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Health care providers’ perceptions of barriers, facilitators, and acceptability of an eHealth resource: Descriptive study
No full textIntroduction: Women often experience breastfeeding difficulties leading to premature supplementation and cessation. Implementing evidence-informed eHealth resources in clinical interactions with health care providers (HCPs), both in the health department and hospitals throughout a health region may help address this longstanding clinical issue. However, the provision of an eHealth resource alone is not sufficient to increase breastfeeding rates and health literacy, as the effective implementation of the eHealth resource in clinical practice is required. As such, our study objective was to conduct a needs assessment with HCPs to determine the barriers, facilitators, and perceived acceptability of the eHealth resource. Methods: A non-experimental descriptive study was used to examine HCPs’ perceptions of barriers and facilitators to the implementation of an eHealth resource in clinical settings. HCPs completed an online questionnaire to determine barriers and facilitators informed by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR). Results: HCPs (n=44) completed the survey and agreed the resource was credible (86%), up to date (84%), covered relevant topics (91%), would ease their ability to provide breastfeeding education (82%), and would increase consistent messaging (86%). They agreed it would increase parents’ breastfeeding health literacy (91%) and help parents meet their breastfeeding goals (86%). Concerns were expressed regarding how this would be used in clinical interactions due to challenges with navigation, searchability, and the large amount of content. Implications and Conclusion: HCPs rated the eHealth resource highly; however, adaptations to the local context are required. For effective implementation of interventions in clinical settings, HCPs’ perceptions should be explored to determine their specific needs and determine how to best adapt the intervention to their setting to increase acceptability and facilitate use in clinical interactions
Integration trends of internationally educated nurses in Canada and Australia: A scoping review
No full textBackground: Canada is less successful in integrating internationally educated nurses (IENs) into the nursing workforce than other developed countries like Australia. Objective & Design: This scoping review compares the integration trends of internationally educated nurses in Canada with those in Australia. Data Sources & Methods: Nine online databases were searched for English-language studies on the integration pathways of IENs in Canada or Australia. Results: Twenty-seven articles included in the review were completed in Canada (62.96%, n=17) and Australia (37%, n=10). The articles reported on internationally educated nurse integration in the workforce (18.5%, n=5) and workplace (66.7%, n=18), and four studies (14.8%) examined both workforce and workplace integration. This review highlighted the difficulties IENs encounter during their integration in Canada and Australia. Collaboration among stakeholders in Australia resulted in better integration of IENs. Conclusion: This review suggests Canadian ministries collaborate and align their policies to support better integration of internationally educated nurses into the Canadian health system
Reframing goals and strategies for delivering humanized obstetric care in Brazil
No full textIntroduction: Despite the long-lasting efforts to promote the quality of obstetric care, Brazil requires robust changes in the care practices throughout the prenatal-labour-postpartum continuum. The ongoing National Program for the Humanization of Prenatal and Childbirth (PHPN) efforts address the fight against obstetric violence (OV), the improvement in the quality of obstetric care, but its implementation has faced obstacles and difficulties, such as responding to cultural values and operating with a weak infrastructure. This research explored Brazilian health and social service professionals’ perceptions of the PHPN’s recommendations regarding innovation, policy and practice changes necessary to respect women’s human rights to receive a high quality, dignifying obstetric care. Methods: An online multi-site survey in which data were collected (Jun 2019-Mar 2020) from health professionals working in the public health system in Brazil. Data analysis used descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Analytical themes were Perceptions of Program effectiveness to minimize obstetric violence and Program’s gaps, inadequacies and needed changes. Results: Respondents (n=369) disclosed their perceptions about the Program’s nature, utility, and gaps towards an improved implementation. Key issues were rooted in the outdated university education, reduced accountability, and governance in services’ management; unfavourable work conditions and climate; professional power-imbalance; population’s lack of information about the Program; underutilization of obstetric nurses’ and midwives’ skills; neglect of professional development; no denunciation & re-education, and culture of quality improvement. Conclusions: Firmness, hope and determination will be needed to transform society’s culture of silence about OV, awakening the public awareness and mobilizing to enhance collective health and political literacy to ensure professional accountability while protecting women and newborns. There is a need for a realignment of work processes, an investment in professional education, and education within women’s social networks for women to become partners in the active process of improvement of quality of obstetric care
Aesthetics of friendship during the COVID-19 pandemic: An exploratory analytic study
