Contextual annealing: Research rolling - hotter, colder, hotter

In conducting research you focus on the question, then the method follows. You may have to go back to the question (in truth) as the methods available to you present their own opportunities and constraints.

Over the past two months this has been a questionnaire within residential care facilities.

Sometimes a confounding factor is to how to describe the study. It's a bit like the figure-ground illusion. One minute you are thinking of the individual, the care worker; the next moment the organisation.

Perspectives shift all the time. This is one of the roles of Hodges' model. The ability to switch from individual to group (population) and various other perspectives and contexts.

I’ve an image of an iceberg. At any one time the questionnaire study’s above the water, the institutional case study under: but then it rolls.

Join the Revolution: For the Lady in the Corner (c/o ST4Health)

ST4Health

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

individual

Lady situated assumptions personal experience	one disease - malaria, smallpox, leprosy, TB,  emergency treatment, hospitals, Africa, systems, capacity
people, society, community, village gender, interactions, humanitarian works,	policy, organisations, population health improvement, global health, poverty, economics, outcomes

group - population
BIG PICTURE (above)

My source:  HIFA2015 list

Who cares about the future and the weather?

Sci-fi

Cli-fi

Care-fi ?

The Etisalat Prize for Literature
(c/o Open Book, BBC Radio 4 and The Financial Times)

'Holistic reform of education' in Jordan (an eastern dose of serendipity)

View from The Citadel, Amman 23 April 2013

Yesterday morning I arrived back safe and sound from Amman in Jordan, via Istanbul through to Manchester and full of new experiences and learning. I say 'safe and sound' because travel to the region is clearly not a matter of routine given ongoing events. Checking governmental advice in the UK it becomes a question of personal evaluation as was the unexpected trip to Colombia in 2011. Once the non-trivial decision is out of the way ... Jordan's nursing and educational communities provide a truly remarkable welcome and experience. Not only that, but the kingdom of Jordan and the people have so much to offer in their culture, history, hospitality and engagement.

Returning on Thursday from a full day's trip to Petra - amazing! - I asked for an English language paper to read at the hotel before leaving for the airport. I was provided with a copy of The Jordan Times to accompany a cappuccino^*. On page nine Mona Smadi,^# Asst. Professor, Al Balqa Applied University) wrote an opinion piece on Holistic reform of education. The opening sentence enabled my brain to reconnect with my legs (although I would have gladly walked back through the valley):

A holistic perception of reality means having a vision of the context of the constituent fragments and thereby gaining a clearer perception of the reality in its totality.

Prof. Smadi's focus is children's education and curriculum reform. The overlap between children's education, the professor's concerns and nursing is not limited to how curricula are designed and who owns them. Is, for example, the curriculum centered on the student as an individual nurse, or child? If nurses are to be able to integrate their learning and effectively negotiate the emotional and ethical spaces they find themselves in then when is this deeper thinking to start?

Petra 25 April 2013

Not surprisingly there was a lot of talk about this at the JNC conference. The theory - practice gap is not just alive and kicking there is an echo off the seemingly disparate walls. Given too the debate in the UK about student nurses spending time as a health care assistant before starting their formal nurse education. The word applied in the title of Prof. Smadi's university's is interesting. We are accustomed to applied mathematics, ethics, energy and of course applied nursing research and many other examples?

What of applied nursing - does that make sense? Or is there a circularity of sorts in nursing applied? I will check my notes as this point was raised in conference regards to evidence based care and evidence based practice.

Prof. Smadi's referring to a 'clearer perception' can also be extended to recognition of patterns, contexts and situations that are 'hot' in how they relate to values.

(There are a couple of points to add here which I will get too).


There was another serving of serendipity to add to that at Le Meridien, soon after rejoining the land of the virtual I came across the UK Department of Education's Preparing for Adulthood initiative on twitter. If you read the brief article by Prof. Smadi you will see how the two are closely related. Do lifestyles and family life today for many compromise the ability of families to teach moral values to children? As noted in the text this then becomes a critical role for education. In westernized cultures is this one of the qualities referred to in the saying of 'spending quality time' with the family? An acknowledgement of a deficit?

Source: http://www.preparingforadulthood.org.uk/

Vital and complex work in two senses. On the one hand cultures try to understand themselves; and on the other, they seek to understand the other others out there: now not so far away. The patterns that are realised be they mosaic, prayers, celtic knot, tartan, languages, landscapes - rock cut architecture - sculpture; these patterns work, that is 'make a difference' by virtue of both the detail and the whole.

