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The purpose of this study is to examine the way in which the theoretical construct of liminality contributes to understanding the process of dying of cancer from the perspective of patients, carers and professionals in a state-run organization undergoing privatization.

Qualitative interviews were held with 13 patients and their carers and two focus groups with eight physiotherapists and occupational therapists. Data were analysed from the perspective of liminality for all three actors: patients, carers and health professionals.

The theoretical construct of liminality was useful for understanding the lived experience of patients and their carers. However, a major finding of this study reveals that health professionals operated in a dual space as both managers of the ritual process and individuals undergoing a liminal journey as their organization underwent transformation or restructure. Clients and carers had little knowledge of these tensions.

The findings are limited by the fact that the interviews did not directly ask questions about the restructure of the organization.

It would appear that professionals provide quality care despite their own struggles in moving from one organizational form to another

Few studies have explored the liminal rituals of dying at home that outline how professionals, as managers of the process, deal with their own liminal issues.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how nurses make decisions to ration care or leave it undone within a clinical environment that is controlled by systems level cost containment. The authors wanted to find out what professional, personal and organisational factors contribute to that decision-making process. This work follows previous international research that explored missed nursing care using Kalisch and Williams’ MISSCARE survey.

The authors drew on the care elements used by Kalisch and Williams, asking nurses to tell us how they decided what care to leave out, the conduits for which could include delaying care during a shift, delegating care to another health professional on the same shift, handing care over to staff on the next shift or leaving care undone.

The findings suggest that nurses do not readily consider their accountability when deciding what care to leave or delay, instead their priorities focus on the patient and the organisation, the outcomes for which are frequently achieved by completing work after a shift.

The actions of nurses implicitly rationing care is largely hidden from view, the consequences for which potentially have far reaching effects to the nurses and the patients. This paper raised awareness to hidden issues facing nurses within a cycle of implicitly rationing care, caught between wanting to provide care to their patients, meeting the organisation’s directives and ensuring professional safety. Rethinking how care is measured to reflect its unpredictable nature is essential.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a conceptual plan for innovative, integrated care designed for people living with long-term conditions (LTCs).

The conceptual plan delivers a partnership between the health system, the person with LTCs (chronic), their family, and the community. The partnership aims to support people at home with access to effective treatment, consistent with the New Zealand Government Health Strategy. This concept of people-owned care is provided by nurses with advanced practice skills, who coordinate care across services, locations and multiple LTCs.

With the global increase in numbers of people with multiple chronic conditions, health services are challenged to deliver good outcomes and experience. This model aims to demonstrate the effective use of healthcare resources by supporting people living with a chronic condition, to increase their self-efficacy and resilience in accordance with personal, cultural and social circumstance. The aim is to have a model of care that is replicable and transferable across a range of health services.

People living with chronic conditions can be empowered to manage their health and well-being, whilst having access to nurse-led care appropriate to individual needs.

Although there are examples of case management and nurse-led coordination, this model is novel in that it combines a liaison nursing role that works in partnership with patients, whilst ensuring that care across a number of primary and secondary care services is truly integrated and not simply interfaced.

The purpose of the paper is to explore how the national, state and organisational health policies in Australia support the implementation of person-centred care in managing chronic care conditions.

A qualitative content analysis was performed regarding the national, state and organisational Queensland Health policies using Elo and Kyngas' (2008) framework.

Although the person-centred care as an approach is well articulated in health policies, there is still no definitive measure or approach to embedding it into operational services. Complex funding structures and competing priorities of the governments and the health organisations carry the risk that person-centred care as an approach gets lost in translation. Three themes emerged: the patient versus the government; health care delivery versus the political agenda; and health care organisational processes versus the patient.

Given that person-centred care is the recommended approach for responding to chronic health conditions, further empirical research is required to evaluate how programs designed to deliver person-centred care achieve that objective in practice.

This research highlights the complex environment in which the person-centred approach is implemented. Short-term programmes created specifically to focus on person-centred care require the right organisational infrastructure, support and direction. This review demonstrates the need for alignment of policies related to chronic disease management at the broader organisational level.

Given the introduction of the nurse navigator program to take up a person-centred care approach, the review of the recent policies was undertaken to understand how they support this initiative.

Workforce shortages and maldistribution in the health care sector are the outcome of poor planning processes, entrenched power relations, jurisdictional boundaries and professional silos. In seeking to redress these problems, countries are moving toward establishing independent agencies to monitor, regulate and shape the health workforce. In Australia, for example, Health Workforce Australia (HWA) has been established to provide data on workforce numbers and fund clinical education. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether this strategy is likely to work. By locating HWA within the framework of an Independent Regulatory Agency, the implicit strengths and weaknesses of using HWA to manage workforce planning are highlighted.

A theoretical discussion on regulatory capitalism and Independent Regulatory Authorities provides the context for the case study: the gynaecological cancer workforce – a niche health workforce that is complex and multidisciplinary. Data are from a mixed method study commissioned by Cancer Australia.

The analysis of the gynaecological cancer workforce illustrates the difficulties that HWA will face in defining the health workforce, in measuring supply and demand and in setting targets for training and education.

