Dances with disciplines? Practice and performance in multidisciplinary electronic patient record (EPR) research

Rather like archetypal stories (such as ‘Dances with Wolves’ or ‘Avatar’) that feature individuals who embark on adventures and are changed by their exposure to natives, social scientists and others have to negotiate new ways of working within the multidisciplinary team. Multidisciplinary research is valued for drawing on multiple knowledge bases to redefine problems and processes and to reach new understandings and solutions. Designing a project so that the practice and performance of various disciplines are truly interactive and interdependent rather than just parallel work-packages should offer maximum benefit but can be challenging to plan and implement successfully. A new research team brings a new set of challenges, potential barriers and facilitating factors to the table, all operating within a technologically dense environment (TDE). In this presentation, we will describe our Patient Record Enhancement Project (PREP) - the overall aim of which is to develop strategies for making available, for research and audit purposes, medical information that is ‘concealed’ in the free text parts of the primary care EPR. The research involves field work studying the creation and use of the primary care EPR to better understand the contexts within which coded data and free text forms are used. We work within a highly multidisciplinary team including social scientists, epidemiologists, doctors, statisticians, computer scientists and human-computer interaction analysts who all work on various aspects of the research in different ways. Drawing on our experiences during analysis of a particular data set- on ovarian cancer- and on insights from the field studies, we will reflect on how team practice and performance is mutually shaped and influenced. We will illustrate some of the slips and some of the successes that have emerged as we strive to function efficiently as a truly interdisciplinary team that crosses traditional boundaries of practice and performance

Ambivalence in digital health: co-designing an mHealth platform for HIV care

In reaction to polarised views on the benefits or drawbacks of digital health, the notion of ‘ambivalence’ has recently been proposed as a means to grasp the nuances and complexities at play when digital technologies are embedded within practices of care. This article responds to this proposal by demonstrating how ambivalence can work as a reflexive approach to evaluate the potential implications of digital health. We first outline current theoretical advances in sociology and organisation science and define ambivalence as a relational and multidimensional concept that can increase reflexivity within innovation processes. We then introduce our empirical case and highlight how we engaged with the HIV community to facilitate a co-design space where 97 patients (across five European clinical sites: Antwerp, Barcelona, Brighton, Lisbon, Zagreb) were encouraged to lay out their approaches, imaginations and anticipations towards a prospective mHealth platform for HIV care. Our analysis shows how patients navigated ambivalence within three dimensions of digital health: quantification, connectivity and instantaneity. We provide examples of how potential tensions arising through remote access to quantified data, new connections with care providers or instant health alerts were distinctly approached alongside embodied conditions (e.g. undetectable viral load) and embedded socio-material environments (such as stigma or unemployment). We conclude that ambivalence can counterbalance fatalistic and optimistic accounts of technology and can support social scientists in taking-up their critical role within the configuration of digital health interventions

Utopian thinking : a discourse on the culture of Leszek Kołakowski and Zygmunt Bauman

The main thesis of this article is that the utopian thinking of Bauman and Kołakowski represents a natural “hermeneutic orientation” for human beings. This, in turn, means that the human race almost instinctively attempts to discover the sense in each and every thing which it comes to experience. The concepts of culture found in Bauman and Kołakowski are anchored in the hermeneutic worldview - a perspective, which assumes that there is a sense and meaning existing beyond human intentions. What connects these two Polish philosophers in their ponderings on European culture is a nonorthodox model of structuralism rooted in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Współpraca pielęgniarki z rodziną pacjenta chorego na stwardnienie rozsianejako ważny element terapii

