1,721,354 research outputs found
FIP Global Pharmacy Workforce Report 2012
Key messages • Access to quality medicines and competent, capable health care professionals are fundamental aspects of any health care system. Pharmaceutical human resources should ensure the uninterrupted supply of quality medicines to the population, their management, and responsible use, as vital components in improving the health of nations. • Multi-stakeholder collaboration incorporating best-available evidence is required to inform needs-based pharmaceutical human resources planning. When relevant, well-informed stakeholders partner to address workforce issues, there are greater possibilities for coordinated workforce planning and implementation. • Pharmacy workforce per capita varies considerably between countries and regions and generally correlates with country level economic development indicators. Countries and territories with lower economic indicators, such as those in Africa, tend to have relatively fewer pharmacists and pharmacy support workers. This has implications for observed inequalities in access to medicines and medicines expertise. In addition, some countries and territories have many times more pharmacies than pharmacists, which may imply a renewed need for supervision of medicines and medicines use. • Strategic frameworks and policies related to the pharmacy workforce are being successfully developed and implemented at the country level through multi-stakeholder processes involving ministries of health, health professional associations, regulators, and educators to drive and achieve both competence and practitioner excellence for care quality. • Improving workforce performance - productivity, competency and the ability to adapt to new roles - is an on-going challenge in the increasingly dynamic environment of rising health care costs, increased demand for health services, and increased burden of chronic diseases. Fuelled in part by an increased focus on patient care and inter-professional collaboration, these elements provide the opportunity for pharmacists to use their professional skills to provide safe, high quality, and cost-effective pharmaceutical services for the benefit of populations. Leadership is a key aspect in empowering pharmacy professionals to maximize these opportunities and to innovate and shape their practice. • Investment in transforming and scaling up professional education is crucial, as education provides the foundation for building a capable health care workforce. The capacity to provide pharmaceutical services in each country is dependent upon having an assured, competent workforce and an integrated academic workforce to train sufficient numbers of new pharmacists and other support staff at both foundation and advanced levels. Ongoing effort is needed to ensure capacity building of skilled medicines expertise meets the pharmaceutical health needs of populations. • A needs-based education strategy allows local systems to best assess the needs of its community and then develop (or adapt) the supporting educational system to produce a workforce relevant to these needs. National health care demands are diverse and complex, often varying widely within and between regions. Although broad and general frameworks may be beneficial at the macro level, a “one-size-fits-all” system does not offer the authenticity needed for full engagement and sustainability at the local level. • Pharmaceutical Human Resources continue to be a priority issue for FIP Education initiatives (FIPEd) to engage collaboratively with all stakeholders; we need to work together towards developing a profession that can meet present and future societal and pharmaceutical health needs around the world (www.fip.org/education)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
An overview of current pharmacy impact on immunisation: A global report
The role of pharmacists in immunisation and vaccination varies across the world; in some countries pharmacists are primarily involved in ensuring the safe supply and dispensing of vaccines, as well as advocating for immunisation, while in other countries they are empowered to play a more active role, as they are legally authorised to administer vaccinations, manage patients’ vaccination schedules and/or organise vaccinations activities and campaigns. It is estimated that ten million lives per year could be saved by increasing access to medicines and vaccinations. Community pharmacists are therefore in a strong position to provide a major contribution to public health due to their accessibility, distribution and available medicines expertise. Pharmacists are also highly trusted healthcare professionals and can therefore significantly improve communication channels and provide public reassurance on product quality. We conducted a survey, disseminated to 137 FIP member organisations, to gather a better understanding of the current role of pharmacists in immunisation across the world and the impact of these activities. We also provide here a closer look at the immunisation activities undertaken in eleven different countries and territories presented as case studies. Vaccination policies vary across the world; the legal authority to perform immunisation activities currently varies significantly across countries and the integration of community pharmacies and pharmacists in national vaccination policies tends to develop as a gradual process over time. Strategic and integrated partnerships between healthcare professionals are increasingly common and the role of pharmacists as educators, facilitators and immunisers is becoming more readily recognised. Several countries authorise vaccination in pharmacies and/or by pharmacists (for example in Argentina, Australia, Philippines, South Africa, UK and USA); this practice has been initiated, in the majority of the cases, with pharmacy-based vaccinations against influenza and then expanded to include other vaccines from the immunisation schedule. In most cases, it is associated with specific requirements such as pharmacist training, management of vaccination records and specifications on premises, equipment and waste management. Based on the sample of countries presented in this report, 940 million people live in countries where over 193,000 community-pharmacies can potentially offer access to vaccination services. In this sample alone, we further estimate that currently, pharmacist-administered vaccination services have the potential to reach a total global population of 655 million. These estimates are based on our sample of 45 countries and territories; the potential in health gain to have pharmacy-led outreach to global populations is clear and this report suggests that community-based pharmacies are safe and high quality vaccination centres. Providing direct administration of vaccines, using pharmacists and pharmacies, is a highly effective public health strategy for health systems and healthcare planners, complementing the existing service offerings for immunisation. Pharmacists are trusted healthcare professionals and as such can offer strong advocacy for building societal trust in vaccines as essential medicines. Added to this is the pharmacy-based opportunity for promoting immunisation in communities linked with the easy access to vaccination that community pharmacies bring and the outreach opportunities for healthcare planners. On the technical side, and highly significant, is the medicines expertise embedded in the vaccination supply chain and storage of cold-chain products; the safety and quality assurance that society demands of vaccines also has significant input from pharmacists. Pharmacists offer convenience, product safety, advocacy support and an overall highly impactful contribution to the public health challenges of immunisation and vaccination policies. The continuing trend to authorise pharmacists to provide direct access to immunisation allows policy makers to ensure additional resilience for national public health systems. Unexpected outbreaks of preventable communicable disease (from influenza to events such as H1N1) will happen again, somewhere, at some time, and pharmacists should be considered as invaluable contributors, together with our healthcare professional colleagues, in the delivery, access and administration of vaccines also during emergencies
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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