Findings are limited by the fact that HWA was only established in mid 2009.

The establishment of independent agencies to oversee and implement government policy is a new form of control over universities and health professionals that challenges their professional autonomy.

This paper points to the creation of new agencies of government control in the wake of an international health workforce crisis.

This paper examines citizen trust at both a rational and affect level in the water utility provider, SA Water.

The study draws on data from a CATI of approximately 500 residents in two urban and rural locations.

Citizens have a healthy scepticism toward the utility provider suggesting they make a distinction between the capacity of SA Water to provide safe drinking water, and the political willingness of the government to plan for long‐term sustainability.

The conduct of research on topics of a political nature may be viewed by respondents as a political act although it is possible to see the views expressed as representative. Research conducted during times of heightened awareness, such as during a drought when water restrictions are in place, may generate strong feelings of anger in government, but may not be a true measure of citizen trust in the provider.

The paper shows that trust in utility providers may vary according to social situations.

Encouraging citizen trust in the water supply requires education in the science used to ensure safety, but also transparent regulation for ensuring risk management.

The study points to possible shifts in citizen trust in water providers depending on climatic conditions, the role of the utility provider, and the reputation of the government as a regulator and planner.

This study is a considered interpretation of the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme for the health professions, which commenced operations in Australia in 2010. The development of the Scheme and its operational elements (namely the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency and 14 profession-specific national Boards) are positioned within the context of regulatory capitalism. Regulatory capitalism merges the experience of neoliberalism with an attentiveness to risk, particularly by the State. Nationally consistent legislation put in place a new set of arrangements that enabled the continuity of governments’ role in health workforce governance. The new arrangements resulted in an entity which is neither exclusively subservient to nor independent of the State, but rather “quasi-independent.” In exploring this arrangement, specific consideration is given to how the regulatory response matched the existing reality of a global (and national) health workforce market. This study considers this activity by the State as one of consolidation, as opposed to fracturing, against a backdrop of purposeful regulatory reform.

Design for manufacture and testability seems to be a very hot topic. This seminar organised by Bob Willis was over‐subscribed within the first two weeks of announcement, and the standby places were already sufficient to warrant a repeat seminar during September. This will be held in Chelmsford on 9 September.

This chapter seeks to reassess the film GoldenEye (Campbell, 1995), and its highly successful (Impellizeri, 2010) videogame adaptation GoldenEye 007 (Rare, 1997), in light of the concept of the Hegemony of Play (Fron, Fullerton, Morie, & Pearce, 2007), which seeks to critique the dominance of the hypermasculine ‘gamer’ identity in videogame culture (a persona GoldenEye anticipates in its problematic character Boris Grishenko).

Since the gamer is bound up in the very technological materiality of videogames as a medium and an industry (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009), central to this discussion is the significant yet highly ambivalent role technology continues to play in the Bond films, both extending and threatening (Leach, 2015; Nitins, 2010) Bond’s natural male skill and intuition (McGowan, 2010). Indeed, GoldenEye is a particularly salient study since many suggest Brosnan to be the most technologically adept (or dependent) of the Bonds (Rositzka, 2015; Willis, 2003), and I will argue that the film and game together explore just what happens when Bond’s implacable force meets the immutable technological object, providing a fascinating lens through which to read the larger technocultural shifts embodied in the transition to the immaterial economies of cognitive capitalism (Hardt & Negri, 2001) and their potential to disrupt traditional, patriarchal gender configurations (Haraway, 1991; Hayles, 2005; Plant, 1998; Wajcman, 2004).

Core to this is a critical reading of the game’s popular multiplayer mode, where exploration of whether technology can be understood to potentially level the gender playing field (Jones, 2015) or whether the fact that such technology is always already encoded as masculine (Chess, 2017) ultimately undercuts this ambition.

Although competence to live alone is typically associated with measures of activities of daily living, such measures fail to capture problematic situations that older people face in daily life. In particular, little is known about how older homebound women handle potentially harmful incidents. During a descriptive phenomenological study of the experience of reaching help quickly (RHQ) with 40 older homebound women, 33 women spontaneously reported 139 incidents (falls, “tight spots,” near-falls, health problems, and unwanted visitors) that they managed alone. The purpose of this secondary phenomenological analysis of RHQ project data was to describe the experience of those women with handling “close-calls.” Data yielded a typology of close-call incidents and five components of the phenomenon, managing a close-call. In addition to self-directed intentions to lessen the impact of each incident, there were four component phenomena relative to help-seeking, ranging from no mention of need for help (70% of incidents) to managing without desired or solicited help (6% of incidents). Contextual factors, including availability of potential helpers and access to help-seeking devices, influenced intentions in close-calls. Findings are springboards for further research and stimuli for new approaches to practice. Researchers should broaden the focus of competence assessment to take in empirical situations. Further work should be done to explore how older people appraise their status following close-calls and how they move from self-management to consideration of help-seeking and in some cases, on to active help-seeking. Because few close-calls were reported, practitioners could use our typology as an assessment protocol during routine visits. Practitioners can elicit self-management intentions relative to a particular close-call and build dialogue around those intentions, thereby bolstering ability of older women to manage close-calls effectively.