School of Informatics. Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation. http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/ds/1574

HDRUK: Phenotype Library: Asthma Primary Care

Recommended codes for asthma when working in primary care dat