How to conduct research in an independent hospice: practical tips and advice

Independent hospices can – and should aim to – participate in palliative care research, say Paul Perkins, Rebecca Day, Julie Hapeshi, Lorraine Dixon and Rudo Nyakuhwa, who give tips and advice based on their experience at Sue Ryder

How to conduct research in an independent hospice: practical tips and advice

Independent hospices can – and should aim to – participate in palliative care research, say Paul Perkins, Rebecca Day, Julie Hapeshi, Lorraine Dixon and Rudo Nyakuhwa, who give tips and advice based on their experience at Sue Ryder

Balanced Literacy Versus Basal Reading Instruction for Urban African-American, Title I Third-Grade Students

This study compared third-grade reading achievement of urban African-American, Title I students using a basal reading series with those using a balanced literacy program to determine whether the highly structured skills-based methods advocated by The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act actually foster or impede reading achievement in an urban school setting. Two hundred forty-five third-grade African-American, Title I students from an urban elementary school in southeastern Virginia served as subjects for the study. Subjects were studied as intact groups to avoid disruption in the educational setting. Participants in the control group were third-grade classes of urban African-American, Title I students who were taught reading through a basal approach in the 2000-2001 school year. Participants in the comparison group were urban African-American, Title I third graders who received instruction through a balanced reading approach during the 2002-2003 school year. The research site was an urban elementary school that has been designated as a school-wide Title I site because of the high number of low-income students classified as at-risk for school failure. Ninety-seven percent of the students receive free lunch. The school, which has an average enrollment of 700 children in pre-kindergarten through fifth grade, is surrounded by housing projects, apartments, and single-family houses. To address the low reading performance and test scores of the third-graders, the school applied for and received a Reading Excellence Act grant in 2001 to develop reading improvement strategies. The hypothesis of this study was that urban African-American, Title I third-grade students receiving instruction through a balanced reading approach would have higher reading scores overall than students receiving instruction through a basal reading approach. Overall reading achievement scores on the Virginia Standards of Learning Test and its subtests understanding word analysis, understanding elements of literature, and understanding a variety of printed materials/resources were examined using ANOVA (p \u3c .05). Results showed that students performed similarly with regard to overall reading achievement on the Virginia Standards of Learning Reading: Research and Literature test whether they received basal reading instruction or balanced literacy instruction. Students also performed similarly on the subtests of word study and elements of literature, but the balanced literacy group did score significantly better on the subtest of printed materials and printed resources. This study will add to the existing body of knowledge by identifying the benefits of these approaches to urban African-American, Title I students, which will assist school districts, schools, and teachers in designing reading programs to address the instructional needs of this population. It is important to note that in Title I schools, funding is tied to adherence to NCLB mandates, which endorse skills-based approaches more closely associated with basal reading instruction than with balanced literacy

Generating Reliable Collaboration Data: A Proof-of-Concept Project Using Research Administration Data

Central administration at Rutgers University requested help from the Office for Research to develop a proof-of-concept tool to count collaborations between faculty, departments, schools and chancellor units across the university. This presentation will discuss how the Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence team focused on research administration and research output data to define a “collaboration,” structure available data, create interactive visualizations and allow end users to customize the level of detail displayed. This presentation will begin by discussing the importance of generating reliable collaboration data in a university setting including use cases for the data. It will then describe the dataset that was used for the proof-of-concept project and discuss why these sources were important. Finally, the presentation will discuss future development goals and collaborators for the collaboration project

Integrated primary health care in Australia

Introduction: To fulfil its role of coordinating health care, primary health care needs to be well integrated, internally and with other health and related services. In Australia, primary health care services are divided between public and private sectors, are responsible to different levels of government and work under a variety of funding arrangements, with no overarching policy to provide a common frame of reference for their activities. <br><br> Description of policy: Over the past decade, coordination of service provision has been improved by changes to the funding of private medical and allied health services for chronic conditions, by the development in some states of voluntary networks of services and by local initiatives, although these have had little impact on coordination of planning. Integrated primary health care centres are being established nationally and in some states, but these are too recent for their impact to be assessed. Reforms being considered by the federal government include bringing primary health care under one level of government with a national primary health care policy, establishing regional organisations to coordinate health planning, trialling voluntary registration of patients with general practices and reforming funding systems. If adopted, these could greatly improve integration within primary health care. <br><br> Discussion: Careful change management and realistic expectations will be needed. Also other challenges remain, in particular the need for developing a more population and community oriented primary health care

