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This study uses qualitative data gathered from focus group interviews of 76 participants to investigate the factors that influence employees' decisions to use or not use work-family policies in an Australian university. The focus group data identified a number of barriers that limit the use of work-family policies including lack of communication about the policies, high workloads, management attitudes, career repercussions, influence of peers, and administrative processes. This study reinforces the notion that organisational commitment to an environment that supports work and family is not merely about providing policies for their symbolic value, but is also about creating a workplace culture that supports and encourages the use of the policies.

Development of leadership capacities in the nursing workforce is essential to achieving universal health in the Region of the Americas. This evaluation considered the effectiveness of an online leadership course offered in English and Spanish to nurses throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. The online course was an asynchronous eight-module leadership nursing course created and offered by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) Virtual Campus. A retrospective, descriptive design was used to evaluate learner performance data from the modules. Learner performance on the course was analyzed. Electronic surveys were distributed to individuals who withdrew prior to course completion to obtain information regarding the reason for withdrawal. In all, 289 individuals from 41 countries participated in the online course. Learner performance demonstrated improvement from pre- to post-test. The most frequent reason for not completing the course was being too busy with other obligations. The Spanish-language course version received more enrollment applications than any other course in the virtual campus’ 12-year history. The evaluation concluded that continuing education that develops nursing leadership is desired across Latin America and the Caribbean. Online education through the PAHO Virtual Campus may be a low-cost yet powerful means of disseminating knowledge to the nursing workforce throughout the Americas.

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Severely to profoundly hard-of-hearing (HOH) listeners (n=12) were tested for their perception of prosodic phrase continuity in clear and conversational speech. In two experiments, fluently spoken sentences were compared with utterances artificially assembled from isolated words (experiment 1) and prosodic phrases (experiment 2) that replicated the sentences’ lexical composition. The difference in the overall duration of the assembled and fluent utterance was eliminated via signal processing, but the amplitude envelope and the intonational contour differences were left intact. Randomized repetitions of each utterance pair (72 pairs, 12 sentences × 2 speaking styles × 3 speakers, in experiment 1, and 40 pairs, 10 sentences × 2 speaking styles × 2 speakers, in experiment 2) were presented to each listener over several experimental sessions. In a 2IFC procedure, the listener identified the utterance that sounded more like fluent speech. Four normal-hearing (NH) controls were tested in white noise (S/N ratio=−20 dB). NH listeners identified the fluent sentences with accuracy greater than 90%. Across HOH listeners, identification accuracy varied from completely random to less than 75% correct, and was dependent on a listener’s sensation level and preferred communication mode (oral versus manual). [Work supported by NIDCD.]