801 research outputs found

    Older adults experiences of rehabilitation in acute health care

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    Rehabilitation is a key component of nursing and allied healthcare professionals’ roles in most health and social care settings. This paper reports on stage 2 of an action research project to ascertain older adult's experience of rehabilitation. Twenty postdischarge interviews were conducted and the interview transcripts were analysed using thematic content analysis. All older adults discharged from an acute older acute rehabilitation ward to their own homes in the community were eligible to participate. The only exclusion criterion was older adults who were thought to be unable to give consent to participate by the nurse in charge and the researcher. Whilst 92 older adults were eligible to participate in this research study, only 20 were interviewed. The findings from this study suggest that older adults valued communication with health professionals but were aware of their time constraints that hindered communication. This study suggests that both nurses and allied health professionals are not actively providing rehabilitative services to promote health and well-being, which contradicts the focus of active ageing. Furthermore, there was evidence of unmet needs on discharge, and older adults unable to recall the professions that were involved in their interventions and the rationale for therapy input. It is suggested that further research is needed to explore the effectiveness of allied health rehabilitation in the acute setting. This study highlights the need for further research into older adults’ perceptions of the rehabilitation process in the acute setting

    Cues and knowledge structures used by mental-health professionals when making risk assessments

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    Background: Research into mental-health risks has tended to focus on epidemiological approaches and to consider pieces of evidence in isolation. Less is known about the particular factors and their patterns of occurrence that influence clinicians’ risk judgements in practice. Aims: To identify the cues used by clinicians to make risk judgements and to explore how these combine within clinicians’ psychological representations of suicide, self-harm, self-neglect, and harm to others. Method: Content analysis was applied to semi-structured interviews conducted with 46 practitioners from various mental-health disciplines, using mind maps to represent the hierarchical relationships of data and concepts. Results: Strong consensus between experts meant their knowledge could be integrated into a single hierarchical structure for each risk. This revealed contrasting emphases between data and concepts underpinning risks, including: reflection and forethought for suicide; motivation for self-harm; situation and context for harm to others; and current presentation for self-neglect. Conclusions: Analysis of experts’ risk-assessment knowledge identified influential cues and their relationships to risks. It can inform development of valid risk-screening decision support systems that combine actuarial evidence with clinical expertise

    Exploring Preceptorship Programmes: Implications for Future Design

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    This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Taylor, L. M., Eost‐Telling, C. L. & Ellerton, A. (2018). Exploring Preceptorship Programmes: Implications for Future Design. Journal of Clinical Nursing, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.14714. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving• Aims and objectives: To review and analyse current preceptorship programmes within NHS trusts in the North West of England. To evaluate the pedagogic rigour of the programme and suggest recommendations to inform the future design of preceptorship programmes. • Background: Enhancing the retention of newly qualified staff is of particular importance given that the journey from a new registrant to a competent healthcare professional poses a number of challenges, for both the individual staff member and organisations. • Design: A mixed methods evaluative approach was employed, using online questionnaires and content analysis of preceptorship documentation. • Methods: Forty-one NHS trusts across the North West region employing newly qualified nurses were invited to participate in the completion of an online questionnaire. In addition, preceptorship programme documentation was requested for inclusion in the content analysis. This study utilised the SQUIRE (Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence) guidelines. • Results: The response rate for the questionnaire was 56.1% (n=23). Eighteen trusts (43.9%) forwarded their programme documentation. Findings highlighted the wide variation in preceptorship programmes across the geographical footprint. • Conclusions: There were instances of outstanding preceptorship and preceptorship programmes where there was a clear link between the strategic vision, i.e., trust policy, and its delivery, i.e. preceptorship offering. There was no one framework that would universally meet the needs of all trusts, yet there are key components which should be included in all preceptorship programmes. Therefore, we would encourage innovation and creativity in preceptorship programmes, cognisant of local context. Relevance to clinical practice: The significant shortage of nursing staff in England is an ongoing issue. Recruitment and retention are key to ameliorating the shortfall, and formal support mechanisms like preceptorship, can improve the retention of newly qualified staff. Understanding current preceptorship programmes is an important first step in establishing the fundamental building blocks of successful preceptorship programmes and enabling the sharing of exemplary good practice across organisations

