Search results

The purpose of this study was to explore long-term residential care provided by people other than the facilities’ employees. Privately hired paid “companions” are effectively invisible in health services research and policy. This research was designed to address this significant gap. There is growing recognition that nursing staff in long-term care (LTC) residential facilities experience moral distress, a phenomenon in which one knows the ethically right action to take, but is systemically constrained from taking it. To date, there has been no discussion of the distressing experiences of companions in LTC facilities. The purpose of this paper is to explore companions’ moral distress.

Data were collected using week-long rapid ethnographies in seven LTC facilities in Southern Ontario, Canada. A feminist political economy analytic framework was used in the research design and in the analysis of findings.

Despite the differences in their work tasks and employment conditions, structural barriers can cause moral distress for companions. This mirrors the impacts experienced by nurses that are highlighted in the literature. Though companions are hired in order to fill care gaps in the LTC system, they too struggle with the current system’s limitations. The hiring of private companions is not a sustainable or equitable solution to under-staffing and under-funding in Canada’s LTC facilities.

Recognizing moral distress and its impact on those providing LTC is critical in relation to supporting and protecting vulnerable and precarious care workers and ensuring high-quality care for Canadians in LTC.

Paramedics increasingly attend to mental health-related emergencies; however, there has been little evaluation of the mental health training for paramedics. This study aims to analyze the fit between paramedicine pedagogy, patient needs and the conditions for paramedics’ skill development.

Data were collected in a single, qualitative, critical ethnographic case study of pre-hospital mental health and psychosocial care in paramedicine in Ontario, Canada. Transcripts from interviews (n = 46), observation (n ∼ 90h) and document analysis were thematically analyzed using a constant comparative method. The study is theoretically grounded in a feminist political economy framework.

Tensions are explored in relation to the pedagogy of paramedicine and the conditions of work faced by paramedics. The paper presents challenges and insufficiencies with existing training, the ways in which certain work and training are valued and prioritized, increased emergency care and training needs and the limitations of training to improving care.

Recommendations include more comprehensive didactic training, including the social determinants of health; scenario training; practicum placements in mental health or social services; collaboration with mental health and social services to further develop relevant curriculum and potential inclusion of service users.

This paper addresses the lack of mental health pedagogy in Ontario and internationally and the need for further training pre-certification and while in the workforce. It presents promising practices to ameliorate mental health training and education for paramedics.

Research ethics committees (RECs) and ethical standards govern research. To conduct research involving participants, researchers must first gain a favourable opinion on their protocol from a REC. This paper aims to promote researcher reflexivity and openness about applying agreed ethical protocols in practice.

Using examples from qualitative fieldwork in two care home studies, the authors critically reflect on the issues encountered when applying ethics committee agreed protocols in real-world situations.

Three areas of research practice are reflected on given as follows: recruitment and consent; approach to observations; and research processes, shared spaces and access to data. The interface between researcher and participant did not always mirror textbook scenarios. Ultimately, this left researchers accountable for taking ethically acceptable actions while conducting research.

Drawing on research experiences in care homes, the authors consider the reliance on the researcher to be authentic and morally driven over and above formal ethical approvals. The authors conclude that the researcher is the bridging agent between ethical protocols and ethical practice in the field. As such, researchers need to be open and reflexive about their practices in fieldwork.

The use of data for instructional improvement is prevalent in today’s educational landscape, yet policies calling for data use may result in significant variation at the school level. The purpose of this paper is to focus on tools and routines as mechanisms of principal influence on data-use professional learning communities (PLCs).

Data were collected through a comparative case study of two low-income, low-performing schools in one district. The data set included interview and focus group transcripts, observation field notes and documents, and was iteratively coded.

The two principals in the study employed tools and routines differently to influence ways that teachers interacted with data in their PLCs. Teachers who were given leeway to co-construct data-use tools found them to be more beneficial to their work. Findings also suggest that teachers’ data use may benefit from more flexibility in their day-to-day PLC routines.

Closer examination of how tools are designed and time is spent in data-use PLCs may help the authors further understand the influence of the principal’s role.

Previous research has demonstrated that data use can improve teacher instruction, yet the varied implementation of data-use PLCs in this district illustrates that not all students have an equal opportunity to learn from teachers who meaningfully engage with data.

In 1997‐1998, seven universities of applied science were created in Switzerland. Together with the traditional academic universities, they are among the main pillars of the country’s tertiary education system. These new institutions represent a continuation of Switzerland’s dual educational system and have to position themselves in the education market as such. Feedback on the success and failures of their graduates can be an important source of information for assessing their position and informing policy. The article examines how successful graduates of the Berne School of Business and Administration, a member school of the Berne University of Applied Science, have been in making the transition from the educational world to working life. The study was conducted using salary regressions and an analysis of the appropriateness of the jobs found by the students after completing their studies. All of the data contained herein are based on a survey of people who graduated between 1997 and 1999.