"Petra is half-built, half-carved into the rock ..." UNESCO.

^#If I have not used the proper name and title I will edit this accordingly asap upon advice.
 
^*Why not an Arabic coffee? Well I had one the day before. What can I say... It was different in the preparation, being an observation as in so many cultural patterns (tea). I would like to think I will have another one day. The key thing is I did not necessarily want to have the capability to run to the airport at 11pm, or back to Petra for that matter.

Dem@Care Summer School on Ambient Assisted Living

Dem@Care SUMMER SCHOOL ON AMBIENT ASSISTED LIVING (DemAAL 2013)
16-20 September 2013, Chania, Crete, Greece
http://mklab.iti.gr/demaal2013/

We are pleased to announce the 1st Dem@Care summer school on Ambient Assisted Living. The DemAAL summer school is primarily intended for postgraduate (PhD or MSc) students, postdocs and researchers investigating clinical and technical aspects related to Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies for remote health management, ageing well and independent living. Leading researchers from academia and industry will cover theoretical and practical aspects pertinent to pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies for Ambient Intelligence (AmI) applications, while special focus will be given on the role and opportunities of such technologies for dementia management.

Lecture material will be augmented with hands-on practical sessions. Participants will be provided with electronic versions of all programme lectures and all necessary tools and environments for the hands-on sessions. PC access with all tools pre-installed will be available on site as well. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to present their work and obtain feedback during a dedicated poster session intended to further facilitate interactions and the exchange of ideas.

TOPICS
=======
- Dementia and ICT for staging, enablement, and support
- Wearable and pervasive computing
- Sensor networks
- Sensor correlation and fusion
- Context modelling
- Activity monitoring and recognition
- Semantic Complex Event Processing
- Contextual reasoning in AmI
- Assistive technologies for cognitive support and well-being
- Video & voice-based analytics for symptomatic assessment of dementia

SPEAKERS
==========
- Assoc. Prof. Panagiotis Bamidis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)
- Prof. Jenny Benoit-Pineau (University of Bordeaux 1, France)
- Prof. Claudio Bettini (University of Milan, Italy)
- Dr. Antonis Bikakis (University College London, UK)
- Dr. Francois Bremond (INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France)
- Dr. Ceyhun Burak Akgül (Vistek Isra Vision)
- Prof. Cem Ersoy (Boğaziçi University, Turkey)
- Dr. Kate Irving-Lupton (Dublin City University, Ireland)
- Dr. Laura Klaming (Philips Research, The Netherlands)
- Prof. Chris Nugent (University of Ulster, UK)
- Assoc. Prof. Mounir Mokhtari (CNRS/Institut Mines-Telexom, France)
- Prof. Adrian Paschke (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)
- Dr. Daniel Rogen (ETH Zürich, Switzerland)
- Prof. Stefan Sävenstedt (Luleå University of Technology, Sweden)
- Prof. Alan Smeaton (Dublin City University, Ireland)
- Dr. Alex Sorin (IBM Research Haifa, Israel)
- Prof. Kåre Synnes (LTU, Sweden)
- Prof. Magda Tsolaki (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece)

HOW TO APPLY
=============
Please visit and follow the instructions at http://mklab.iti.gr/demaal2013/registration. The deadline for applications is May 30th, 2013.
The summer school fee, including lectures, accommodation, meals and social events is 450 €.

VENUE
=======
The summer school will be held in Chania, Crete, a beautiful land brimming with natural beauty, history, and culture, at the Conference Center of MAICh. For more information about Chania, transportation and accommodation please visit http://mklab.iti.gr/demaal2013/venue.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE
======================
- Ceyhun Burak Akgül (Vistek Isra Vision)
- Stamatia Dasiopoulou (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas)
- Kate Irving (Dublin City University)
- Athina Kokonozi (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas)-
- Yiannis Kompatsiaris (Centre for Research and Technology Hellas)
- Erik Schuijers (Philips Research)

DTMD 2013 & Three different perspectives on a model

I am really looking forward to next week's the Difference That Makes a Difference an interdisciplinary workshop on Information: Space, Time, and Identity at the The Open University and the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK. 

