It's about Power Stupid! - The interpretive study of environmental governance.

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Improving student retention through enhanced academic and pastoral support: A Case Study

This case study presents an innovative approach to student retention. The Integrated Learner Support model brings together professional support services and programme-focused academic support to deliver ‘the team around the student’. A redesign of the University of Northampton’s Personal Tutoring system has sought to foster a sense of care and belonging; embedding this support within curricula with triage to the wider team. These developments have been informed by best practice from the University’s Faculty of Health and Society where two senior nursing lecturers have developed an additional level of student support. Initiated originally by the Subject Lead for Nursing, these roles provide emotional and pragmatic interventions to the needs of individual nursing students as they progress through their programme. Informal feedback and retention statistics suggest that in the face of rising mental health issues in the national student population, this kind of face-to-face, caring and timely support is of clear value

Clinical outcomes associated with Hypoxia in hospitalized patients with COVID-19

Corresponding author: Madeline Sharp, University of Missouri School of MedicineThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has majorly impacted millions of people worldwide. The clinical course and outcomes of infection with COVID-19 have been studied, but there remain knowledge gaps. This study aims to investigate the impact of hypoxia necessitating inpatient and postdischarge supplemental oxygen in COVID-19 patients on in-hospital mortality, clinical outcomes, and return rates.Madeline E. Sharp, B.S., (University of Missouri School of Medicine), Rachel Stuck, M.S., (University of Missouri Value Driven Outcomes and Analytics), Syed H. Naqvi, M.D., (University of Missouri Department of Medicine)Includes bibliographical references

Work ability, age and intention to leave aged care work

Aim: To describe the work ability of mature age women workers in Australia's aged care sector, and to explore the relationship between ageing, work ability and intention to leave. Method: Logistic regression techniques were applied to a sample of 2721 responses to a survey of mature age women workers in the aged care sector. Results: Mature age women working in the Australian aged care sector have relatively high levels of work ability by international standards. Furthermore, their work ability remains high in their 50s and 60s, in contrast to some prevailing stereotypes. However, work ability is a key determinant of intention to leave in key occupational groups. Conclusion: Our findings challenge some prevailing stereotypes about the work ability of mature age workers. However, they lend support for the development of retention strategies, which incorporate programs that target low work ability

Biomedicine and Traditional Medicine: Continuities and Discontinuities in Korean Migrants' Use of Health Care in Australia

The primary task of this interdisciplinary (sociological and historical) study is to explore the question: what changes take place in the way in which culture mediates the health care choices people make when they move from one society to another and why? The empirical focus of the study is on the factors which influence health care utilization (both biomedicine and traditional medicine - hanbang) amongst Korean immigrants in Australia

Improving the capabilities of NHS organisations to use evidence : a qualitative study of redesign projects in Clinical Commissioning Groups

Background Innovation driven by authoritative evidence is critical to the survival of England’s NHS. Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) are central in NHS efforts to do more with less. Although decisions should be based on the ‘best available evidence’, this is often problematic, with frequent mismatches between the evidence ‘pushed’ by producers and that used in management work. Our concern, then, is to understand practices and conditions (which we term ‘capabilities’) that enable evidence use in commissioning work. We consider how research gets into CCGs (‘push’), how CCGs use evidence (‘pull’) and how this can be supported (toolkit development). We aim to contribute to evidence-based NHS innovation, and, more generally, to improved health-care service provision. Method Supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), we conducted semistructured ethnographic interviews in eight CCGs. We also conducted observations of redesign meetings in two of the CCGs. We used inductive and deductive coding to identify evidence used and capabilities for use from the qualitative data. We then compared across cases to understand variations in outcomes as a function of capabilities. To help improvements in commissioning, we collated our findings into a toolkit for use by stakeholders. We also conducted a small-scale case study of the production of evidence-based guidance to understand evidence ‘push’. Results Fieldwork indicated that different evidences inform CCG decision-making, which we categorise as ‘universal’, ‘local’, ‘expertise-based’ and ‘trans-local’. Fieldwork also indicated that certain practices and conditions (‘capabilities’) enable evidence use, including ‘sourcing and evaluating evidence’, ‘engaging experts’, ‘effective framing’, ‘managing roles and expectations’ and ‘managing expert collaboration’. Importantly, cases in which fewer capabilities were recorded tended to report more problems, relative to cases in which needed capabilities were applied. These latter cases were more likely to effectively use evidence, achieve objectives and maintain stakeholder satisfaction. We also found that various understandings of end-users are inscribed into products by evidence producers, which seems to reflect the evolving landscape of the production of authoritative evidence. Conclusions This was exploratory research on evidence use capabilities in commissioning decisions. The findings suggest that commissioning stakeholders need support to identify, understand and apply evidence. Support to develop capabilities for evidence may be one means of ensuring effective, evidence-based innovations in commissioning. Our work with evidence producers also shows variation in their perceptions of end users, which may inform the ‘push’/’pull’ gap between research and practice. There were also some limitations to our project, including a smaller than expected sample size and a time frame that did not allow us to capture full redesign projects in all CCGs. Future work With these findings in mind, future work may look more closely at how information comes to be treated as evidence and at the relationships of capabilities to project outcomes. Going forward, knowledge, especially that related to generalisability, may be built by means of a longer time and the study of redesign projects in different settings