Educational Infrastructure (educational + infrastructure)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Developing Clinical Terms for Health Visiting in the United Kingdom

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF NURSING TERMINOLOGIES AND CLASSIFICATION, Issue 2003
June Clark
BACKGROUND The UK health visiting service provides a universalist preventive health service that focuses mainly on families with young children and the elderly or vulnerable, but anyone who wishes can access the services. The principles of health visiting have been formally defined as the search for health needs, the stimulation of awareness of health needs, influencing policies that affect health, and the facilitation of health-enhancing activities. The project is currently in its fourth phase. In phase 1, 17 health visitors recorded their encounters with families with new babies over a period of 3 months; in phase 2, 27 health visitors recorded their encounters with a wider range of clients (769 encounters with 205 families) over a period of 9 months; in phase 3, the system is being used by a variety of healthcare professionals in a specialist program that provides intensive parenting support; phase 4 is developing a prototype of an automated version for point-of-contact recording. UK nursing has no tradition of standardized language and the concept of nursing diagnosis is almost unknown. Over the past decade, however, the government has initiated the development of a standardized terminology (Read codes) to cover all disciplines and all aspects of health care, and it is likely that the emerging SNOMED-CT terminology (a merger of the Read codes with the SNOMED terminology) will be mandated for use throughout the National Health Service (NHS). MAIN CONTENT POINTS The structure and key elements of the Omaha System were retained but the terminology was modified to take account of the particular field of practice and emerging UK needs. Modifications made were carefully tracked. The Problem Classification Scheme was modified as follows: ,All terms were anglicized. ,Some areas , notably relating to antepartum/postpartum, neonatal care, child protection, and growth and development,were expanded. ,The qualifiers "actual,""potential," and "health promotion" were changed to "problem,""risk," and "no problem." ,Risk factors were included as modifiers of "risk" alongside the "signs and symptoms" that qualify problems. The Intervention Classification was modified by substituting synonymous terms for "case management" and "surveillance" and dividing "health teaching, guidance, and counseling" into two categories. The Omaha System "targets" were renamed "focus" and a new axis of "recipient" was introduced in line with SNOMED-CT. The revised terminologies were tested in use and also sent for review to 3 nursing language experts and 12 practitioners, who were asked to review them for domain completeness, appropriate granularity, parsimony, synonymy, nonambiguity, nonredundancy, context independence, and compatibility with emerging multiaxial and combinatorial nomenclatures. Review comments were generally very favourable and modifications suggested are being incorporated. CONCLUSIONS The newly published government strategy for information management and technology in the NHS in Wales requires the rapid development of an electronic patient record, for which the two prerequisites are structured documentation and the use of standardized language. The terminology developed in this project will enable nursing concepts to be incorporated into the new systems. The experiences of the project team also offer many lessons that will be useful for developing the necessary educational infrastructure. [source]


Strategies for Developing a High-Skilled Workforce

PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT QUARTERLY, Issue 1 2004
Catherine M. Sleezer
ABSTRACT This article focuses on the human performance improvement and human resource development task of providing an organization with a skilled workforce. We begin by describing the U.S. demographic trends and the changing job skill requirements that will lead to a shortage of skilled workers and that highlight the importance of considering the various strategies that are available for developing a skilled workforce. Then, using perspectives found in the literature, we examine four strategies for developing a skilled workforce: (1) hire and then train the workers, (2) transfer individual workers, (3) relocate the work, and (4) create an educational infrastructure within a community to develop a workforce with the needed skills. We conclude by comparing the four strategies and identifying the advantages, disadvantages, and most effective uses of each. [source]


Modeling the effects of health status and the educational infrastructure on the cognitive development of Tanzanian schoolchildren

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF HUMAN BIOLOGY, Issue 3 2005
Alok Bhargava
This paper models the proximate determinants of school attendance and scores on cognitive and educational achievement tests and on school examinations of over 600 schoolchildren from the Control group of a randomized trial in Tanzania, where children in the Intervention group heavily infected with hookworm and schistosomiasis received treatment. The modeling approach used a random effects framework and incorporated the inter-relationships between school attendance and performance on various tests, controlling for children's health status, socioeconomic variables, grade level, and the educational infrastructure. The empirical results showed the importance of variables such as children's height and hemoglobin concentration for the scores, especially on educational achievement tests that are easy to implement in developing countries. Also, teacher experience and work assignments were significant predictors of the scores on educational achievement tests, and there was some evidence of multiplicative effects of children's heights and work assignments on the test scores. Lastly, some comparisons were made for changes in test scores of treated children in the Intervention group with the untreated children in the Control group. Am. J. Hum. Biol. 17:280,292, 2005. © 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]


A shift to ambulatory medical education in Israel

THE CLINICAL TEACHER, Issue 2 2010
Khaled Karkabi
Summary Background:, The Council for Higher Education in Israel published an extensive report in 2007, calling for a significant increase of undergraduate medical education in Israel in ambulatory care settings. The objective of this article is to propose an action plan aimed at shifting undergraduate medical education in Israel towards ambulatory education. Context:, The main barriers to increasing ambulatory education in Israel are lack of academic recognition for teaching and excellence, conflict between patient care, income and teaching, lack of an adequate educational infrastructure and faculty in ambulatory care, and insufficient support and involvement of the health organisations. However, there is great potential for developing ambulatory education in Israel based on existing resources: Israel has a well-established primary care network, has chronic disease management programmes, community-based preventive medicine and health promotion activities, and an emerging structure for home, palliative and terminal care in the community. Innovation:, The proposed action plan presents a framework for enhancing ambulatory education in undergraduate medical education in Israel, and allows site-specific adjustments according to the preferences, resources and capabilities of each of the four medical schools. Implications:, A national shift to ambulatory education in Israel can be implemented through the existing coordination mechanism of the four medical schools. A government funding policy that encourages the collaboration between four medical schools will be beneficial both in terms of resource utilisation and the engagement of other stakeholders. The recognition of community services and educational excellence can be advanced by establishing academies of teaching scholars. [source]