There's a session of instant interest to me as it refers to Peter Gärdenfors' work on conceptual spaces -

Session 1: Information and Space

Spacification: How to design and construct spaces
that can enhance artistic experiences

Ambjörn Naeve (KTH, Sweden) and Carl Smith (London Metropolitan University, UK)

Naeve and Smith provide a further reference:

A (conceptual) model is a description of the most important concepts and their respective relationships within a certain domain of interest. Whatever domain of interest that you focus on, your model will consist of (conceptually simplified) parts that interact with each other in some way. This leads to three different types of models:

1. The static model describes WHAT the (most important) parts are about.
2. The dynamic model describes HOW these parts interact with each other.
3. The intentional model describes WHY they display this behavior.

As we will see, these modeling types can often be mixed into a single model, and then these different types should be thought of more as “aspects” or “perspectives” of the model.

Ref: Ambjörn Naeve. 2011-01-31. A Modeling Primary on Methods and Techniques for Communicative Modeling and Disagreement Management. European Commission Seventh Framework Project (IST-257822).

Journal of Learning Analytics - inaugural issue

ISSN 1929-7750 (online)
Homepage: http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/JLA
Twitter:  http://twitter.com/jla_editorial
Contact:  jla.editorial at gmail.com

Submission deadline (inaugural issue): April 30, 2013

Overview
Journal of Learning Analytics is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal, disseminating the highest quality research in the field. The journal is the official publication of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). With an international Editorial Board comprising leading scholars, it is the first journal dedicated to research into the challenges of collecting, analysing and reporting data with the specific intent to improve learning and teaching practice. “Learning” is broadly defined across a range of contexts, including informal learning on the internet, formal academic study in institutions (primary/secondary/tertiary), and workplace learning.

The journal seeks to connect researchers and developers with practitioners, creating and disseminating new tools and techniques, studying transformations, and providing ongoing evaluation and critique of the conceptual, technical, and practical outcomes. The interdisciplinary focus of the journal recognizes that computational, pedagogical, institutional, policy and social domains must be brought into dialogue with each other to ensure that interventions and organizational systems serve the needs of all stakeholders. The journal seeks to bring into dialogue the intersection of the fields of Education, Computation and Sensemaking.
Journal of Learning Analytics welcomes papers that either describe original research or offer a review of the state of the art in a particular area. The journal also welcomes practice-focused papers that detail Learning Analytics applications in real-world settings, provided that they offer innovative insights for advancing the field (see the About section).

Focus and Scope
The following topics are indicative of the journal’s scope:

Education
- Connections between learning analytics and the learning sciences
- Personalization and adaptation in the learning process
- Educational research methods
- Learner modeling
- The study of emotion, flow, and affective data

Computation
- Social network analysis
- Web science, the Semantic Web, and linked data
- Data mining and machine learning techniques
- Natural language processing and text mining
- Recommendation engines

Sensemaking
- Visualization and user experience
- Data and multimedia literacy
- Decision-support
- Organizational dynamics
- Ethical issues

Research Papers
Journal of Learning Analytics welcomes papers that either describe original research or offer a review of the state of the art in a particular area of learning analytics. No submission, or substantially overlapping submission, be published or be under review elsewhere.  Submissions that extend previously published conference papers are welcome provided that the journal submission has sufficiently been extended (at least 25-30% of new contribution).

The Reflective Practitioner Section
This section of the Journal of Learning Analytics is peer-reviewed and  covers the application of learning analytics across a diversity of contexts. This section spotlights trends and practices; provides new insights and ideas; and analyzes the implications of learning analytics. This section is not intended as an avenue for publication of research articles.

Editors
- Shane Dawson, University of South Australia, Australia
- Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University, Canada
- Phillip Long, University of Queensland, Australia

Editor of the Reflective Practitioner Section
- John Campbell, West Virginia University, USA

Dialectics in therapy, case formulation, h2cm and a tree

Kuyken et al. (2009) propose three dialectics that are useful in an evaluation of their model for case conceptualization, these are:

Released today - 28th Jan 2013

nomothetic – idiopathic; 
simple – complex; 
and subjective – objective.

This act of identifying polarities can be described as a diagrammatic formulation in itself.

These dialectics and many others can be readily incorporated into h2cm: for example;

socio – technical,
macro – micro.
...

Kuyken, W., Padesky, C., Dudley, R. (2009). Collaborative case conceptualization. New York, The Guilford Press.

