Search results

This study explored the experiences of Irish emergency medical services (EMS) first responders during the first nationwide restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19.

A systematic literature review (SLR) of research into healthcare workers' and first responders' experiences during the COVID-19 and 2003 SARS pandemics was performed. The SLR informed the content of an online questionnaire distributed via the Irish Pre-Hospital Emergency Care Council to 2,092 first responders on its live register. Data analysis used both descriptive and content analysis.

EMS first responders faced many challenges including PPE quality, training on its use, issues with decontamination facilities, and organisational effectiveness. Emotional challenges included the anxiety experienced, the impact on families, and ethical dilemmas confronted related to patient care. Positive findings also emerged, such as first responders' dedication to working through the pandemic, collegiality, and the community goodwill displayed.

While investigations of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on healthcare workers have been undertaken globally, studies focussing exclusively on the experiences of EMS first responders have been rare. This study addressed this knowledge gap, providing an insight into the challenges and successes experienced by first responders and identifying opportunities for learning that can be applied to future public health emergencies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the explicit teaching of information text schema with vocabulary instruction to primary-aged students in Hong Kong international education.

Data were collected through three quasi-experimental studies with different age groups and participants. Each study divided participants into two randomly assigned groups, either informational texts (IT) or vocabulary building (VB). Impact was evaluated with gain scores on a standardized reading comprehension test and researcher-designed cloze tests of fiction and nonfiction passages.

The explicit teaching of IT can benefit student reading comprehension from an early age, particularly to first language (L1) English students and possibly second language (L2) English learners. School reading programmes should include opportunities for students to experience IT (nonfiction) and fiction materials, and build their vocabulary through incidental learning and explicit teaching. For IT, they should be exposed to: layout – e.g., headings, sub-headings, glossary, and index; and content – photographs and specific/technical vocabulary. For fiction-based texts and VB, the following themes should be covered by younger aged students: antonyms, synonyms, and affixes.

Several limitations apply to this study which will need to be addressed in future studies. These include: the random sampling of students from the overall student population was not an option, given the necessity of voluntary participation and avoiding disruption to school routines. This study used meta-analysis to aggregate results across multiple comparisons largely because of the extremely small samples available. The data show large standard errors as a consequence of small numbers of participants. Hence, the current results, notwithstanding the power of meta-analysis, need to be validated with much larger samples in future studies.

This paper suggests that greater comprehension and cloze performance among L1 students was found due to the teaching of IT compared to vocabulary training, with the reverse result for L2 English learners.

This paper aims to demonstrate how skills taxonomies can be used in combination with machine learning to integrate diverse online datasets and reveal skills gaps. The purpose of this study is then to show how the skills gaps revealed by the integrated datasets can be used to achieve better labour market alignment, keep educational offerings up to date and assist graduates to communicate the value of their qualifications.

Using the ESCO taxonomy and natural language processing, this study captures skills data from three types of online data (job ads, course descriptions and resumes), allowing us to compare demand for skills and supply of skills for three different occupations.

This study illustrates three practical applications for the integrated data, showing how they can be used to help workers who are disrupted by technology to identify alternative career pathways, assist educators to identify gaps in their course offerings and support students to communicate the value of their training to employers.

This study builds upon existing applications of machine learning (detecting skills from a single dataset) by using the skills taxonomy to integrate three datasets. This study shows how these complementary, big datasets can be integrated to support greater alignment between the needs and offerings of educators, employers and job seekers.

The high prevalence of mental illness within the prison population necessitates innovative mental health awareness provision. This purpose of this feasibility study with 75 males (47 intervention; 28 control) was to evaluate State of Mind Sport (SOMS), originally developed as a community based mental health and well-being initiative, in a notoriously challenging prison setting.

A mixed 2 (group) × 2 (time) factorial design was adopted. Questionnaires tested for effects on knowledge of mental health, intentions to seek help, well-being and resilience. For each outcome measure, main and interaction effects (F) were determined by separate mixed factors analysis of variance. Two focus groups (N = 15) further explored feasibility and were subjected to general inductive analysis.

A significant group and time interaction effect were shown for mental health knowledge, F(1, 72) = 4.92, p = 0.03, η_p² = 0.06, showing a greater post-programme improvement in mental health knowledge score for the intervention group. Focus group analysis revealed an increase in hope, coping efficacy and intentions to engage more openly with other prisoners regarding personal well-being as a result of the SOMS programme. However, fear of stigmatisation by other inmates and a general lack of trust in others remained as barriers to help-seeking.

