Technological and clinical advances have led to increased levels of patient dependency and shorter hospital stay, such that they are now often managed on general wards. Have staff been trained or educated for this change in focus? This project was designed to identify the education and training needs of health care professionals in assessing and managing acutely physically ill hospital patients, within the boundaries of one Strategic Health Authority (SHA) in the UK. Participants identified the knowledge, skills and resources required to assess and manage acutely ill patients. These issues may be addressed through the provision of an appropriate range of structured educational programmes and experiences with the ultimate aim of improving standards of patient care.
In recent decades, UK and New Zealand unions have tried valiantly to counter dwindling membership and political clout. However, their revival strategies have stemmed, rather than convincingly reversed, such measures of union decline. This study draws on national survey, interviews, union documentation and website material from New Zealand and the UK to compare the extent and nature of a relationship between the activities of collective structures for women within unions and unions’ revival efforts. It emerges that, mediated by context, women’s structures positively contribute to union revival strategies in both countries. Further, this occurs not just in terms of quantitative and external outcomes, but also in the qualitative processes of engaging members. The findings inform a discussion of future directions for revival strategies and of the adequacy of union vitality gauges themselves.
This paper reports the findings of a comparative case-study project which evaluated the development of nursing research capacity in two academic schools in the United Kingdom. The research compared the approaches used, explored the experiences of staff during the implementation process, and identified the outcomes which were achieved. The methods employed were in-depth interviews, focus groups and documentary analysis. A literature review was undertaken to inform the design and conduct of the study (Segrott et al., 2006). The project's findings are divided into five sections. We begin by discussing the strategies implemented by the two schools, and their overall success. We then examine the wider development of a research culture, explore the problems and challenges experienced, and consider the management and organisation of capacity building. The final theme concerns the role played by the schools' wider institutional and political contexts. The paper explores the relative strengths of inclusive and exclusive approaches to staff development, and the importance of integrated academic leadership and effective management. The study highlights the need for academic schools to forge strong connections between experienced researchers and novices, as well as between teaching and research activities.
This conceptual article calls for a greater recognition of wages in academic and media discussions of hospitality and tourism employment. The article draws on the New Zealand hospitality and tourism context, but places the discussion in an international perspective
as well. The article approaches the topic of low wages in a new way, arguing that rather than being an inevitable outcome of structural factors, improving wages can be an 'engine' for reducing turnover and becoming employers of choice, and significantly improving employees lives. The article
conceptualizes a 'hospitable wage', defined as a wage that incorporates genuine care and consideration of well-being for a level of care that hospitality employers would expect their staff to apply to guests. The concept of a hospitable wage is differentiated from the constructs of minimum
wage, fair wage and the living wage. The article concludes by proposing that the Living Wage Movement is a practical and pragmatic way to operationalize a hospitable wage and thereby potentially improve conditions for employers and employees alike.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.