International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13) & Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)

Call for Papers

5^th International Workshop on Knowledge Representation for Health Care (KRH4C'13)

+

6^th International Workshop on Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth’13)

Organized as One Full Day Workshop

Acronym: KR4HC’13 / ProHealth’13

Murcia, Spain –  June 1^st, 2013

In conjunction with the 14th Conference on
Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME'13)

Web site: http://banzai-deim.urv.net/events/KR4HC-ProHealth-2013/

Important Dates

Deadline for workshop paper submissions: 8 March 2013
Notification of Acceptance: 9 April 2013
Camera-ready version: 7 May 2013
KR4HC/ProHealth Workshop: 1 June 2013

Workshop Goals

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high quality services to their patients at affordable costs. These challenges become more prominent with the growth in the aging population with chronic diseases and the rise of healthcare costs. High degree of specialization of medical disciplines, huge amounts of medical knowledge and patient data to be consulted in order to provide evidence-based recommendations, and the need for personalized healthcare are prevalent trends in this information-intensive domain. The emerging situation necessitates computer-based support of healthcare process & knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making.

This workshop brings together researchers from two communities who have been addressing these challenges from two different perspectives. The knowledge-representation for healthcare community, which is part of the larger medical informatics community, has been focusing on knowledge representation and reasoning to support knowledge management and clinical decision-making. This community has been developing efficient representations, technologies, and tools for integrating all the important elements that health care providers work with: Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and healthcare information systems, clinical practice guidelines, and standardized medical vocabularies. The process-oriented information systems in healthcare community, which is part of the larger business process management (BPM) community, has been studying ways to adopt BPM technology in order to provide effective solutions for healthcare process management. BPM technology has been successfully used in other sectors for establishing process-aware enterprise information systems (vs. collections of stand-alone systems for different departments in the organization). Adopting BPM technology in the healthcare sector is starting to address some of the unique characteristics of healthcare processes, including their high degree of flexibility, the integration with EMRs and shared semantics of healthcare domain concepts, and the need for tight cooperation and communication among medical care teams.

This joint workshop brings together two approaches: healthcare process support, as addressed in previous ProHealth workshops, and healthcare knowledge representation as dealt with in previous KR4HC workshops. The workshop shall elaborate both the potential and the limitations of the two approaches for supporting healthcare process & healthcare knowledge management as well as clinical decision-making. It shall further provide a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized knowledge-based clinical process support can be debated. We want to bring together researchers and practitioners from these different, yet similar fields to improve the understanding of domain specific requirements, methods and theories, tools and techniques, and the gaps between IT support and healthcare processes yet to be closed. This forum also provides an opportunity to explore how the approaches from the two communities could be better integrated.

History of the Joint Workshop 

Providing computer-based support in healthcare is a topic that has been picking up speed for more than two decades. We are witnessing a plethora of different workshops devoted to various topics involving computer applications for healthcare. Our goal has been to try to join forces with other communities in order to learn from each other, advance science, and create a stronger and larger community. In 2012, the two workshops, KR4HC and ProHealth held a joint workshop, which proved to be very successful. This year, we are aiming to continue the collaboration initiative and hold another joint workshop.

The two workshops have quite a long history, as briefly described below.

The first KR4HC workshop, held in conjunction with the 12th Artificial Intelligence in Medicine conference (AIME'09), brought together members of two existing communities: the clinical guidelines and protocols community, who held a line of four workshops (European Workshop on Computerized Guidelines and Protocols (CPG'2000, CPG'2004); AI Techniques in Health Care: Evidence-based Guidelines and Protocols 2006; Computer-based Clinical Guidelines and Protocols 2008) and a related community who held a series of three workshops / special tracks devoted to the formalization, organization, and deployment of procedural knowledge in healthcare (CBMS’07 Special Track on Machine Learning and Management of Health Care Procedural Knowledge 2007; From Medical Knowledge to Global Health Care 2007; Knowledge Management for Health Care Procedures 2008). Since then, two more KR4HC workshops have been held, in conjunction with the ECAI’10 and the AIME’11 conferences.

