1,720,959 research outputs found
HUMANITARIAN POLICY-MAKER PERSPECTIVES ON PALLIATIVE CARE
Get PDFBackground: In the face of overwhelming need and increasingly scarce resources, the humanitarian charge of “saving lives and alleviating suffering” is often reduced to simply saving lives. In 2014, World Health Assembly Resolution 67.19 called for the strengthening of palliative care as a key component of comprehensive care. However, even when palliative care is the only available option (ie. 2014-2015 Ebola Crisis), there is little evidence showing it is available in the field. More research is needed to understand this dissonance between policy and practice, and to ensure that humanitarians are providing ethical and contextually appropriate care.
Methodology: Twelve individual, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted in English and French with humanitarian healthcare policy makers from North America, Europe, and the Middle East, average 10+ years of experience representing various international organizations. Interviews were transcribed and coded using NVivo11 and an interpretive description framework.
Findings: Participant comments suggested the existence of an institutionalized rescue culture, characterized by the fear of failure, equating of death with failure of the humanitarian healthcare professional, and a resultant systemic devaluation of palliative- type care in disaster contexts. The indoctrination of this culture may begin as early as medical school, and manifests clearly in the lack of consistent nomenclature and awareness of palliative care, treatment of palliative-triaged individuals, and resources allocated to palliative care in humanitarian contexts. Palliative care provision is a moral obligation as a final bastion of the human right to dignity and to health.
Discussion & Conclusion: In order for palliative care to be integrated into the humanitarian mandate, a significant cultural shift must first take place. The findings of this thesis and the larger Humanitarian Health Ethics study will provide key guidance for the adoption and adaptation of policies that help humanitarians maintain the dignity of individuals in their most vulnerable moments.ThesisMaster of Science (MSc
Ethical Innovation in Humanitarian Contexts
Get PDFIn humanitarian settings (such as natural disasters, conflicts, famines, etc), innovation can be as important as regular programmatic activities or research, and can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from either of these. At once experimental and responsive, innovation can be a welcome response to an unresolved problem, but also lack the oversight of research and the reliability of established practices. To help address the unique ethical tensions that arise in humanitarian innovation, the research presented in this dissertation was conducted as part of a consultancy-grant with the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF). The aim of this partnership was to support the development of evidence-based ethics tools for innovation in humanitarian contexts. In this dissertation I present three unique contributions to the body of knowledge surrounding humanitarian ethics research.
The first article presents the overarching research architecture that was employed in partnership with the HIF, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of this approach to the development of ethics tools. The second article presents the findings from a scoping review of academic and grey literature focusing on ethics and humanitarian innovation, identifying ethical tensions across innovation stages as well as a common thread of solutionism. The final article presents a qualitative description of key stakeholder interviews, which highlighted the need for micro (tools for reflection), meso (funding structures), and macro (sectoral learning and transparency) level shifts to foster ethical humanitarian innovation. Taken together, these contributions point to a humanitarian innovation ecosystem that is very much still in its nascency, potentially vulnerable to exploitation by market interests, and has not established effective mechanisms to facilitate learning and collaboration between funders, innovators, and affected populations.
This research and the associated toolkit begin to respond to the immediate need for resources, and provide empirical support for larger sectoral change. Further research and the establishment of a community of practice surrounding these tools will be critical to the continued pursuit of humanitarian innovation in an accountable, ethical, and impactful manner.ThesisDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)Over the past decade there has been an intense proliferation of innovation activities in the humanitarian sector (challenges, labs, accelerators), but a lack of practitioner-oriented resources to facilitate ethical decision making and reflection when pursuing these activities. This research was conducted through a consultancy-grant between the Humanitarian Innovation Fund & the Humanitarian Health Ethics Research Group, with the aim of supporting the development of evidence-based resources to foster ethical innovation in humanitarian contexts. Qualitative interviews and literature reviews were used to explore the landscape of what is known and to identify gaps and needs, which informed the series of iterative tool workshops. This research ultimately produced five unique tools and a series of case studies, as well as greater understanding of the ethical dimensions of humanitarian innovation. Further research and the establishment of a community of practice surrounding these tools will be critical to the continued pursuit of humanitarian innovation in an accountable, ethical, and impactful manner
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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
No full textWe 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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