East meets West: Evaluating a professional development programme for Chinese nurses in New Zealand

This paper is a report of an evaluation study to look at the effectiveness of a nursing training programme provided by one of the tertiary institutions in New Zealand. The purpose of the programme was to provide education to international nurses in order to promote their professional development through expanding their overseas training experiences

Ageing well through a cultural and professional lens

living well and ageing well are common wishes of all people. China is facing a challenge in caring for elderly people due to severely ageing population. The Chinese government endeavours to promote healthy ageing through prioritising and establishing an old-age security system. To support and ensure elderly people live well, it is crucial for health care professionals to understand the Chinese tradition in elder care and its implications for developing social policies

Teaching Ethics in Nursing Education - A case study of teaching in a New Zealand tertiary education context

Nurses face a plethora of ethical challenges in their everyday practice. In order to help trainees become aware of the multiple issues they will face beyond the classroom, nursing educators have acknowledged the criticality of having an ethical component taught throughout the nursing curriculum of a tertiary education institution. The purpose of this study was to explore what experiences and challenges nursing educators faced teaching such content and to identify the sorts of difficulties being encountered in their own classroom practice. A self-selecting sample of seven nursing educators working at a large, New Zealand tertiary institution in the North Island were interviewed. After transcribing data from the interviewing process, seven dominant themes emerged from the inductive data analysis process. A general model of teaching was adopted to analyse these multiple themes. In this respect, the variables identified in this model involved considerations of the teaching content, the teacher, the learner, the context, and the educators’ ideals. Adopting a principled approach to teaching ethics was acknowledged as a challenge by the participants because of the friction identified between culturally specific and universalist principles. Nonetheless, the importance of promoting students’ ethical awareness through the adoption of codes of ethics in the nursing programme was emphasised. Sharing cases from personal experience to supplement textual narratives was an important way to bridge the divide between theory and practice. That ethics be integrated throughout the whole nursing programme was the general consensus. The challenge in teaching ethics lies in the changing context of nursing and the changing context of ethics itself. Despite such hurdles, the nursing educators in this study were confident teachers who all had positive experiences in teaching ethics to their students

Ethics education in nursing: Now more complicated than ever

Nurses face ethical challenges in their everyday practice. Difficulties getting to know ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ can result in moral distress of nurses. Nursing educators have acknowledged the critical importance of having an ethical component taught throughout the nursing curriculum in order to promote nursing students’ ethical awareness. Yet for all of this, there is very little New Zealand research available that explores what experiences and challenges nursing educators faced teaching such content. A case study of teaching nursing ethics in a New Zealand tertiary education context was therefore conducted and seven nursing educators were interviewed to ascertain their experiences of teaching ethics to trainee nurses. One of the major difficulties identified was the friction between a culturally specific perspective and universalist one where hard-and-fast principles or codes dictated ethical practice. As the interviewees agreed, the challenge in teaching ethics lies in the changing context of nursing and the changing context of ethics itself. Despite such hurdles, the nursing educators in this study were confident teachers who all had positive experiences in teaching ethics to their students. That ethics be integrated throughout the whole nursing programme using textual narratives was a further point of consensus

Towards Omni-generalizable Neural Methods for Vehicle Routing Problems

Learning heuristics for vehicle routing problems (VRPs) has gained much attention due to the less reliance on hand-crafted rules. However, existing methods are typically trained and tested on the same task with a fixed size and distribution (of nodes), and hence suffer from limited generalization performance. This paper studies a challenging yet realistic setting, which considers generalization across both size and distribution in VRPs. We propose a generic meta-learning framework, which enables effective training of an initialized model with the capability of fast adaptation to new tasks during inference. We further develop a simple yet efficient approximation method to reduce the training overhead. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and benchmark instances of the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at: https://github.com/RoyalSkye/Omni-VRP.Comment: Accepted at ICML 202

Penta­aqua­(1H-benzimidazole-5,6-dicarboxyl­ato-κN 3)nickel(II) penta­hydrate

In the title mononuclear complex, [Ni(C9H4N2O4)(H2O)5]·5H2O, the NiII atom is six-coordinated by one N atom from a 1H-benzimidazole-5,6-dicarboxyl­ate ligand and by five O atoms from five water mol­ecules and displays a distorted octa­hedral geometry. Inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen-bonding inter­actions among the coordinated water mol­ecules, solvent water mol­ecules and carboxyl O atoms of the organic ligand and additional N—H⋯O hydrogen bonding lead to the formation of a three-dimensional supra­molecular network

Nucleate pool boiling heat transfer of SES36 fluid on nanoporous surfaces obtained by electrophoretic deposition of Al2O3

With the aim of enhancing pool boiling heat transfer coefficient (HTC), the nucleate boiling performance of nanoporous surfaces obtained by an electrophoretic deposition (EPD) method is evaluated in this paper, with SES36 as the boiling fluid. A pool boiling experimental apparatus and procedure are described. Three kinds of experiment have been performed: (i) smooth stainless steel (SS) surface with pure SES36, providing the baseline; (ii) smooth SS surface with boiling nanofluid consisting of 0.5, 1 and 2 wt% Al2O3 suspended in SES36; (iii) nanoporous surfaces, of SS coated by EPD in procedures using 0.5, 1 and 2wt% concentrations of Al2O3, with pure SES36 as the boiling fluid. In (ii), the results show that the HTC of the smooth SS surface deteriorated with increasing concentration of Al2O3. In (iii), however, the HTC increased by approximately 6.2%, 30.5% and 76.9% for surfaces prepared with suspensions containing 0.5, 1 and 2 wt% Al2O3 respectively under the heat flux of 90 kW/m2, compared with the baseline of the smooth surface in (i). The boiling behaviors are related to the modified surface micro-morphology due to the deposition of nanoparticles, as visualised by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The maximum active nucleation site density was about 2.6×105 sites/m2 for the 2 wt% EPD surface under 94 kW/m2, which is 1.8 times of the smooth SS surface. The increased site density of the nanoporous surface obtained by EPD enhanced greatly the nucleate pool boiling

Diaqua­bis­(4-carb­oxy-2-propyl-1H-imidazole-5-carboxyl­ato-κ2 N 3,O 4)cobalt(II) N,N-dimethyl­formamide disolvate

In the title complex, [Co(C8H9N2O4)2(H2O)2]·2C3H7NO, the CoII cation (site symmetry ) is six-coordinated by two 5-carb­oxy-2-propyl-1H-imidazole-4-carboxyl­ate ligands and two water mol­ecules in a distorted octa­hedral environment. In the crystal structure, the complex mol­ecules and dimethyl­formamide solvent mol­ecules are linked by extensive O—H⋯O and N—H⋯O hydrogen bonding into sheets lying parallel to (21)