The first ProHealth workshop took place in the context of the 5th Int’l Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) in 2007. The next three ProHealth Workshops were also held in conjunction with BPM conferences (BPM'08, BPM’09, and BPM’11). The aim of ProHealth has been to bring together researchers from the BPM and the Medical Informatics communities. As the workshop was associated with the BPM conference that had never been attended by researchers from the Medical Informatics community, we had included Medical Informatics researchers as keynote speakers of the workshop, members of the program committee, and to our delight, saw a number of researchers from the Medical Informatics community actively participating in ProHealth workshops. Following the keynote talk given by Manfred Reichert from the BPM community at the Artificial Intelligence in Medicine 2011 (AIME’11) conference, where KR4HC was held, the organizers of ProHealth and KR4HC workshops have shown their interest to hold their workshops in conjunction as part of the BPM'12 conference, which marks a landmark in the collaboration between the two communities. We are continuing the efforts that started four years ago by members of the Software Engineering in Health Care (SEHC) community to strengthen the collaboration between the ProHealth and SEHC communities.

Workshop Theme

Original contributions are sought, regarding the development of theory, techniques, and use cases of Artificial Intelligence and / or process management in the area of healthcare, particularly connected to patient data, clinical guidelines and healthcare processes.

Submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of significance, originality, technical quality, and exposition. Papers should clearly establish their research contribution and the relation to the goals of the workshop. The scope of the workshop includes, but is not limited to the following areas:

• Process modeling in healthcare
• Computer-interpretable clinical guidelines / protocols and decision support
• Workflow management in healthcare
• Semantic integration of healthcare processes with electronic medical records
• Knowledge representation and ontologies for healthcare processes
• Temporal knowledge representations and exploitation
• Facilitating knowledge-acquisition of healthcare processes
• Visualization, monitoring and mining healthcare processes
• Knowledge extraction from healthcare databases and EPRs
• Knowledge combination, personalization and adaptation of healthcare processes
• Compliance of healthcare processes
• Evaluation of quality and safety of careflow systems
• Managing flexibility and exceptions in healthcare processes
• Process optimization and simulation in healthcare organizations and healthcare networks
• Experiences in deploying knowledge-based tools in healthcare
• Patient empowerment in healthcare
• Linking clinical care and clinical research
• Lifecycle management for healthcare processes
• Context-aware healthcare processes
• Ambient intelligence & smart processes in healthcare
• Mobile process support in healthcare
• Process interoperability & standards in healthcare
• Process-oriented system architectures in healthcare

Format of the Workshop

The 1-day workshop will comprise accepted long and short papers, tool presentations, and 1 keynote. Papers should be submitted in advance and will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee. An informal proceedings will be available during the workshop. At least one author for each accepted paper should register for the workshop and present the paper. The selected best long (full) papers will be included in the formal proceedings, which are expected to be published as part of the LNAI Springer series, as it was done in all previous editions of the workshop.

Paper Submission

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. Three types of submissions are possible: (1) full papers (12 pages long) reporting mature research results, (2) position papers reporting research that may be in preliminary stage not yet been evaluated, and (3) tool reports. Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages. Papers must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.
Papers should be submitted in the LNCS format. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper, position paper, or tool report). Papers (in PDF format) should be submitted electronically via the Easychair system

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kr4hcprohealth2013.

Semantic Web journal Special Issue on Cognitive Science and the Semantic Web

The Semantic Web journal invites paper submissions for a special issue on "Cognitive Approaches for the Semantic Web." The scope of the special issue includes research from cognitive science that employs Semantic Web technologies, ontologies, or Linked Data as well as semantic web research that takes inspiration from Cognitive Science findings and methods. We also invite work from domains that would benefit from a closer integration of cognitive science methods into the Semantic Web such as the digital humanities, bioinformatics, and GIScience. Submitted research may address a variety of topics including (but not limited to) reasoning, information retrieval and integration, personalization, context, patterns, user interfaces, spatial cognition, and learning. All standard paper types from the Semantic Web journal may be submitted (research paper, survey paper, tool/system paper, dataset description paper, application report, ontology description - see http://www.semantic-web-journal.org/authors ). In addition, we invite vision and position papers of the highest quality, which will be evaluated as to their potential to stimulate research investigations on the interplay between Cognitive Science and Semantic Web.