The inherit complexity of an educational system further complicates the challenge of introducing technology-based educational initiatives into a school environment. Once introduced, the initiative has the potential to become self-sustaining or to cease once the term is over. Such uncertainty makes the use of expensive information technology (IT) in schools “risky business,” which requires school leaders go above and beyond their current routine to extend the system's capacity to sustain the innovation. A discretionary behavior of school leaders and teachers is one of key factors that contribute to or prevent the sustainability of an innovation. A lack of understanding of what encourages an individual's discretionary behavior and how discretion is fostered in school practices contribute to the challenge of innovation's sustainability. If the individuals’ discretion is required to sustain a technology-based educational program within a school, do their actions dwell outside or inside of the school environment? More importantly, how does a discretionary chain of command operate and can it be aligned? In this chapter we use an “ecological model” approach to describe the influential factors, which affect project's sustainability by transforming effective discretionary approaches of school leaders and teachers from policy to practice. We draw our description of the model on the results of the empirical study of Hong Kong schools involved in the design and strategic IT implementation of the e-Leadership Enhancement Project (eLEP).

Using the family activity of hobby stock-keeping (“petstock”) as a context, this paper aims to extend singularization theory to model the negotiations, agencies and resistances of children, parents and petstock, as they work through how animals become food within the boundaries of the family home. In doing so, the authors present an articulation of this process, deciphering the cultural biographies of petstock and leading to an understanding of the emergent array of child animal food-product preferences.

Data were collected from petstock-keeping parents through a mixture of ethnographic, in-depth interviewing and netnographic engagements in this qualitative, interpretive study; with parents offering experiential insights into animal meat and food-product socialization behaviours played out within the family environments.

The findings discuss the range of parental behaviours, motivations and activities vis-à-vis petstock, and their children’s responses, ranging from transgression to full compliance, in terms of eating home-raised animal food-products. The discussion illustrates that in the context of petstock, a precocious child food preference agency towards animal meat and food products is reported to emerge.

This research has empirical and theoretical implications for the understanding of the development of child food preference agency vis-à-vis animal food products in the context of family petstock keeping.

The research has the potential to inform policy makers around child education and food in regard to how child food preferences emerge and can inform marketers developing food-based communications aimed at children and parents.

Two original contributions are presented: an analysis of the under-researched area of how children’s food preferences towards eating animal food products develop, taking a positive child food-choice agency perspective, and a novel extension of singularization theory, theorizing the radical transformation, from animal to food, encountered by children in the petstock context.

The ability to identify the root causes of leading environmental crises, and the capacity to design effective intervention strategies, rely on a proper conceptualization of the linkages that join the social and natural worlds. An indispensable feature of an integrated model concerns the temporal frequencies intrinsic to the spatial and organizational hierarchies that comprise the socio-ecological system. The purpose of this chapter is to assemble ideas from a wide range of disciplines to promote a greater sensitivity to the relevance of time, and to alert us to the conceptual challenges of introducing temporal considerations into interdisciplinary environmental studies.

With this number the Library Review enters on its ninth year, and we send greetings to readers at home and abroad. Though the magazine was started just about the time when the depression struck the world, its success was immediate, and we are glad to say that its circulation has increased steadily every year. This is an eminently satisfactory claim to be able to make considering the times through which we have passed.

The purpose of this paper is to determine recidivism outcomes for 953 offending men with domestic violence histories, serving community-based sentences and enroled in the domestic abuse program (DAP), provided by Corrective Services New South Wales in Australia.

An intention to treat definition of DAP participation and a quasi-experimental and pseudo-prospective research design compared recidivism outcomes of the treatment group to a propensity score matched control group. Cox and Poisson regression techniques determined survival time to first reconviction and rates of reconvictions adjusted for time at risk.

DAP enrolment was associated with significant improvements in odds of time to first general reconviction (15 per cent) and first violent reconviction (by 27 per cent) compared to controls. Reconviction rates were significantly lower (by 15 per cent) for DAP enrolees. Programme completion was necessary for significant therapeutic effect; 62 per cent completed the programme.

This evaluation suggests the 20 session DAP is an effective intervention which could be adopted by other jurisdictions to modify criminal behaviours of domestically abusive men; potentially lessening the physical, emotional and financial impacts on victims and providing savings to government and criminal justice systems. The methodology, with refinements, could be adopted by other service providers to evaluate similar community-based therapeutic interventions in forensic settings.

First peer reviewed evaluation of the DAP. The programme contributes to evidence-based best practice interventions for domestically violent men.