The implications of this study, the first to evaluate a sport-based mental health intervention in prison, are that a short intervention with low costs can increase prisoner knowledge of mental health, intentions to engage in available well-being opportunities and increase a sense of hope, at least in the short term.

Black slavery and white racism in the South and the nation, de jure and de facto Jim Crow, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed separate schools, “massive resistance” to it (Klarman, 1994, p. 82), plus racial disparities in educational achievement since 1954, all frame this narrative of black males' quest for higher education. Bondmen were denied literacy and black freemen rarely attended school, much less pursue advanced study, during the antebellum period. Union victory in the Civil War, abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), and Reconstruction marked the rise of not only Negro schools and colleges but also southern share cropping, called “the new slavery” (Du Bois, 1935, p. 715), and epidemic violence against blacks that imposed their disfranchisement and segregation, by laws and customs, until the 1960s. Thus African American males sought collegiate and professional training in a national milieu of white supremacy, which postulated black men's mental and moral inferiority but ignored their widespread poverty, separation, and unequal opportunities. Confined in historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), they breached the color-line little by little at white institutions, thereby paving the way for Brown, the civil rights movement, and desegregation. In the second half of the 20th century, HBCUs and the majority-white institutions trained increasing numbers of black male graduates and professionals. By 1980 though, only some 11 percent of young black men had received 4 years of college compared to 25.5 percent of young white men (Jaynes & Williams, 1989). An “achievement gap” was evident and it persists today (Lee, 2002, p. 3), revealing the deep roots of race and class inequality in America. White racism, its legal and extralegal forms, and black aspirations and efforts underlay and continue to fuel black men's drive for higher learning. Over time black men, and certainly women as well, faced racist structures, ideologies, and attitudes born of slavery; sub-citizenship, stereotypes, and terror, among other barriers, through a century of Jim Crow; and after Brown, ongoing discrimination, socioeconomic disadvantages, and ambiguous “affirmative action” policies (Jaynes & Williams, 1989, p. 376).

This paper sets out to profile the activities and consumers of a unique and successful local food retail outlet in the UK that is based on weekly community markets.

The seminal literature on local food in the UK is reviewed prior to providing a case study on a local food outlet, the True Food Co‐op. This is followed by the results from a detailed survey of its customers.

The increase in availability of and interest in local food over the last decade has been matched by new research findings. Although there is a consensus on the reasons why people buy local food, there are significant gaps in other areas of one's understanding, such as the lack of a clear definition of what local food is. This is frustrating further developments in the sector.

Business development strategies that rely on niche markets, such as local food, in fast‐moving consumer goods categories are enjoying rapid growth. However, there are many difficulties with research in this area that emerge from the multitude of purchases made by numerous people, of various products, and in different places.

Innovative community‐based food retail outlets, such as the True Food Co‐op, provide an example of a business model that links consumers and producers in local food networks. As such they contribute to food security by filling a vital role in a diversified, resilient and environmentally friendly food system.

The paper publicises recent research findings in the local food sector that have practical implications for policy. In addition, these findings are important for individual businesses in the local food sector which are aiming to develop and secure their position in the marketplace.

Pre-existing music has been used to underscore the moving image since the days of ‘silent’ film, and this practice is still commonplace today in Hollywood and beyond. Such music may be ‘classical’ or ‘popular’ and can feature within the narrative of a movie diegetically, non-diegetically, or both. With regard to art music in film, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is often the composer of choice, given the popularity and familiarity of many of his compositions. However, his music is employed cinematically in a range of different situations and for a variety of purposes.

In this chapter, I focus on ways in which compositions by Mozart are used to manifest the music and death nexus present in the narrative of three films that were released in different decades. ‘Là ci darem la mano’ from Don Giovanni (1787) features in the first film I analyse, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945), with the aria being linked to the symbolic death of the moral compass of the protagonist. I then consider the inclusion of music from one of Mozart's symphonies in the storyline of the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), the narrative of which includes the themes of deception and murder. The final film I examine is I am David (Paul Feig, 2003), in which one of the characters sacrifices his life to save that of his friend. Each example encapsulates death as embodied affect, with Mozart's music specifically impacting upon the emotions of the protagonists.