Caroline Chibelushi

The discharge planning dilemma in the UK NHS: the role of knowledge management

This paper describes a research project that investigates and evaluates the role of Knowledge Management (KM) in discharge planning (DP) within the UK National Health Service (NHS). KM has been promoted in the NHS for a little more than 13 years. The paper shows that the popular press frequently reports problems associated with DP and examines some more reliable sources, concluding that more research into the phenomenon is needed. The factors that contribute to inadequate DP are summarised as conclusions to the paper. This is therefore an extract from a wider research project into the use of KM in DP, which is aimed at suggesting some causes, indicating some possible solutions and producing a KM framework to guide the DP and decision-making process. The paper indicates the current status of the research, which is continuing. It is hoped that this paper highlights the problem, summarises the research to date and stimulates further discussion of this important topic. Further publications will disseminate the developed solution.

Text segmentation of spoken meeting transcripts

Text segmentation has played an important role in information retrieval as well as natural language processing. Current segmentation methods are well suited for written and structured texts making use of their distinctive macro-level structures; however text segmentation of transcribed multi-party conversation presents a different challenge given its ill-formed sentences and the lack of macro-level text units. This paper describes an algorithm suitable for segmenting spoken meeting transcripts combining semantically complex lexical relations with speech cue phrases to build lexical chains in determining topic boundaries.