The Persistence of Safety Silence: How Flight Deck Microcultures Influence the Efficacy of Crew Resource Management

The majority of First Officers and Captains feel that Captains establish the tone of the flight deck microculture. However, the majority of these pilots also report that as First Officers, they have hesitated to share safety-pertinent data and/or experience being silenced after sharing safety data due to a psychologically unsafe flight deck. Utilizing direct feedback from industry pilots, we explore ways that Captains can create a more inclusive microculture that elicits safety voice. The safety system designed to enhance crew collaboration, Crew Resource Management, fails to adequately establish tools for designing a psychologically safe flight deck. We conclude that Crew Resource Management training must be re-designed with a human-centered data approach to increase the efficacy of the systems

Faculty Mentoring Practices in Academic Emergency Medicine

Background Mentoring is considered a fundamental component of career success and satisfaction in academic medicine. However, there is no national standard for faculty mentoring in academic emergency medicine (EM) and a paucity of literature on the subject. Objectives The objective was to conduct a descriptive study of faculty mentoring programs and practices in academic departments of EM. Methods An electronic survey instrument was sent to 135 department chairs of EM in the United States. The survey queried faculty demographics, mentoring practices, structure, training, expectations, and outcome measures. Chi-square and Wilcoxon rank-sum tests were used to compare metrics of mentoring effectiveness (i.e., number of publications and National Institutes of Health [NIH] funding) across mentoring variables of interest. Results Thirty-nine of 135 departments completed the survey, with a heterogeneous mix of faculty classifications. While only 43.6% of departments had formal mentoring programs, many augmented faculty mentoring with project or skills-based mentoring (66.7%), peer mentoring (53.8%), and mentoring committees (18%). Although the majority of departments expected faculty to participate in mentoring relationships, only half offered some form of mentoring training. The mean number of faculty publications per department per year was 52.8, and 11 departments fell within the top 35 NIH-funded EM departments. There was an association between higher levels of perceived mentoring success and both higher NIH funding (p = 0.022) and higher departmental publications rates (p = 0.022). In addition, higher NIH funding was associated with mentoring relationships that were assigned (80%), self-identified (20%), or mixed (22%; p = 0.026). Conclusions Our findings help to characterize the variability of faculty mentoring in EM, identify opportunities for improvement, and underscore the need to learn from other successful mentoring programs. This study can serve as a basis to share mentoring practices and stimulate conversation around strategies to improve faculty mentoring in EM

What is the place of generalism in mental health care in Australia?: a systematic review of the literature

Mental health disorders are the leading cause of the disability burden in Australia. Only 40% of people with a mental disorder report receiving treatment. General practitioners (GPs) and generalist providers are essential service providers for this population. This review examines the role of generalists in Australian mental health care, the elements of care they can provide effectively, the supports they need, and the implications for workforce arrangements and policyThe research reported in this paper is a project of the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute, which is supported by a grant from the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing under the Primary Health Care Research, Evaluation and Development Strategy

BurstCube: A CubeSat for Gravitational Wave Counterparts

BurstCube will detect long GRBs, attributed to the collapse of massive stars, short GRBs (sGRBs), resulting from binary neutron star mergers, as well as other gamma-ray transients in the energy range 10-1000 keV. sGRBs are of particular interest because they are predicted to be the counterparts of gravitational wave (GW) sources soon to be detectable by LIGO/Virgo. BurstCube contains 4 CsI scintillators coupled with arrays of compact low-power Silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs) on a 6U Dellingr bus, a flagship modular platform that is easily modifiable for a variety of 6U CubeSat architectures. BurstCube will complement existing facilities such as Swift and Fermi in the short term, and provide a means for GRB detection, localization, and characterization in the interim time before the next generation future gamma-ray mission flies, as well as space-qualify SiPMs and test technologies for future use on larger gamma-ray missions. The ultimate configuration of BurstCube is to have a set of $\sim10$ BurstCubes to provide all-sky coverage to GRBs for substantially lower cost than a full-scale mission.Comment: In the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference, Busan, Kore