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Heartfelt story by BU PhD student in Ugandan newspaper today

uganda-aliceThe Daily Monitor in Uganda published the sad story of the death in childbirth of Juliet Angwech Opoka-Kinyera and her new-born baby.  The story is told by Juliet’s sister Alice Opoka.  Before starting her PhD in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences Alice worked in the field of maternal health as a researcher and health educator.  Alice Opoka is cited in the newspaper article as saying: “Childbirth in other parts of the world is a moment of joy and expectation for the newest addition to the family. Sadly, in the developing world, it is a bridge between life and death.”

But rather than silently remembering her sister, Alice uses her story to highlight the imporance of reducing maternal mortality.  She expresses this eloquantly in the following sentences: “To save even just one woman and baby from the claws of death at a time when she is meant to be bringing life to this earth. If we see human faces beyond the statistics, perhaps there will be a new sense of urgency to prevent maternal deaths from happening anywhere in the world.  Each one playing their part in the community, health facility and government.”

Every day nearly 800 women die in childbirth, nearly all of them in low-income countries and nearly all there deaths are ‘avoidable’.  Nearly two decades ago Dr Brundtland, the then Director-General of the WHO (World Health Organization), highlighted that “Because of our collective failure to solve this problem, the tragedy of maternal mortality represents a major source of suffering and injustice in our societies.” She added “This situation cannot be allowed to continue.”  Today women are still dying unnecessary.  Alice’s story is a stark reminder why research into improving maternity care for women in low-income countries is so very important.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinal Health

Festival of Social Science: widening participation and photography

Centre for Excellence in Learning, Student Engagement, student research

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“I want to take a break… stop autopiloting … everything that you do makes you feel”

Student, 10/10/2016

In My Voice, My Story, we explore what it means to be a non-traditional student at university through the participatory photographic and story technique, photovoice. This technique sees students become the researchers of their own lives through taking photos and telling their stories.

The photovoice method is a participatory approach used to inform policymakers, so that meaningful policy changes can be shaped the lived experiences of the communities the policies are intended to serve.

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We focus on students from non-traditional backgrounds because we know how the lived experiences of these students are often marginalised by institutions and that this impacts upon their attainment and degree outcomes. Learning together in this way is a central tenet to our programme of Fair Access Research.

This research contributes to new, more participatory, ways of doing and thinking about widening participation which is a core tenet to BU’s Fair Access Research project.

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Students Who Bounce Back, led by Dr Jacqueline Priego

We invite you all to a workshop where we will listen to the students’ voices, learn from the students’ stories, gain insights into different research methods and work together to develop practical responses to what we see and hear.  

Monday 7th November 2016 10:00 -13:00 in the Fusion Building, F105

Book a place here!

You will gain insights into the power of arts-based social participatory research methods for eliciting deep stories and re-represented for social action. Having engaged with storytelling, participants will discuss ways in which the students’ lived experiences could shape policy changes and interventions to better enable students to belong.

 Feel free to share this invitation  with your colleagues or networks.

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For more information about this project or BU’s innovative Fair Access Research, email the Principal Investigators, Dr Vanessa Heaslip (vheaslip@bournemouth.ac.uk) and Dr Clive Hunt (chunt@bournemouth.ac.uk).

 

 

 

 

 

WTM eTourism: Disrupting innovations for Tourism and Hospitality

Fusion, international

Join Professor Dimitrios Buhalis on Monday 7 November, as part of the World Travel Market 7-9 November, in London.This discussion will take place in our Inspire Theatre, in Fusion, between 10:30am-12:15.

The event will host a series of speakers including: Kevin May, Tnooz.com; Mario Hardy Pacific, Asia Tourism Association, Thailand; Nathaniel Green, DUETTO Research, USA; Richard Hatter Hotel Icon, Hong Kong; Andy Owen-Jones, BD4Travel, Germany; and Matthew Gardiner, UnderTheDoormat, UK.

This session will  discuss how disrupting innovations generate significant market structure changes, modifying the operating practices, industry structure and dominant logic. This structural change is affecting the organisational networks and the services tourism players are supposed to use to perform well in markets. Both opportunities and challenges emerge for the whole tourism and hospitality industry. Relationships between players change as their respective roles change; this is driven by e-commerce / e-business and disruptive innovation. For instance hotels, thanks to e-business technological platforms, can now use algorithms to set yield and revenue management strategies, monitor competition in real time and allow consumers to use mobile devices to access several services. In the tourism industry, many innovations have been initiated from companies in the information technology sector. Generally, Information technology is revolutionizing products, services and markets.

For more information please click here.

The session is free however, to attend you must join the World Travel market, please click here.

Funds available to support Global Engagement through staff mobility

To help support staff in global engagement endeavours, we have funds available from Erasmus and Santander under the revised Staff Mobility scheme.

