BU Research Blog

Research from Bournemouth University was showcased at the Global Women`s (GLOW) conference organised by University of Manchester on 24th November 2016. The GLOW annual conference is designed to provide a platform for academics, policy makers and researchers involved in international maternal, child and reproductive health to share their experiences, build collaborations and inspire upcoming researchers to make a difference.

Under the theme `innovations to accelerate saving lives at birth` researchers were given the opportunity to share their ideas and novelties on improving newborn, child and maternal health. A key message echoed by speakers at the conference was on improving quality of maternity services at health facilities with a call to ensure interventions translate into saving lives along the continuum of care.

PhD student, Alice Ladur presented a poster In mama` shoes. Using board games with men to influence uptake of skilled birth attendants in Uganda. This research is about using educational board games as a means to engage with men to address barriers that hinder pregnant women from accessing skilled care at birth a key factor contributing to high maternal deaths in low income countries. Alice`s PhD project is supervised by Dr Zoe Sheppard and Professor Vanora Hundley.

Key highlights for me from the GLOW conference was receiving feedback on the game that will be tested next year in Uganda and a call for excellence as articulately stated by one of the keynote speakers ` let us all do our part in saving lives at birth and do it well`. It is possible to improve health outcomes for pregnant mothers and babies in resource constrained settings.

If you are interested in finding out more about this research, please contact me at aladur@bournemouth.ac.uk

Being a reflective doctor is integral to the safe practice of medicine and forms a significant part of the assessment process for General Practitioners in the UK. Reflective practice is integral to Fitness to Practice and Maintaining an ethical approach as identified in the RCGP training curriculum:

As a GP you should aim at understanding and learning to use your own attitudes, strengths and weaknesses, values and beliefs in a partnership with your individual patients. This requires a reflective approach and the development of insight and an awareness of self. Being honest and realistic about your own abilities, strengths, weaknesses and priorities will help you in dealing with your patients and problems; the lack of self awareness will make your job as a GP very difficult. (RCGP Curriculum)

Rutherford (Programme Leader – MA Advertising) and Dr Emer Forde (GP Foundation Programme Director – Centre for General Practice) have been leading a series of workshops with GP trainees which uses photography as a means to encourage meaningful and constructive self-reflection.

In addition to our snapshots of friends and family, holidays and special events, many of us also make photographs of things… just because we liked the way something looked, but often without knowing why our attention had been attracted to a particular scene. For example, we might photograph two children playing in a park, an old house, or a bicycle lying in the grass – but we don’t know those children, or the people who lived in that house, and that’s not our bicycle. It was suggested that, when we are prompted to record a scene with which we have no conscious or logical connection, it may be that we have intuitively recognised a personally relevant metaphor in the arrangement of elements – and one to which our subconscious is now trying to bring to our attention.

The GP trainees were asked to carry a camera with them wherever they went and to be prepared to photograph those scenes or ‘moments’ that attracted their attention with an intuitive ‘tap on the shoulder’.

After identifying the three or four photographs at which they regularly paused when leafing casually (‘absent mindedly’) through their photographs, the GP trainees were then asked to reflect on the significance of both the individual elements within the frame as well as the ‘story’ depicted in the picture – and to try to identify the aspect(s) of their personal or professional lives the photographs appear to describe allegorically. The GP trainees were required to submit a self-reflective commentary of 500-1000 words explaining what they had learned about themselves as a result of this project – and how the photographs led to these insights.

These workshops have formed the basis of an ongoing research project, leading to three articles for diverse academic journals currently in preparation.

The photographs produced by the GP trainees in these workshops will be exhibited at the Atrium gallery (Talbot campus) in the week of 12 December 2016.

See you next Wednesday at Royal London House 201 at 1 pm.  Students and Staff are Welcome!!

Five years ago ‘Channel 4’ approached the Corporate and Marketing Communications academic group (CMC) to ask us to carry out for them some highly interpretive research around the Paralympics – they were interested to know how audiences make sense of the coverage and thus how they might frame this event in future. From this came award winning, nation-wide phenomenological study conducted over the period of 18 months.

Indirectly this also led to ‘Channel 4’ re-thinking some of the ways in which they promoted and covered the 2016 Paralympics in Rio. Some of those Colleagues involved in this project decided to delve deeper and edited a book published by Routledge (2015) and entitled ‘Reframing Disability? Media, (Dis)Empowerment, and Voice in the 2012 Paralympics’.

As a direct result of being editors of this book, Professor Michael Silk approached Carrie Hodges, Dan Jackson and Richard Scullion to form the core bid team at Bournemouth University for the AHRC grant entitled:  ‘Re-presenting parasport bodies: the cultural legacy of the Paralympics’. In November 2016, the team got the news that they were successful in securing over £600k to fund a 30 month long series of studies that will involve a variety of qualitative research packages to consider audience interpretations, the media production and dissemination of the Games, related content as well as media analysis. The project will culminate in an interactive public exhibition and a documentary film.