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Impact of e-mentoring on online conversations by adolescents with complex communication needs
No full textThis abstract was prepared for the inaugural 'HDR Student Conference', Flinders University, November 2018. Copyright © the authorIntroduction: Adolescents with complex communication needs (CCN) have limited use of natural speech for communication and use a range of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) methods. They experience difficulties in face-to-face conversations. Enhancing participation in everyday life is a key goal of AAC interventions. Methodology: This mixed methods research explored changes in social media use and participation in online conversations by adolescents with CCN following an e-mentoring intervention. Methods: Four mentees and two mentors with CCN participated in the four month e-mentoring intervention. Multiple baseline single case experimental design was used to investigate the effects of the intervention on participation in online conversations. Online conversations of the mentees were collected before, during and after the e-mentoring intervention over a period up to 34 weeks. Measures of goal attainment were used to describe changes in social media use. Computer Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA) was used to investigate changes in participation in online conversation. Fidelity measures of the mentoring intervention were also collected. Results: Participants demonstrated improvements in their social media use goals and in hours spent in online conversations following the intervention. CMDA demonstrated increases in conversational turns and functions following the intervention. Conclusion: This research demonstrates the feasibility of e-mentoring interventions for adolescents with CCN. Variability in the data compromised the ability to interpret the effect of the intervention. Increases in participation in online conversations were observed for some measures. Implications: These findings provide evidence that online conversations are a valuable context for providing AAC interventions and reinforce our understanding of the complex and inter-directional relationships between activity, participation, environmental and personal factors
Transformative consumer focussed research
No full textThis abstract was prepared for the inaugural 'HDR Student Conference', Flinders University, November 2018. Copyright © the authorTransformative research designs and consumer focussed approache
Learning from students: facilitators' learning in interprofessional placements
Get PDFThis manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This author accepted manuscript is made available following 12 month embargo from date of publication (May 2018) in accordance with the publisher’s archiving policyFew studies have examined experiences and learning from the viewpoint of interprofessional facilitators of student placements, and limited research has investigated this learning enacted across traditional service boundaries or between health and education practitioners. This study aimed to address these gaps by exploring perceptions about the learning and experiences of Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) who facilitated placements in childcare settings for speech-language pathology students from a health professional background. Lave and Wenger’s theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation was utilised to design and interpret this study. Seven ECEs from two childcare centres and four Centre Directors participated in focus groups and individual semi structured interviews respectively. Thematic analysis revealed five themes that described how the ECEs came to accept the students as legitimate members of their practice community, and how this subsequently facilitated the ECEs’ learning. The themes of power described in previous studies that explored status and hierarchical differences between facilitators and students from differing professions were not identified in this study. This absence of observed power differential, in addition to the embedded nature of the placement design, and the students’ participation in the ECEs’ everyday activities and routines contributed to the ECEs’ positive interprofessional learning
Real-world use of fidaxomicin in a large UK tertiary hospital: how effective is it for treating recurrent disease?
Get PDFThis manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This author accepted manuscript is made available following 12 month embargo from date of publication (May 2018) in accordance with the publisher’s archiving policyAll courses of fidaxomicin use in the study hospital were reviewed. It was used for first recurrence (six times), second recurrence (eight times) and one case of third recurrence. One patients received fidaxomicin as first-line treatment. Eight patients initially responded to therapy; of these, three patients were asymptomatic at 90 days, three patients remained asymptomatic at 30 days, and two patients had recurrences five and nine days after stopping therapy. Four patients failed to respond; of these, two patients required faecal transplantation and one patient required a colectomy. Two patients deteriorated and two patients died. Fidaxomicin was well tolerated. These findings suggest that the utility of fidaxomicin at this stage of infection is unclear.The research was conducted as part of routine clinical work at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Spatio-temporal geomorphological and ecological evolution of a transgressive dunefield system, Northern California, USA
Get PDFThis manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This author accepted manuscript is made available following 24 month embargo from date of publication (Sept 2018) in accordance with the publisher’s archiving policyA series of historic aerial photographs in addition to the U.S. Coast Survey 1870 map were used to document evolution of the coastal barrier and transgressive dunefield system at the Lanphere-Ma-le'l Dunes on Humboldt Bay, California, USA, between 1870 and 2016. Geomorphic units (shorelines, foredunes, nebkha, blowouts, parabolic dunes, deflation basins, and dunefields) as well as vegetation alliance were mapped in ArcGIS at approximately decadal intervals and compared among three subareas delineated based on large scale geomorphic differences that coincided with contrasting biological invasion and management histories. Sand inundation events in the 1930s and 1940s led to deterioration of the foredune and burial of deflation basins in the south, with the transgressive dunefield directly abutting the backshore in places. The transgressive dunefield in the north differentiated into parabolic dunes that decoupled from the foredune complex earlier than in the southern subareas, which have retained undifferentiated transgressive dunefields. Shoreline progradation increased dramatically following the historic 1964 flood, but exhibited a north-south gradient consistent with the Mad River to the north acting as the primary source of sediment, and effective north-south littoral drift. Biological invasions of Lupinus arboreus in the north and Ammophila arenaria in the south contributed to stabilization post-1965, but concomitant increases of native vegetation in other areas suggest these biotic processes were subordinate to other forcing factors. A notable switch from an erosional to a depositional system occurred coincident with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) shift from a cool to a warm phase in the late 1970s, suggesting climate forcing as a major driver of dune evolution. Changes in the rate of vegetation stabilization per time interval post 1948 are correlated with change in mean monthly PDO index for the