Erasmus staff mobility funding can be used to support the travel, accommodation and subsistence costs of academic and professional support staff undertaking training at an organisation/ institution in Europe. It can also be used to support the same costs for any academic staff member wishing to teach at a European university. The guidance to the application form contains more details as to the amounts available and duration and our priority institutions. Erasmus funds are a great way to build networks and gain a great experience.

Santander staff mobility funding can be used to support travel, accommodation and subsistence costs for staff wishing to develop research, education and professional practice projects. This fund is ideal to support academic staff in travelling to an international university in order to develop a collaborative relationship.

All the details needed to make the application as well as sources of advice can be found on this dedicated webpage.

The deadline for submissions is 9am on 24th October 2016.

World Mental Health Day: how does the way we process emotions affect our health?

Nearly every day, we are faced with some kind of stress or difficulty, which we need to overcome and usually do so without it causing us significant trauma. Less frequently we may have to cope with major life events, such as a serious illness, the death of a loved one or a relationship breakdown. Under these circumstances, our resolve and the way in which we process difficult events may be seriously challenged.

This year’s World Mental Health Day focuses on the importance of ‘psychological first aid’; the idea that in a crisis situation, people’s psychological wellbeing and how they process that event is just as important as their physical needs. For more than twenty years, experts in Bournemouth University’s Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) have been studying emotional processing of daily and unexpected events and what impact this can have on our mental and physical wellbeing. Professor Roger Baker, lead researcher and a clinical psychologist, explains their research and its implications.

“Most people are able to process emotional or traumatic events and, once having dealt with the situation, are able to return to their normal behaviour. However, this isn’t true for all of us. In some cases people find it very difficult to process emotional events, which can lead to psychological disorder or psychogenic conditions,” says Professor Baker.

“I first noticed the effects of emotional processing difficulties in panic attack patients in the 1980s. At the time, panic attacks were only just beginning to be recognised as a condition distinct from generalised anxiety disorders, and what struck me was the connection between a traumatic event in people’s lives and the emergence of their symptoms.”

“This link came up over and over again, suggesting that there was likely to be a clear connection between the way we process emotional events and its implications for our mental and physical wellbeing.”

“Over the last fifteen years, I’ve been working with fellow researchers in BUCRU – including Dr Sarah Thomas and Professor Peter Thomas – and others to explore how emotional processing affects people in a variety of different situations and with different health conditions. These range from people with MS, people with cancer to people who have suffered abuse and psychological conditions such as depression, alcoholism and anorexia.”

“Based on the data gathered, we have been able to establish norms for emotional processing, both for healthy people and people in very specific circumstances. We’ve used this data and our research in this area to develop a recently published Emotional Processing Scale, which asks people to reflect on their emotions over the last week. It analyses five different areas of processing – suppression, signs of unprocessed emotion, controllability of emotion, avoidance and emotional experience.”

“Each area is given a score, with higher values indicating an area of difficulty. It can be a really helpful process both for the individual and for their psychologist as it highlights the issues which therapy could help with. People can fill out the questionnaire at the beginning and end of their treatment to give an indication of how their processing abilities have changed.”

“Often when people come in for therapy, they’ll discuss their problems not in terms of cognitive or behavioural symptoms, but how distressing it makes them feel. As psychologists, we need to be able to move beyond cognitive and behavioural debates and consider people holistically, which includes taking into account their ability to emotionally process events.”

Migration research conference: Borderless Worlds in Finland

Migration Research Conference: Borderless worlds – for whom?

University of Oulu, Finland

I recently attended a migration research conference, “Borderless Worlds- for whom? Ethics, moralities and (in)justice in migration and tourism” organized by the RELATE Centre of Excellence/Academy of Finland & University of Oulu. This was an interdisciplinary conference with leading border and migrant scholars, human geographers, anthropologists and tourism scholars. They also invited journalists, activists, activist researchers and migrants themselves as part of panel sessions. Interestingly, the panel sessions were held at at a local library (Oulu City Library) while being open to local people, which lead to perspectives ‘beyond academia’ (speaking of ‘borderless’!). Through the two day conference, we were exposed to the complexity of the terrain and to pay much-needed attention to the ethics, moralities and (in)justices in border struggles, migration and tourism mobilities. Instead of taking territorial or relational views as normative givens, we came to consider how the simultaneous ‘geographies’ of bounded and open, networked spaces are realised in the contemporary world.

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In the State and the Governance of Mobilities session, I presented a paper on tourism development and Filipino migrant workers’ community in Macau (co-authored with Dr. Michael O’ Regan at BU). We discussed how rapid tourism development in Macau attracts high populations of Filipino migrant workers, and how Filipino migrants perceive their quality of life and constraints while working and living in Macau. Most of the migrant workers left family in the Philippines and support them financially, and I showed this was the biggest issue for their happiness and life satisfaction. Another interesting issue was the sense of community. Filipino migrants expressed that it is not only difficult to integrate into the Macau society, but also hard to have their own Filipino community due to multiple complex reasons. We concluded that the government should consider the migrant workers’ subjective quality of life, and introduce new policies to support the migrant workers, and create a livable place for everyone.