Deadlines

Paper submission deadline: January 10, 2013
Notification: March 10, 2013

Editors of the special issue:

Rob Goldstone (Indiana University, Bloomington, US)
Frank van Harmelen (VU Amsterdam, NL)
Pascal Hitzler (Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University, Dayton, US)
Krzysztof Janowicz (University of California, Santa Barbara, US)
Kai-Uwe Kühnberger (Universität Osnabrück, DE)

Guest editorial board (to be completed)

Benjamin Adams (University of California, Santa Barbara, US)
Claudia d'Amato (University of Bari, IT)
Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh, UK)
Jérôme Euzenat (INRIA Rhône-Alpes, FR)
Helmar Gust (Universität Osnabrück, DE)
Cory Henson (Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University, Dayton, US)
Zhisheng Huang (VU Amsterdam, NL)
Werner Kuhn (Universität Münster, DE)
Alexander Mehler (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, DE)
Simon Scheider (Universität Münster, DE)
Christoph Schlieder (Universität Bamberg, DE)
Lael Schooler (MPI für Bildungsforschung, DE)
Wei Lee Woon (Masdar Institute, Abu Dhabi, AE)
Gudrun Ziegler (DICA-lab, University of Luxembourg, LU)
...

Contact: If you have questions, please contact us via contact @ semantic-web-journal.net .

-- Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Dept. of Computer Science, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
http://www.knoesis.org/pascal/
Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org
Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net

Context, locus, photos and festival-non-goer (Ack. FT)

In the Financial Times, Life & Arts section, June 23/June 24 2012 Francis Hodgson wrote Hocus-focus about the 15th PHotoEspaña festival.

The curator Gerardo Mosquera introduced the broad theme of the festival -

From Here: Context and Internationalisation

- which Hodgson feels provides 'no secure binder between disaprate elements':

' "Context," he writes opaquely, "has ceased to be a 'closed' locus linked to a reductive concept of what is local; instead it is projected as a space from which international culture is naturally constructed."

Apart from giving a broad hint that pictures will come from around the world, I'm not sure that is much help for a festival-goer.' p.10.

Although I'm a festival-non-goer in this case and my access to the images is limited to the three published in the FT and online, I wonder if a link here is the interposition of local and global? The conurbation that can be described as glocal? This is what that single sentence says to me.

In accord with our economic times the festival website notes that:

PHotoEspaña has cut its budget by 25%. The public-private partnership model has been adapted to ensure a broad-based programme of exhibitions and activities.

In this sense here at least art reflects health care. The reliance on partnership, overcoming constraints whilst providing an experience that coheres.

25%

This context.

One care domain.

Which domain do we cut - the interpersonal, the social, political, the scientific? Do we vary the top-slicing across the domains? In health too we must grasp what is local, global and glocal to us.

New patient chart to save 6,000 lives a year in the UK

The purpose of NEWS - National Early Warning Score is to standardise the assessment of acute-illness severity in the NHS and in doing so: save lives.

For me in the late 70s early 80s there was great emphasis placed on doing the charts, on 'obs' and the art and skill of observation. As a student nurse, you were finally nursing. From my mental health base, I've noticed new students today retain this enthusiasm to do the TPR and BP. To sign-off this essential competency. I mentioned art and skill above to highlight the intuitive side, not to diminish the underlying knowledge. Recognition is essential to prompt action, critical in acute-illness.

I notice some comments in response to NEWS express concern about finding agreements on units and how standards might stifle innovation. Against this though, Nursing Times reported an acute problem with the quality of nursing observation skills in 2009.

It goes without saying that the elements in NEWS are physical: respiratory rate, blood oxygen level, temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and level of consciousness. It will be fascinating to follow the results and not just in England.

In terms of integrated and holistic care - other measures will be needed.

My source: The Independent (27 July 2012).
Laurence, J. (2012, July 27). New patient chart to save 6,000 lives a year in the UK, The Independent. p.12

New: NHS Change Model

The NHS has a new model to help deliver change, a critical objective over the months and years as new commissioning arrangements are also implemented. The introduction below is from the website, from where the components of the model are also explained following registration and this is a chat forum:

Welcome to the NHS Change Model

The model has been created to support the NHS to adopt a shared approach to leading change and transformation.  We hope to build this website further and add practical information, tools and support over the coming months.  Please tell us what you think to help us shape this model and the ongoing future work using the chat room facility.

Why do we need a change model?
Building on what we collectively know about successful change the ‘NHS Change Model’ has been developed with hundreds of our senior leaders, clinicians, commissioners, providers and improvement activists who want to get involved in building the energy for change across the NHS by adopting a systematic and sustainable approach to improving quality of care.  

