SBAR, communication, and patient safety: an integrated literature review

Communication errors are a common cause of adverse patient safety events in the healthcare field. The Situation-Background-Assessment-Recommendation (SBAR) communication tool was introduced in 2002 to guide the communication of critical patient-care information. The purpose of this integrated literature review was to determine how the use of the SBAR tool during handoff of critical information affects communication between healthcare providers and patient safety. An integrated literature review approach was chosen due to the varying methodologies and multiple variables that have been used in the study of SBAR. The combined search terms of “SBAR”, “Communication”, and “Patient Safety” were entered into PubMed, the Cumulative Index of Nursing Research, and Cochrane databases to find English language, peer reviewed articles published within the last 10 years. The resulting articles were then analyzed for recurring themes. Review of the literature resulted in the following themes: the SBAR tool creates a common language for communication, increases the confidence of users, results in more effective and efficient communication, improves patient safety outcomes, and promotes a culture of patient safety in healthcare organizations. The benefits of SBAR can be divided into primary and secondary benefits. Primary benefits result from characteristics unique to the SBAR tool, while secondary benefits result from the standardization process of communication. The primary benefits may make SBAR more advantageous than other standardized communication tools. Communication errors are a systemic problem in healthcare, often resulting in patient harm. Evidence of this review indicates SBAR as a simple and effective intervention for improving communication and patient safety

Student perception of academic grading: personality, academic orientation, and effort

Factors influencing student perceptions of academic grading were examined, with an emphasis on furthering understanding of the relevance of effort to students’ conceptualization of grading. Students demonstrated a conceptualization of grading where effort should be weighted comparably to actual performance in importance to the composition of a grade, with the expectation that grade allocation should reflect this perception. Students suggested a compensatory effect of effort in grade assignment, where a subjectively perceived high level of effort was expected to supplement low performance on a task. Furthermore, students perceived professors as less fair and less competent when they were perceived to not be able to adequately account for students’ subjective perception of effort. In addition, student perceptions of grading were examined in relation to student-possessed learning orientation (LO), grade orientation (GO), and aspects of personality. Prototypically, individuals high in LO tend to be motivated by the acquisition of knowledge, while those high in GO tend to be driven by the acquisition of high grades. Conscientiousness, openness and age contributed significantly to and positively predicted LO. Inversely, conscientiousness, openness and age contributed significantly to and negatively predicted GO while neuroticism positively predicted this orientation. Students appear to place a heavy amount of importance on professor consideration of effort, despite recognizing the realistic difficulties in determining effort. The potential for an emerging student mentality is discussed, where students’ perception of grading is distorted by a subjective appraisal of their own effort

Public Perceptions of Crime Maps: Considering the Impact of Map Style on Perceptions of Safety

Presentation slides for a study that questions how people may interpret and understand the types of crime maps that are frequently publicly available. As public crime maps increase in use and distribution, researchers are beginning to explore the impacts of access

The international landscape of positive psychology research: A systematic review

Since positive psychology originated in 1998 as an organized stream of inquiry in theUnited States, it has inspired new theory and research on human flourishing across the world. The current systematic review presents an overview of (a) the prevalence of scientific research in positive psychology across five continents and 63 countries, (b) the characteristics of the research, including methodology and topics, and (c) the influence of positive psychology in expanding established lines of research in new ways. Through an analysis of 863 peer-reviewed positive psychology articles, this review attempts to map the international landscape of positive psychology research. Further, it responds to relevant critiques of the field, confirming some and dispelling others. Finally, recommendations are shared for future directions to build a more culturally responsive field of positive psychology that is committed to the advancement of flourishing and wellbeing in the global context

Modelling the effects of road pricing

The classical road tolling problem is to toll network links such that under the principles of Wardropian User Equilibrium (UE) assignment, a System Optimising (SO) flow pattern is obtained. Such toll sets are however non-unique and further optimisation is possible: for example, minimal revenue tolls create the desired SO flow pattern at minimal additional cost to the user. In the case of deterministic assignment, the minimal revenue toll problem is capable of solution by various methods, such as linear programming (Bergendorff et al, 1997) and by reduction to a multi-commodity max- flow problem (Dial, 2000). However, these methods are restricted in their application to small networks or problems of special structure.However, it is generally accepted that deterministic models are less realistic than stochastic, and thus it is of interest to investigate the principles of tolling under stochastic modelling conditions. This thesis develops methodologies to examine the minimal revenue toll problem in the case of Stochastic User Equilibrium. In examining the case of Stochastic User Equilibrium the ‘desired flow pattern’ to be created must first be determined. The classical economics solution of replacing cost flow functions with marginal cost flow functions does not generally result in the total network cost being minimised in the stochastic case. Thus tolls which are analogous to Marginal Social Cost Pricing (MSCP) in the deterministic case do not give the System Optimal solution but do result in drivers being charged for their externalities. If the true system optimal flow pattern is desired it may be possible to derive tolls which are unrelated to MSCP. This thesis examines tolling methodologies to achieve or to closely approach the deterministic SO solution under SUE and examines both path-based exact methods and link-based heuristic methods.It may however be considered to be more desirable in the stochastic case to produce instead a ‘Stochastic System Optimum’ (SSO) where the perceived total network cost is minimised. The SSO solution may be achieved by applying MSCP-tolling under SUE (Maher et al, 2005). This thesis examines tolling solutions for inducing the Stochastic System Optimal (SSO) under SUE and compares such toll sets with those derived to induce SO flows.Initial work was based on the assumption of a fixed demand stochastic equilibrium model. It is clear that imposing tolls on a network, will directly affect demand as well as being able to influence route choice and this paper investigates tolling under Stochastic User Equilibrium with elastic demand (SUEED). Elastic demand may be readily included in stochastic equilibrium models (Maher et al, 1999) and MSCP tolls may be easily derived by using marginal cost functions in an SUEED algorithm. In the case of deterministic assignment with elastic demand a Social Optimum with Elastic demand (SOED) has been formulated where economic benefit is to be maximised; under this formulation it has been shown that all toll-sets associated with the flow/demand pattern which minimises the SOED objective function generate the same revenue and that marginal social cost price tolls are such a toll set (Hearn and Yildirim, 2002; Larsson and Patriksson; 1998).This thesis extends the SOED formulation to SSOED (Stochastic Social Optimum with Elastic Demand) and discusses the extension of the fixed revenue result to tolling to achieve SSOED under SUEED. It further examines the case where the economic benefit is not to be maximised and tolling may be used to achieve an SSO flow pattern for a particular OD matrix where minimal revenue tolls may be desired. The earlier heuristic used to create toll sets to induce the 'true SO' flow pattern under stochastic assignment methods presupposes that the desired flow pattern is fixed and may be determined. In the case of elastic demand, further iteration is required to account for the change in the 'desired flow pattern' as each link toll is increased and the fixed demand heuristic is extended to include this. This heuristic may also be utilised with a minor modification to produce toll sets to induce SSO solutions under SUEED and these are compared to toll sets derived to induce SO flow patterns under SUEED.Numerical results are given for small toy networks and logit-based SUE is used primarily for reasons of mathematical tractability although the heuristics derived are equally valid for use with any stochastic assignment method