same intervals. Alongshore gradients of sediment availability and tectonic subsidence are likely superimposed on climatic controls. Stability of the dune system reached its maximum extent in 2000, despite erosional effects of the 1998–2000 La Niña event and invasive plant removal projects in the 1990s. Increased storminess (2015–2016 El Niño) resulted in decreased shoreline stability in the most recent interval, coincident with sharply declining rates of progradation and a reduction in mean monthly PDO index. This study provides insights into how transgressive dune phases can be formed, sustained and decoupled, as well as how they change their geomorphology over time. The absence of relict foredunes in the study area and elsewhere on the North Spit barrier suggests that the foredune-blowout-parabolic dune complex may build to quite large proportions for some time, and then be destroyed or destabilized to such a degree that the sediments comprising the complex are released to form a new dunefield phase. Ruptures along the Cascadia subduction zone are a likely mechanism for transgressive dunefield initiation, both in the past, and likely in the future.This work was supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Grant No. F11PX02819
A realist process evaluation within the Facilitating Implementation of Research Evidence (FIRE) cluster randomised controlled international trial: an exemplar
Get PDFOpen Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to
the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver
(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Background: Facilitation is a promising implementation intervention, which requires theory-informed evaluation. This paper presents an exemplar of a multi-country realist process evaluation that was embedded in the first international randomised controlled trial evaluating two types of facilitation for implementing urinary continence care recommendations. We aimed to uncover what worked (and did not work), for whom, how, why and in what circumstances during the process of implementing the facilitation interventions in practice. Methods: This realist process evaluation included theory formulation, theory testing and refining. Data were collected in 24 care home sites across four European countries. Data were collected over four time points using multiple qualitative methods: observation (372h), interviews with staff (n=357), residents (n=152), next of kin (n=109) and other stakeholders (n=128), supplemented by facilitator activity logs. A combined inductive and deductive data analysis process focused on realist theory refinement and testing. Results: The content and approach of the two facilitation programmes prompted variable opportunities to align and realign support with the needs and expectations of facilitators and homes. This influenced their level of confidence in fulfilling the facilitator role and ability to deliver the intervention as planned. The success of intervention implementation was largely dependent on whether sites prioritised their involvement in both the study and the facilitation programme. In contexts where the study was prioritised (including release of resources) and where managers and staff support was sustained, this prompted collective engagement (as an attitude and action). Internal facilitators' (IF) personal characteristics and abilities, including personal and formal authority, in combination with a supportive environment prompted by managers triggered the potential for learning over time. Learning over time resulted in a sense of confidence and personal growth, and enactment of the facilitation role, which resulted in practice changes. Conclusion: The scale and multi-country nature of this study provided a novel context to conduct one of the few trial embedded realist-informed process evaluations. In addition to providing an explanatory account of implementation processes, a conceptual platform for future facilitation research is presented. Finally, a realist-informed process evaluation framework is outlined, which could inform future research of this nature.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no. 223646
Changes in Media Portrayal of Human-wildlife Conflict During Successive Fatal Shark Bites
Get PDFThis is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use and distribution of the article, provided the original work is cited.Encounters between humans and wildlife that result in human fatalities can generate public anxiety and increase
pressure on conservation managers and governments for risk mitigation. Low probability-high consequence
events such as shark bites on humans attract substantial media attention for short time periods, but how the media
react when several of these rare but fatal events occur in quick succession has seldom been subject to quantitative
analysis. Understanding media portrayal of such encounters is important because it both reflects and influences
public perceptions of risks, mitigation measures, and conservation policies. This study examined media portrayals
of sharks between 2011 and 2013 in the state of Western Australia during which six shark bites resulting in fatalities
occurred. We analysed 361 shark-related articles published in major Western Australian newspapers over 26 months
to trace changes in media reporting about sharks prior to, during, and after the six fatalities. The findings indicate
that when rare, but fatal human-wildlife events occur in quick succession, negative framing by media of wildlife
behaviour and threats can exaggerate public anxiety about the pervasive presence of wildlife predators and high
risk of human fatalities. The study highlights the need for government agencies and conservation scientists to
better engage with media to provide accurate and effective information and advice to swimmers and surfers about
shark ecology and behaviour
Ecosystem-based translation of health research: expanding frameworks for environmental health
Get PDFThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.The high capacity of science and health infrastructure in countries such as Australia has contributed to the relatively low public health impact of many environmental health hazards, including our endemic, wildlife‐origin zoonotic diseases. However, understanding how these and other health risks may be reduced within an ecosystem service framework will be increasingly valuable as climate change and pressures on natural environments intensify. Benefits could transcend national boundaries, especially if regional epicentres of ecological, political and social disintegration widen, creating milieux for potential pandemics. We are in a gainful position to progress research and translation of research into policy using the frameworks already available in Australia. This will be strengthened by promoting common language and metrics across disciplines and agencies, including costing that includes externalities and co‐benefits, and by supporting research into ecological linkage mechanisms and the broader ecosystem service ‘settings’ of health risks. Existing tools inclusive of stakeholder inputs can address ecosystem service trade‐offs. These can be used to identify or trial primordial preventative ‘eco‐social’ strategies. Aggregated, these have the potential to address GEC as health risk. We advocate concerted effort to refine these approaches and to promote a sense of urgency in their implementation
Between the Lindens
Get PDF'The story was inspired by a story I heard on a bus in China, about a boy who had left his homeland during a time of persecution and who always felt in the shadow of his remarkable father. It raises questions of national and personal identity, and whether there is a chance to treat each other, and the planet itself, differently.