    Using XML and XSLT for flexible elicitation of mental-health risk knowledge

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    Current tools for assessing risks associated with mental-health problems require assessors to make high-level judgements based on clinical experience. This paper describes how new technologies can enhance qualitative research methods to identify lower-level cues underlying these judgements, which can be collected by people without a specialist mental-health background. Methods and evolving results: Content analysis of interviews with 46 multidisciplinary mental-health experts exposed the cues and their interrelationships, which were represented by a mind map using software that stores maps as XML. All 46 mind maps were integrated into a single XML knowledge structure and analysed by a Lisp program to generate quantitative information about the numbers of experts associated with each part of it. The knowledge was refined by the experts, using software developed in Flash to record their collective views within the XML itself. These views specified how the XML should be transformed by XSLT, a technology for rendering XML, which resulted in a validated hierarchical knowledge structure associating patient cues with risks. Conclusions: Changing knowledge elicitation requirements were accommodated by flexible transformations of XML data using XSLT, which also facilitated generation of multiple data-gathering tools suiting different assessment circumstances and levels of mental-health knowledge

    Assessing Espoused Goals in Private Family Firms Using Content Analysis

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    Understanding how private family firms gauge performance is of great interest to family business scholars. Unfortunately, finding comparable data to understand differences in the performance of such firms is challenging. This study draws from the organizational identity literature to show how private family firms communicate different goals in publicly available organizational narratives. The authors illustrate a process using content analysis that allows family business scholars to create a comparative data set that captures both normative and utilitarian goals using website and press release narratives from a sample of Australian firms.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

    Erasmus Language students in a British University – a case study

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    Students’ assessment of their academic experience is actively sought by Higher Education institutions, as evidenced in the National Student Survey introduced in 2005. Erasmus students, despite their growing numbers, tend to be excluded from these satisfaction surveys, even though they, too, are primary customers of a University. This study aims to present results from bespoke questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with a sample of Erasmus students studying languages in a British University. These methods allow us insight into the experience of these students and their assessment as a primary customer, with a focus on language learning and teaching, university facilities and student support. It investigates to what extent these factors influence their levels of satisfaction and what costs of adaptation if any, they encounter. Although excellent levels of satisfaction were found, some costs affect their experience. They relate to difficulties in adapting to a learning methodology based on a low number of hours and independent learning and to a guidance and support system seen as too stifling. The results portray this cohort’s British University as a well-equipped and well-meaning but ultimately overbearing institution, which may indicate that minimising costs can eliminate some sources of dissatisfaction

    Asexuality: Classification and characterization

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    This is a post-print version of the article. The official published version can be obtaineed at the link below.The term “asexual” has been defined in many different ways and asexuality has received very little research attention. In a small qualitative study (N = 4), individuals who self-identified as asexual were interviewed to help formulate hypotheses for a larger study. The second larger study was an online survey drawn from a convenience sample designed to better characterize asexuality and to test predictors of asexual identity. A convenience sample of 1,146 individuals (N = 41 self-identified asexual) completed online questionnaires assessing sexual history, sexual inhibition and excitation, sexual desire, and an open-response questionnaire concerning asexual identity. Asexuals reported significantly less desire for sex with a partner, lower sexual arousability, and lower sexual excitation but did not differ consistently from non-asexuals in their sexual inhibition scores or their desire to masturbate. Content analyses supported the idea that low sexual desire is the primary feature predicting asexual identity

    Assessing the design of accounting modules across UK higher educational institutions

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    The purpose of this article is to uncover how accounting modules are designed across UK Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). We carried out a content analysis of Undergraduate Year 1 Accounting Module Handbooks for a sample of 12 UK Universities. The study finds considerable heterogeneity concerning the way accounting modules are designed and delivered across the UK HE sector. Our findings reveal significant variations across the sector in terms of credit hours, module learning outcomes and assessment strategies. This research contributes to accounting/business education literature as no study has previously utilised a content analysis approach to understand how accounting modules are designed and delivered across UK HEIs
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