No full textDuring the covid-19 pandemic, the social and health crisis - which already configured the reality of the Brazilian population - worsened and deepened their precarious life conditions. This study seeks to analyze the conditions of possibility for nurses to establish their care practices in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, articulating with some issues brought up by the ethics of care. To this end, inspired by Michel Foucault\u27s genealogical method, as well as supported by Feminist and Gender Studies, we approach the power relations in their interface with the role of nursing in contemporary society. We then take the reports that 59 Primary Health Care nurses gave to a national survey entitled Nursing Practices in the Context of Primary Health Care: A National Study of Mixed Methods, which investigated the overload and precariousness of the work of nurses in Primary Health Care, during the covid-19 pandemic, to articulate with a brief genealogy of health care. Thus, we reflect about care practices from a perspective situated by gender and race issues, as a way of knowing, creating and recreating care practices ethically oriented by an aesthetic of friendship, as Foucault suggested in his studies on care of the self for practices of freedom
Healthcare practices among refugee older adults: A protocol for a scoping review
No full textBackground: Healthcare systems worldwide face the significant challenge of meeting the complex healthcare needs of refugee older adults. These individuals encounter numerous barriers at micro, meso, and macro levels in accessing and using healthcare in their host or resettled countries. Beyond these barriers, understanding their specific healthcare needs, healthcare-seeking behaviors, health practices, and the facilitators that enhance their access to and utilization of both formal and informal healthcare is crucial for improving their health outcomes. Objective: Our scoping review aims to capture the scope and range of evidence on refugee older adults’ healthcare needs, healthcare-seeking behaviors, health practices, and facilitators and barriers to access to and utilization of formal and informal healthcare. Methods: The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) methodology for scoping reviews along with the PRISMA-ScR framework will guide this scoping review. Literature written in English and published between 2011 and 2024 will be selected if they focused on refugee older adults who are 55 years of age and older. Scholarly literature will be searched using CINAHL, SocINDEX, Academic Search Complete, PsycINFO and MEDLINE, and gray literature will be captured by searching ProQuest’s Dissertations and Theses Global, Google, and Google Scholar. The extracted data will be synthesized, and narratively presented and supported by tables designed to align with the scoping review’s objective. Implications: The results of this scoping review will be used to offer actionable insights for healthcare providers, policymakers, and researchers. By mapping the existing landscape and identifying gaps, we also hope to inform the development of more inclusive and responsive healthcare models that address the specific needs of refugee older adults
Emergence as Method: The Virtuality of Grief and Remembrance in Memory Eternal
No full textNamed after the Ukrainian Orthodox prayer for the dead, the Canadian feminist Decameron Collective’s Memory Eternal (Вічная Пам\u27ять) is a single user a Virtual Reality work designed for Quest 2 that features seventeen distinct storytelling works which include 360 video, interactive and spatialized sound, AI generated images and video, film, as well as text. Set in a surreal and watery landscape, the works investigate our shared experiences of grief and loss at personal, societal, and planetary scales. The design of the world and the works in it center around a question: In the wake of crises, what do and should we remember, and how? Interactants’ journey through the world takes them through experiences of mourning, sitting with, and awakening to new futures.
Research objectives:
Memory Eternal was an experiment in finding interactive forms for grieving and memory work in response to personal losses, war, and the climate crisis.
Speculative practices:
The generation of the world and works in it is the product of a speculative feminist praxis asking what important relationships to the past and what forms of futurity can be attained through digital storytelling and research co-creation. The work results from years long conversations, inquiry, and artistic experimentation between the members of the Decameron Collective (Jolene Armstrong Kelly Egan, Lai-Tze Fan, Caitlin Fisher, Angela Joosse, Kari Maaren, Siobhan O’Flynn, Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof, and Monique Tschofen) anchored in an ethics of care.
Documenting / bearing witness:
Memory Eternal designs an experience that asks immersants to bear witness to individual grief, as well as participate in collective acts of grieving at a historical moment of overlapping personal and planetary crises. How can haptic and immersive interactive forms engage the thickness of lived histories? How can digital worlds create spaces of encounter that bring vastly diverse, heterogenous yet overlapping experiences together?
Theoretical framework: The theoretical frameworks that informed the production and our current understanding of the work includes memory studies (Nora, Van Abbele, Young ); (an)archives and living archives (Springgay, Sabiescu, Siegel); autotheory (Fournier, Vanyecken, Strom, Puig de la Bellacasa); interactive documentary and co-creation (Gaudenzi, Cizek); care ethics; and research-creation (Springgay, Truman, Loveless).
