Shaping the future for primary care education and training project. Education and training provision to deliver integrated health & social care: course finder

Within the Shaping the Future for Primary Care Education and Training Project, the literature review concerning integrated health and social care identified a number of implications or recommendations for service and education. For education, these recommendations may be categorised under a number of headings or themes: Team working, Communication, Role Awareness, Practice Development and Leadership,Partnership Working. It would follow that if agencies in the North West are to deliver truly integrated health and social care services, educational curricula across the region should cover these themes. Prior to the Shaping the Future Project there was no simple way of looking across the entire region to gain insights into current education and training provision. One of the core objectives of the Shaping the Future Project was to develop a webbased Course Finder tool and to map existing regional provision of education and training which can support the delivery of integrated health and social care service

Interpretation of an international terminology standard in the development of a logic-based compositional terminology

Purpose: Version 1.0 of the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP®) is a logic-based compositional terminology. International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 18104:2003 Health Informatics¿Integration of a reference terminology model for nursing is an international standard to support the development, testing and implementation of nursing terminologies. Methods: This study examines how ISO 18104:2003 has been interpreted in the development of ICNP® Version 1.0 by identifying mappings between ICNP® and the ISO standard. Representations of diagnostic and interventional statements within ICNP® are also analyzed according to the requirements mandated by the ISO standard. Results: All structural components of ISO 18104:2003 i.e. semantic categories, semantic domains, qualifiers and semantic links are represented either directly or in interpreted form within ICNP®. The formal representations within ICNP® of diagnostic and interventional statements meet the requirement of the ISO standard. Conclusions: The findings of this study demonstrate that ICNP® Version 1.0 conforms to ISO 18104:2003. More importantly perhaps, this study provides practical examples of how components of a terminology standard might be interpreted and it examines how such a standard might be used to support the definition of high-level schemata in developing logic-based compositional terminologies

Factors that influence public engagement with eHealth: a literature review

Purpose: Public engagement with eHealth is generally viewed as beneficial. However, despite the potential benefits, public engagement with eHealth services remains variable. This article explores reasons for this variability through a review of published international literature. Methods: A focused search, conducted in January 2009, of three bibliographic databases, MEDLINE, CINAHL and EMBASE, returned 2622 unique abstracts. Results: Fifty articles met the inclusion criteria for the review. Four main types of eHealth service were identified: health information on the Internet; custom-made online health information; online support; and telehealth. Public engagement with these services appears to depend on a number of factors: characteristics of users; technological issues; characteristics of eHealth services; social aspects of use; and eHealth services in use. Conclusions: Recommendations for policy makers, developers, users and health professionals, include: targeting efforts towards those underserved by eHealth; improving access; tailoring services to meet the needs of a broader range of users; exploiting opportunities for social computing; and clarifying of the role of health professionals in endorsement, promotion and facilitation

Logical ontology for mediating between nursing intervention terminology systems

Objectives: Several researchers have proposed the use of logical ontologies as reference terminologies'. However, there are a number of unresolved issues. This article describes the development of a logical ontology for nursing interventions and presents the results of evaluation. Methods: Initially this study involved the development in GRAIL of two separate experimental ontologies: an ontology based on the textual content of informal definitions for nursing interventions drown from the Nursing interventions Classification; and an ontology based On labels for the some nursing interventions. Following initial bench-testing, the ontology based on labels was selected for extension (to accommodate also nursing intervention components of the Home Health Care Classification System and the Omaha System), for further testing and for external evaluation. Results: A hierarchy of nursing interventions generated automatically from the experimental antolagy based on informal definitions cantained only 3 hierarchical relationships, compared to 214 for the initial ontology based on labels. For the final extended ontology based on labels, the generated hierarchy contained the three source terminology systems in entirety - there were a total of 2861 hierarchical relationships. While the results of comporative bench testing of the final ontology were fovourable, the results of external evaluation were mixed and showed little agreement between reviewers. Conclusion: This study suggests that while a logical ontology based on labels might be a useful tool for mediating between nursing intervention terminology systems, a formative consensus type development methodology might improve the approach by helping to harmonise ideological differences that may exist across the nursing profession