Examples of Best Practice in Program Assessment

This session will introduce basic principles of program assessment and its importance. It will include examples and testimonies from two department chairs who have been intentional in the development of learning outcomes for their academic programs, and in determining how their curriculum meets the program learning outcomes

Learning From Coalitions' Efforts to Promote Equity and Justice.

Coalitions and collaboratives are working to address many of the most pressing contemporary health and social issues. The articles in this special issue provide numerous insights into these complex collaborative processes across different contexts and focal issues. All emphasize and scrutinize the strategies that groups are using in their work. These strategies seek to navigate not only conventional notions of effectiveness but also the challenges of pursuing greater equity and justice. In this concluding article, we distill some of the key insights from these articles as a collective. This special issue on collaborating for equity and justice can serve as a launching point for new efforts by coalitions and researchers pursuing policy, systems, and structural changes, particularly those intent on addressing root causes of health and social disparities

How Peer Support Specialists Uniquely Initiate and Build Connection with Young People Experiencing Homelessness

Young people experiencing homelessness are often apprehensive to engage in conventional service systems due to prior mistreatment by providers and others in their lives, as well as stigma associated with accessing services. Even when relationships between service providers and young people are initiated, they often end prematurely. Mutual aid, or peer-to-peer support, has a long and promising history within the mental health field, yet has received little empirical attention in work with young people experiencing homelessness. The present study used participatory qualitative methods to understand how peers uniquely initiate and build connection with young people experiencing homelessness. Through interviews and journaling with peer support specialists and program staff, this study found that peers initiate relationships with young people by becoming familiar faces in youth spaces, identifying themselves as peers, then formalizing relationships with young people. Peers build connection by showing they are on the “same side of the glass” as young people, establishing autonomy and availability over a preset agenda, and creating containers acceptable for failure. Peers, their supervisors, and organizations building mutual aid programs may consider these findings when working to build programs which flexibly and authentically engage young people experiencing homelessness in meaningful relationships

Practice change and development : an insider view : a grounded theory study on the nature of nursing practice change

Change is a common feature of nursing, influenced by prevailing governments as part of their political agendas. These changes have impacted both on the context within which nursing takes place as well as on the actual role of the nurse. For change agents who are implementing these changes, it is imperative that they are aware of how nurses respond to change in order that they can plan the most effective strategies. This thesis investigated how nurses understand their own practice changes, the process that they undergo, how resistance to change manifests and if nursing rituals have an impact on the process. Finally the thesis made recommendations based on the findings to facilitate effective practice change and development. The study was conducted in two parts. In-depth interviews with eight nurses from one acute NHS Trust made up the first part of the study. A further two interviews were conducted with eleven mental health nurses from an early intervention team in one NHS Mental Health Partnership Trust, and this constituted the second part of the study. Constructivist grounded theory was the research method employed in the design of the study. An underpinning theoretical framework of structural anthropology with specific reference to the work of Levi-Strauss was used to present the final grounded theory. The study found that nurses understood the process of practice change as a spiral with the most significant aspects of practice change at the bottom. These were the day-to-day changes that may or may not lead to permanent change. At the top of the hierarchy and of least significance were the changes imposed by their employing organisations or nationally. The overall personal process of practice change and development was identified from the study as a process that centres on the experiences that participants have in their workplace, a process of sense making, learning and intuition. A Practice Change Model in the form of a continuum was developed that described how nurses respond to practice change and development. The significance of this study is that the thesis was able to identify strategies for promoting effective practice change and development, aimed at nurses in practice, change agents at an organisational and national level, and the clinical link role within higher education.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Burden of disease from inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene in low- and middle-income settings: a retrospective analysis of data from 145 countries

objective To estimate the burden of diarrhoeal diseases from exposure to inadequate water, sanitation and hand hygiene in low- and middle-income settings and provide an overview of the impact on other diseases. methods For estimating the impact of water, sanitation and hygiene on diarrhoea, we selected exposure levels with both sufficient global exposure data and a matching exposure-risk relationship. Global exposure data were estimated for the year 2012, and risk estimates were taken from the most recent systematic analyses. We estimated attributable deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) by country, age and sex for inadequate water, sanitation and hand hygiene separately, and as a cluster of risk factors. Uncertainty estimates were computed on the basis of uncertainty surrounding exposure estimates and relative risks. results In 2012, 502 000 diarrhoea deaths were estimated to be caused by inadequate drinking water and 280 000 deaths by inadequate sanitation. The most likely estimate of disease burden from inadequate hand hygiene amounts to 297 000 deaths. In total, 842 000 diarrhoea deaths are estimated to be caused by this cluster of risk factors, which amounts to 1.5% of the total disease burden and 58% of diarrhoeal diseases. In children under 5 years old, 361 000 deaths could be prevented, representing 5.5% of deaths in that age group. conclusions This estimate confirms the importance of improving water and sanitation in low- and middle-income settings for the prevention of diarrhoeal disease burden. It also underscores the need for better data on exposure and risk reductions that can be achieved with provision of reliable piped water, community sewage with treatment and hand hygiene

A mobile ecology of resources for Covid-19 learning

Mobile devices and a vast array of accompanying applications offer significant affordances to create, consume, share, collaborate and communicate—affordances that could be easily leveraged to facilitate meaningful learning. A positive disruption arising from Covid-19 that aligns with the affordances of mobile learning is the uncoupling of time and space in the learning process. Traditionally formal learning is a process that is predominately viewed as an experience that is ‘timetabled’— scheduled to eventuate at a ‘place’—lecture or a tutorial (or similar) in a room or lecture theatre. In this concise paper, an ecology of resources is discussed along with guiding principles for designing and facilitating uncoupled authentic and student-determined learning post the emergency remote teaching phase

Designing for Diabetes Decision Support Systems with Fluid Contextual Reasoning

Type 1 diabetes is a potentially life-threatening chronic condition that requires frequent interactions with diverse data to inform treatment decisions. While mobile technolo- gies such as blood glucose meters have long been an essen- tial part of this process, designing interfaces that explicitly support decision-making remains challenging. Dual-process models are a common approach to understanding such cog- nitive tasks. However, evidence from the first of two stud- ies we present suggests that in demanding and complex situations, some individuals approach disease management in distinctive ways that do not seem to fit well within existing models. This finding motivated, and helped frame our second study, a survey (n=192) to investigate these behaviors in more detail. On the basis of the resulting analysis, we posit Fluid Contextual Reasoning to explain how some people with diabetes respond to particular situations, and discuss how an extended framework might help inform the design of user interfaces for diabetes management