Methodology:
The Decameron Collective’s methodologies have been informed more by research creation principles than by those of interactive documentary, digital design, film, or scholarship. Our work is emergent, dialogic, and collective. We begin with an intention, often thematic. Broader research questions emerge through the creation, and engagement with each other as co-creators, as well as with audiences and scholars. Emergence opens space for somatic thinking and knowing as legitimate forms of knowledge. It allows for the making of surprising connections, following threads we previously did not know existed, and experimenting with dimensional thinking. And emergence centre the dialogical. As such, emergence is more of a strategy than a method, a resistance to rigid methodologies that privileges interaction as opposed to results. We will be discussing both the possibilities and the intellectual and aesthetic risks of this methodology
Exploring Virtual Bodies and Invisible Avatars as Storytelling Tools in Contemporary Narrative-Based Virtual Reality Projects
No full textContemporary narrative-based virtual reality (VR) projects engage with interactors in a variety of ways. While some projects offer a virtual body or avatar that is physically manifested, other projects might position the user as an invisible body within a 360-degree story world or offer them virtual hands that are operated by hand controllers. This presentation explores the narrative impacts of these varying representations, and the way that they foster a sense of embodiment for the interactor. Moreover, the presentation explores the ways that the interactor’s body, as a physically manifested or invisible avatar, might be harnessed as a storytelling tool to evoke or advance a narrative.
Scholars across various disciplines, including psychology, narratology, and computer science, have provided converging perspectives on VR’s ability to generate feelings of \u27presence\u27 and \u27immersion.\u27 Generally, these terms refer to a medium\u27s capacity to position users within a dynamic spatial and potentially social environment that is distinct from the \u27real\u27 world. Regarding VR, Riva et al. note that, ‘there is consensus that the experience of presence is a complex, multidimensional perception, formed through an interplay of raw (multi-) sensory data and various cognitive processes’ (2007, p. 46). Further to the psychological state of presence, the concept of embodiment captures the corporeal experience of feeling present in a virtual environment. Biocca (1997) suggests that embodiment leads to \u27self-presence,\u27 involving salient mental models of the self within a virtual setting. In the context of contemporary narrative-based VR projects, advanced graphics and head tracking technologies contribute to this sense of self- presence, as well as embodiment and immersion in contemporary VR projects’ realistically or imaginatively rendered story worlds.
This area is explored in this presentation via a close reading and phenomenological analysis of three recent narrative-based VR projects. These projects offer varying bodily representations and expressions of agency for the participant. The presentation interrogates the interactive devices and stylistic features of the three projects, noting how these allow the interactor to participate in the unfolding narratives. This analysis is guided by Kilteri et al.\u27s definition of sense of embodiment (SoE) in virtual reality (2012). This contends that a SoE can consist of three subcomponents: sense of self-location, sense of agency, and sense of body ownership (p. 375-377).
Ultimately, the presentation will argue that the specificity of VR as a storytelling format is its emphasis on embodied interactions between users, represented characters, and other story agents. This is particularly evident in works featuring a digital body representation or avatar that serves as a surrogate for the interactor\u27s \u27real\u27 body. The digital avatar empowers the interactor to shape the narrative through bodily movements and interactions with story agents, allowing real-time actions to meaningfully influence a narrative\u27s progression. However, the presentation emphasizes that a virtual body representation or avatar is not a prerequisite for a powerful corporeal engagement with a VR work. Projects positioning the interactor as an unseen observer can also leverage their physical body as a storytelling tool by necessitating user interaction with and contemplation of a scene
Using Double and Triple Integrals to Solve Problems of Mechanics
No full textThis article discusses the application of double and triple integrals in problems of mechanics. Moreover, special attention is paid to the calculation of the static moments of the considered plate relative to the coordinate axes and to the calculation of the moments of inertia of the body relative to the coordinate axes
Research on the efficiency of different energy sources for electric vehicle charging
No full textЦелью данного исследовательского проекта является изучение эффективности различных источников энергии для двигателей электромобилей и предоставление представления об их сильных и слабых сторонах
Liquid Jet in Cross Flow Modeling Under Different Weber Numbers
No full textMany applications employ liquid jet in cross flow (LJICF) configuration such as fuel spray in gas turbine combustion chambers, sanitizer spray subjected to airflow, agricultural sprays under wind conditions, etc. The Weber numbers (We) vary widely, and the model prediction across the range needs to be assessed. The present work investigates the modelling prediction for LJICF configurations by comparison with the available experimental data. Turbulence is modelled using the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach, and the discrete phase modelling is accomplished via the Eulerian-Lagrangian approach using a finite volume method-based solver. The primary breakup model used is cone injection, and the Madabhushi model is used for secondary breakup. The results for droplet size show good agreement at higher Weber numbers, while the model underpredicts the droplet sizes for low Weber number cases