What does the model do?

The model brings together collective improvement knowledge and experience from across the NHS into eight key components. Through applying all eight components change can happen. This means no matter whom or wherever you are in the NHS you can use the approach to fit your own context as a way of making sense at every level of the ‘how and why’ for delivering improvement, to consistently make a bigger difference.

NHS Change Model

What is the foundation of h2cm? Gabora & Aerts 2009

I've described h2cm as a foundation, a substrate for the health and social care assessments that follow. And that's the question: what is there before the conceptual framework is populated? As a foundation the model is initially empty, void, null. In terms of theory, practice, values and judgements there are none. The piece of paper is blank. So is the screen. Once (quickly) learned, the professionals have the conceptual framework in mind (ready to call upon), but it is not exercised. Until they encounter a patient, client, carer amid a situation, the conceptual space is empty.

Lund, Hobykrok B&B in the distance - the farm track

If we allow for the structure to permanently reside what then? Does this situation produce an array of potential? An array of potential concepts? Nurses are used to potential and actual problems (often re-framed as strengths). It seems this is the case with language, the amazing compositional scope of different words to produce sentences and meanings.

In a way I don't want to venture into this space. There are monsters there. I know the above is far removed from nursing. Where is  compassion, dignity, respect, plans and empathy in all this? ... Once the care concepts are realised then: yes - do lead the way. But before the light is turned on: no.

No: but there is no choice. The question needs to be asked and settled.

Liane Gabora gave a talk at Conceptual Spaces At Work. Checking back on her previous work I found this (SCOP: State COntext Property theory of concepts):

An important notion in SCOP is the ground state of a concept, denoted p. This is the ‘raw’ or ‘undisturbed’ state of a concept; the state it is in when it is not being evoked or thought about, not participating in the structuring of a conscious experience (such as, most likely, the concept ZEBRA when you began reading this paper). The ground state is the state of being not disturbed at all by the context. One never experiences a concept in its ground state; it is always evoked in some context. The notion of ground state is somewhat similar to the notion of prototype. The ground state is a theoretical construct; it cannot be observed directly but only indirectly through how the concept interacts with various contexts (which may include other concepts). p. 436.

Gabora, L., Aerts, D. (2009) A model of the emergence and evolution of integrated worldviews, Journal of Mathematical Psychology. 53, 434–451.

Hodges' model in Murphy & Welford (2012) Agenda for the future: enhancing autonomy for older people in residential care. Int. J. of Older People Nursing

ABSTRACT: This is the concluding paper of a three paper publications. Paper 1 focused on specifically understanding what autonomy for older people in residential care means. Paper 2 discussed the various factors that either facilitate or hinder residents autonomy and directed readers to reflect upon their practice. This final paper outlines the findings from the action research phase of a study aimed at enhancing resident autonomy. It describes just one way in which residential care units can work on enhancing residents autonomy and enables the reader to reflect upon nursing practices, which with the right approach can be resident-centred.

Murphy and Welford write:

Hodges (1997) model is essentially concerned with the person (resident) in a social context. The notion of it derives from the intervention of the nurse being future orientated, increasing the health choices, health chances or health prospects of individuals or groups (including families) taking cognisance of the biography of the person or persons being helped. The person already has a biography that has been influenced by their physical and psychological make-up, the kinds of families and social networks they have experienced and the culture or geographical location in which they live. The nurse then is also influenced by personal factors of their individual physical or psychological origin and factors relating to their social world and the policies that govern their daily life. The nurse (assessor) must take cognisance of the attributes the person (resident) brings with them in their current presentation (problem) and how this affects their future choices both in terms of ability to make them and the range of choices available. Thus, this approach to care planning recognises the importance of negotiating care.  (online source - see doi link below)

I am not just very grateful to Murphy and Welford for their adopting Hodges' model in their study, but this supports my own use of the model in teaching staff about person-centred care and communication skills in residential and nursing care homes. The inclusion of a political domain and individual and group (populations) dimensions is a great asset in this context. Their conclusion also identifies the limitations of individually directed change, something that seems apparent from my own experience in nursing home liaison.
 
Murphy, K., Welford C. (2012) Agenda for the future: enhancing autonomy for older people in residential care. International Journal of Older People Nursing. 7, 75–80. doi: 10.1111/j.1748-3743.2012.00309.x