Laurence Moseley

What do mentors find difficult

AIMS (i) To assess whether mentors had a positive or negative attitude towards their role; and (ii) to discover what aspects of the role they found easy or difficult. BACKGROUND The fact that mentorship is an important element in nurse training was recognized by Sir Leonard Peach, the United Kingdom Central Council for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting and the Nursing and Midwifery Council which has recently published new standards to support learning and assessment in practice, which include standards for the preparation of Mentors, to be implemented by September 2007. There are many anecdotal reports of the problems which face mentors, but little firm evidence. METHOD This paper reports a study of those problems. It used a Thurstone scale to assess role satisfaction among mentors (n = 86, response rate 89%) and two Likert scales to assess where problems, if any, lay. RESULTS Unlike anecdotal reports, the Thurstone scale found that, overall, mentors regarded the role positively. In addition, a principal components analysis of responses to the Likert scales showed that there were two clearly delineated factors. The first (interpersonal/organisational factors) had been widely discussed in the literature. The second (cognitive/intellectual factors) has been rarely discussed and could with profit be more strongly stressed in mentor training. CONCLUSIONS (i) Mentors had a positive attitude towards their role and enjoyed it. (ii) When looking at what caused mentors difficulty, in addition to the commonly discussed dimensions of organisational constraints (workload, skill mix) and interpersonal factors, there was clearly an additional cognitive one. Knowledge, not just personality, mattered. IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE Mentors and those who train them could with profit pay more attention to cognitive components of the role, even if that meant laying a lesser stress on the interpersonal ones.

Handedness and hand injuries

Data are reported from a study of 1,003 patients attending with hand injuries at an Accident and Emergency Department. Among both left- and right-handers, injuries to the right hand were more common than to the left hand, except for accidents to right-handers at work. For this group there were more injuries to the left hand. Male and female patients differ in the frequency with which they present for medical attention but show similar types of injury.

Fault diagnosis for industrial printers using case-based reasoning

Abstract The objective of this paper is to discuss first-hand experience of developing a fault-diagnostic application using a commercially available case-based reasoning (CBR) software tool. The paper will analyse the problem domain, discuss the need for a computing solution, compare two different computing approaches (rule-based systems and CBR), and state the effects and potential benefits to industry of introducing such systems.

Associations between Physical Activity and Health Parameters in Adolescent Pupils in Egypt

Physical activity (PA) could be protective against hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease and cardiovascular disease. This quantitative study assessed the association between a PA intervention and three anthropometric parameters (weight, body mass index, body fat) and four physiological parameters (cholesterol level, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, heart rate) among secondary school pupils (N = 160) in Egypt through the school term. The pupils were randomised to an intervention group (80 pupils) and controls (80 pupils). Measurements were obtained for all pupils twice: at baseline; and then again after three months. The PA intervention programme comprised an ‘afterschool’ one hour of moderate exercise three times a week for three months. Both the controls and the intervention pupils attended the ‘normal’ exercise schedule provided by the school; in addition, the intervention group attended afterschool PA programme from about 2–3 o’clock in the afternoon. At baseline, employing pupil’s BMI, 27.5% and 28.8% of the intervention and control pupils respectively were classified as overweight. After three months, the percentage of overweight decreased to 12.5% in the intervention pupils, while it increased to 37.3% in the controls. At the end of the three months period, there were significant improvements across most anthropometric and physiological parameters of the intervention pupils when compared with the control children. The correlation coefficient of the improvements for the boys and the girls was 0.97, indicating clearly that the intervention was having nearly the same beneficial effect for boys and girls. A moderate PA programme for a modest period of 3 months could be effective in maintaining or enhancing pupil’s anthropometric and physiological parameters in comparison to the controls where there was deterioration in both parameters. Policy makers and secondary schools in Egypt might need to pay more attention to PA programmes conducted on school days, in order to motivate pupils to attend such programmes. There is also an urgent need to look at current PA systems within schools in Egypt in order to assess PA outside school times.

Applying lexical and semantic analysis to the exploration of free-text data.

A substantial study of primary nursing involving the authors ( 1 , 2 ) generated, in addition to the pre-coded data, a large number of free-text responses. We decided to investigate whether these less structured data could help to categorise and understand the leadership styles of ward sisters in the sample.

Can feedback be individualised, useful, and economical?

An important, but often neglected, part of any research or audit exercise is the reporting back to participants of the results of that exercise. When feedback is made, it is often of a general, aggregated nature. Considerations of cost and psychological factors usually preclude feedback to individuals. As part of a larger study we have developed a prototype mechanism for providing such individual feedback. This was done by writing a computer program which automatically generated the report, using rules on how to interpret different patterns of responses to a questionnaire. Previous qualitative evaluation had shown a positive response from participating nurses. The current small-scale study reports a more formal evaluation. Participants who received reports on the degree to which their ward was practising primary nursing overwhelmingly found the reports readable, informative, encouraging, accurate and useful.

Viscometric flow interpretation using qualitative and quantitative techniques

Abstract Although the development of rheological software has kept pace with the advances in modern rheometrical instruments the process of data analysis and interpretation remains fallible and can be prone to some significant errors. The reason for this is that the ability and knowledge of human beings to utilize the instruments and data at their disposal can be somewhat limited in some instances. To solve this problem an intelligent system has been built which incorporates knowledge to assist the user. The system provides descriptions about the data or graph using natural language, explanations using tutorial frames, and a step-by-step hands-on guidance through the data analysis. In this paper, the two major problems faced by users are stated and the techniques (symbolic and nonsymbolic computation) employed to solve these problems are described theoretically. Finally, illustrations are given which show how these ideas are implemented in the system.