Multiple sclerosis (Sclerosis Multiplex SM) is classified as a chronic disease. The first clinical symptoms affecting young people make both the sick and those with immediate environment (family, life partners) face the life-long restrictions of varying severity, often connected with changing their life and professional plans. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the general principles of cooperation of a nurse with the family of a patient with multiple sclerosis. The author reviews literature and most on the base of her own experience presents the objectives and models of comprehensive care of patients with MS with regard to the therapy. The role of the nurse in the treatment of patients with MS is being discussed, as well as issues related to the coordination of care for patients with MS. In conclusion, the author states that nurses specializing in MS in most European countries play a key role in the care of patients with MS. They are an essential link in the process of MS therapy. They plan to coordinate the range of care and its implementation. They assist in the access to treatment and promote the rights of the patient. Most nurses feel the need to further education and to create new forms of education giving certain professional competence and qualifications. (PNN 2013; 2(5): 228–231)Stwardnienie rozsiane (sclerosismultiplex — SM) zaliczane jest do chorób chronicznych. Pierwsze objawy kliniczne dotykają ludzi młodych i powodują, że zarówno chory, jak i osoby z najbliższego otoczenia (rodzina, partnerzy życiowi) muszą liczyć się z trwającymi do końca życia ograniczeniami o różnym nasileniu, często zmianą planów życiowych i zawodowych. Celem niniejszej pracy jest omówienie ogólnych założeń współpracy pielęgniarki z rodziną pacjenta chorego na stwardnienie rozsiane. Autorka na podstawie przeglądu piśmiennictwa, a przede wszystkim doświadczenia własnego, przedstawia cele i modele kompleksowej opieki nad pacjentem z SM z uwzględnieniem zastosowanej terapii. Omawia rolę pielęgniarki w procesie terapii chorych z SM, jak również zagadnienia związane z koordynowaniem opieki nad chorym z SM. W podsumowaniu autorka stwierdza, że pielęgniarki specjalizujące się w SM, w większości krajów europejskich odgrywają kluczową rolę w opiece nad pacjentami chorymi na SM. Stanowią one niezbędne ogniwo w procesie terapii SM. Planują zakres opieki i koordynują jego realizację. Pomagają w dostępie do leczenia, promują prawa pacjenta. Większość pielęgniarek odczuwa potrzebę dokształcania się i zgłaszakonieczność tworzenia nowych form kształcenia dających określone kompetencje zawodowe i kwalifikacje. (PNN 2013; 2(5): 228–231

Die Palikot-Bewegung

Die Palikot-Bewegung (Ruch Palikota) hat in den Parlamentswahlen 2011 einen überraschenden Wahlerfolg erzielt und ist drittstärkste Kraft im Sejm. Entstanden war sie erst im Sommer 2010, als es zum Bruch von Janusz Palikot mit seiner damaligen Partei PO gekommen war, in der er intern sowie gegenüber anderen Parteien streitbare Positionen verfochten hatte. Die starke Seite der Palikot-Bewegung ist ihr Talent, die Sehnsucht nach einem modernen und effektiven Staat anzusprechen, und ihre Fähigkeit, sich an die Erwartungen des Infotainment anzupassen. Sie hätte die Chance, die Radikalisierung von PiS , die Ermüdung der Regierungspartei PO und die Führungsschwäche in der SLD für sich zu nutzen. Doch stehen die mangelnde Glaubwürdigkeit des Parteichefs und anderer Politiker, unklare politische Botschaften und die Unterordnung der Parteistrategie unter taktische Erwägungen ihren Ambitionen entgegen, eine dauerhaft prägende Kraft auf der politischen Bühne zu werden

Border Ends: Anti-Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, And The Mexican Revolution In U.s. Modernism

From 1910-1920, the Mexican Revolution became a source of anxiety, interest, and inspiration to those who paid attention to its political turmoil as reported in the popular press. It would lead to the reinvigorating of a debate about U.S. intervention in the political affairs of Mexico, indeed, for some, the question was one of annexation. Responding to a growing imperialist culture in the U.S., William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, John Reed and Max Eastman of The Masses were among those who looked to modernist aesthetic practice to critique military and economic expansionism in Mexico. This dissertation explores that discursive interplay between U.S. modernism and anti-imperialism through representations of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), in writing itself conceptualized as “revolutionary.” While the writers that I take up in this study each, though in different ways, represented Mexico as a site of revolutionary modernity that points to a shared, transnational cultural affinity toward constructions of “the new” as the basis of an anti-imperialist politics, each also, confronts in their writing the disrupting presence of the American Indian within this anti-imperialist vision. Each of these writers in their own way explicitly connects an interest in the aesthetics of the “new” with the colonial history of the “New World.” At the same time, they register self-consciously in their texts the contradiction of using an anti-imperialist discourse to consolidate national identity in the face of ongoing settler colonialism: the appropriation and occupation of native land, the genocide of native peoples, and the erasure of native culture. In key texts about Mexico written by Stein, Williams, Reed, and Eastman, references to a history of U.S. settler colonialism and the presence of the American Indian emerge as a limit to their anti-imperialist poetics and a challenge to their desires for the construction of a “new,” modernist national culture

Henryk Szlajfer, Paweł Ceranka (red.), My Naród... 90 lat stosunków dyplomatycznych między Polską a USA, Warszawa 2009, ss. 98

Krzysztof Flis - Białystok719920