Rebekah Wegener

The impact of the medical emergency team on the resuscitation practice of critical care nurses

Background Medical Emergency Teams (MET)/rapid response are replacing Cardiac Arrest teams in acute hospitals. There is a lack of knowledge about how Critical Care Nurses (CCNs), rostered on MET construct their responsibilities/roles. Objective Assess MET nurse activities at different hospitals. Methods The authors used visual ethnography; selecting Systemic Functional Grammar as our methodological framework. The Generic Systemic Potential was used to guide the coding of visual and inferential meaning of the activities of MET nurses. CCNs coded over 6 h of videoed MET calls, sampled across three hospitals, Sydney, Australia. Results The first layer of coding contained 1042 discreet tasks. They were sorted into 15 Areas of Practice (AOPs) and then allocated to aspects of performance (psychomotor and cognitive). The AOPs ‘Assisting with Procedure’ through to ‘Monitoring Vital Signs’ reflect psychomotor skills which account for almost half (48%) of the AOPs at site 1 and three-quarters at sites 2 (70%) and 3 (78%). Eight generic responsibilities/roles were identified. ‘Ongoing Assessment,’ ‘Re-evaluating Risk’ and ‘Prioritising Interventions’ were the most prominent. The patterns differed by hospital: ‘Re-evaluating Risk’ was prominent for sites 1 and 2 but less so for site 3. Conclusion ‘Ongoing Assessment’ and ‘Re-evaluating Risk’ occupied almost half of the MET nurses time, whereas ‘Establishing Patient Acuity, the key activity in CA teams, occupied only 4%. These findings provide evidence of the roles of CCNs in the MET and suggest that education and training of MET nurses should support these roles.

Modelling Behaviour Semantically

Context is only one of several strata of meaning and we can not predict realisation at the lexical or grammatical level from context alone. Yet, there is a tendency to confuse contextual patterning with semantic patterning and allocate patterning to the contextual level that might better be dealt with on other levels. While much work has been done on theorising lexis and grammar and, more recently, on seeing these in context, much remains to be done on theorising semantics as a separate level mediating between context and lexis and grammar. This paper examines the problem of modelling behaviour and the challenge of understanding behaviour in context as well as on a semantical level. By understanding the descriptive responsibilities allocated to each level of language, we are better able to see what remains to be covered by context within a model.

Making Use of Abstract Concepts–Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Ambient Intelligence

One of the challenges for ambient intelligence is to embed technical artefacts into human work processes in such a way that they support the sense making processes of human actors instead of placing new burdens upon them. This successful integration requires an operational model of context. Such a model of context is particularly important for disambiguating abstract concepts that have no clear grounding in the material setting of the work process. This paper examines some of the strengths and current limitations in a systemic functional model of context and concludes by suggesting that the notions of instantiation and stratification can be usefully employed.

Start Making Sense: Systemic-Functional Linguistics and Ambient Intelligence

An operational model of context is particularly important for the successful integration of new technical artefacts into complex processes. One of the challenges for ambient intelligence is to embed technical artefacts into human work processes in such a way that they support the sense making processes of human actors instead of placing new burdens upon them. This paper examines some of the strengths and current limitations of a systemic functional model of context. We propose that the dimensions that are relevant to modeling are those that have the most consequences for meaning. This is explored in a hypothetical hospital scenario.

Supporting Students Through Notifications About Importance in Academic Lectures

Identifying and extracting important information from monologic interaction is a difficult task for humans and modelling this for an intelligent system is a big challenge. In our work, we have previously used models that are grounded in semiotic, linguistic and psychological theories of multi-modal interaction. Here, we concentrate on academic lectures as a specific form of monologic interaction. Our goal is to support students through a system alerting them to important aspects of a lecture. In this paper, we outline the requirements that went into an early implementation of the system. We discuss a rich contextual model and what this entails for modelling requirements and system implementation. We provide an overview of the system and discuss our notion and role of context within the application domain.

Studying Language in Society and Society through Language: Context and Multimodal Communication

Hasan describes context in the following way: ‘context of situation as construed by discourse is a tripartite entity, each component of which is always active in the production of a text’ (Hasan, 2004, p. 21). This description of context of situation as an entity may be due to a number of reasons. For instance, there is a language-driven semantic drift towards reification because once we start to talk about ‘context’ we come to refer to it as an entity since all our language pushes us in that direction. There is also a discourse focus on context, in the sense that ‘context of situation is construed by discourse’ (Hasan, 2004, p. 21). And there is a bounded notion of discourse, in that a text view of discourse tends towards strong boundaries that make it more likely for context to be seen as an entity.