1,720,960 research outputs found

    Achieving fitness to practice: contributing to public and patient protection through nurse education

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    Aim: To determine the impact of reforms to fitness to practice procedures, within preparatory programmes for nurses and midwives, and the implications for public and patient protection.Background: Professional regulation has seen considerable reform across all health care professions. Higher Education Institutions providing preparatory programmes are required to demonstrate procedures which ensure students are of good health and character in order to ensure public safety.Method: A critical review and evaluation of fitness to practice systems, operating in one large school of nursing and midwifery delivering a wide range of programmes, was undertaken using a case study approach.Findings: The review revealed the need for effective collaborative management of fitness to practice panels within achievable timescales and complimentary and responsive communication processes. Good technical support was required to achieve a student friendly, confidential, on-line self-declaration process, with complementary procedures for effective follow-up, to ensure emerging issues were addressed in a timely manner.Conclusion: Public protection and confidence are high priorities. Case studies are vital to develop good practice, but effective systems challenge available resources. The processes reported contributed positively to a culture of partnership and transparency where self monitoring becomes inculcated into the students’ behaviour, leading to early recognition of the importance of high professional standards

    Developing values-based education through service user participation

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    Mental health education aims to develop valuesbased practice to support practitioners in clinical decision-making. Values-based practice requires high levels of cultural competence achieved through service user participation in professional preparation. The degree of service user participation remains dependent on the values of programme providers.In this paper, we consider whether strategies to involve service users in mental health professional education can support the principles of valuesbased practice. To do this, we have drawn on the findings from qualitative studies of educators' practices and their views regarding service user involvement. Values-based practice requires self-awareness of values impacting on decisions and knowledge derived from service users' personal accounts. The studies suggest that while opportunities exist for service users to present their accounts, few examples of service user involvement facilitated deeper examination of values underpinning decision-making. Enabling service users to influence values-based practice development requires more authentic participatory approaches. Educators valued the contribution of service users' experiential knowledge to the learning process, but there was less evidence of educators' values base that would model commitment to the empowerment of service users

    Evaluation study to ascertain the impact of the clinical academic coaching role for enhancing student learning experience within a clinical masters education programme

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    Aim: To explore the appropriateness of clinical academic coaching role as a tool for enhancing student learning and the development of advanced academic and clinical practice skills for nurses.Background: Coaching involves a relationship between individuals characterised by analyzing and communicating mutually understood objectives and motivating others. Coaching is beneficial for developing those entering new positions with higher level responsibilities.Method: A two stage evaluation involved analysis of structured questionnaires distributed to students registered for a postgraduate advanced clinical practice programme and ten interviews with students and coaches. Data was analysed to develop understanding of how coaches were experienced by students as an aid to learning.Findings: Data indicates the role supported students through transition and provided learning support at crucial times in the academic journey. Specific skills and behaviours enhanced the coach-student relationship. The coach’s understanding of the clinical context was pivotal, as was effective preparation to undertake the coaching role.Conclusion: Supporting students to make the transition into advanced practice roles is a prominent issue within current healthcare literature. Clinical coaching enhances learning through a strong and coherent partnership between the student, their practice context and the academic journey

    User participation in mental health nurse decision-making: a co-operative enquiry

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    Aim: This paper is a report of a study to encourage participants to work together to identify strategies for increasing user participation in clinical decisions and to evaluate the value of co-operative inquiry as a vehicle for supporting learning in practice.Background: Service user participation in the clinical practice decisions of mental health nurses is considered essential for good practice. Methods need to be found which enable opportunities for shared learning, facilitate practice development and empower service users.Method: A co-operative inquiry design engaged all participants (n = 17) as co-researchers and involved repeated cycles of action and reflection, using multiple data collection methods. The research was conducted over a two year period in 2004–2005, with mental health nursing students collaborating with service users.Findings: Factors inhibiting participation included stigmatizing and paternalistic approaches, where clinical judgments were made solely on the basis of diagnosis. Enhancing factors were a respectful culture which recognized users’‘expertise’ and communicated belief in individual potential. Inquiry benefits included insight into service users’ perspectives, enhanced confidence in decision-making, appreciation of power issues in helping relationships and deconstruction of decision-making within a safe learning environment.Conclusion: Learning from novel approaches which enable nursing students to develop their reflective and reflexive ability is essential to avoid practice which disempowers and potentially harms service users’ recovery. Co-operative inquiry is a valuable vehicle for developing professional practice in higher education and practice environments

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    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

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    “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

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    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

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    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
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