Migration research in tourism and leisure has gained more attention, and I am very interested in developing more research projects around ‘migration’ issues starting with the current working paper.

Jaeyeon Choe

Department of Events & Leisure

Faculty of Management

@choe_jaeyeon

CMMPH disability & childbirth research

Publishing

Last month’s press release for the latest study in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) was picked up by the Journal of Family Health.  disability-pregnancy-2016The study ‘Human rights and dignities: Experience of disabled women during pregnancy, childbirth and early parenting’ appeared under the heading ‘Maternity care failing disabled women, charity warns’ in the Journal of Family Health.  The charity in question is Birthrights which funded the survey of women with physical or sensory impairment or long-term health conditions and their maternity care experiences.  The research was conducted by midwifery researchers Jenny Hall, Jillian Ireland and Vanora Hundley at Bournemouth University and occupational therapist Bethan Collins, at the University of Liverpool.

rcm-disabilityLast month this important study had already been reported by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) on their webpages (click here to read more).  On the RCM website  Louise Silverton Director for Midwifery at the RCM said: “It is deeply disappointing to hear that women with disabilities are not getting the maternity care they need and deserve. Although this is only a small survey, it does provide a very valuable insight into the realties of the care these women have received while pregnant.  The RCM believes that maternity services should treat disabled women like every other woman, while ensuring that the care provided does not ignore or overreact to their specific wishes and aspirations.”

 

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis invited to the University of Pretoria

international

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis Head of Department of Tourism and Hospitality at Bournemouth University was invited to the University of Pretoria, on 9 September 2016, to deliver a keynote speech on Universal Accessibility for Tourism and meet the South Africa’s Minister of Tourism, Derek Hanekom.

The Department of Tourism and Hospitality, Bournemouth University is a partner with the University of Pretoria, one of the oldest and most established Universities in South Africa. Professor Buhalis had discussions with the Head of Department of Tourism Professor Berendien Lubbe and her colleagues about research partnerships that will cover a number of areas including eTourism, accessibility, destination management and marketing, and wildlife tourism.

During the Tourism Symposium Professor Buhalis had the opportunity to reflect on Accessibility as welcoming all everywhere any time and he explored several global best practice examples in accessible tourism. He contributed to the Symposium that included a range of important South African and global operators including SANparks, Sun International, Tourvest and SATSA.

Professor Buhalis had the opportunity to meet the Minister of Tourism of South Africa RH Derek Hanekom and to discuss accessibility issues as well as the marketing of South Africa as a destination and global issues such as Brexit, political uncertainty and emerging markets and how they can contribute to tourism and economic development.

Professor Dimitrios Buhalis, Bournemouth University and Derek Hanekom, South Africa’s Minister of Tourism

Professor Buhalis said “I am very glad to establish collaboration with the tourism team of the University of Pretoria South Africa. They are doing very interesting tourism research and a very challenging and rewarding environment. We look forward to develop our research and academic collaboration with the University of Pretoria and develop our research agenda and impact of our research globally. South Africa has unique resources and opportunities to develop tourism as well as challenges that need to be addressed for the benefit of all stakeholders.”

ORI presentation at RCN Society of Orthopaedic and Trauma Nursing International Conference and Exhibition

conferences

RCN Society of Orthopaedic and Trauma Nursing International Conference and Exhibition, 8-9th  September 2016, Cardiff

Nice poster, but can't say the same thing for the poster board...

Nice poster, but can’t say the same thing for the poster board…

The theme for this conference was ‘Valuing the past, embracing the future‘ and it was great to be able to represent BU’s Orthopaedic Research Institute (ORI) whose work is firmly on the ’embracing the future’ side of the theme. I was there to deliver a poster presentation entitled:

‘A review of the literature related to the role of nutritional supplementation for an enhanced recovery pathway for hip and knee replacement’

This was produced through work with Associate Professor Tom Wainwright (Deputy Head) and Professor Rob Middleton (Head) of ORI, and Dr Simon Dyall of the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences. There was good interest in the poster from orthopaedic nurses and fellow academics, and I had a great chat about nutrition with the one medical doctor in attendance – the first time I’ve heard of an orthogeriatrician!

Headline? At present, the evidence base does not support the use of nutritional supplementation in enhanced recovery after surgery pathways for hip/knee replacement. However, that’s not to say that nutrition does not play a role. More high quality research is required particularly to explore the role of zinc, vitamin D and omega fatty acids, and possibly other nutrients that have been overlooked too. If you’d like to find out more you can get a full size version of the poster here. Any comments on this most welcome.

For those interested in orthopaedics in general, the opening presentation included learning about Norman, aged 90, who can apparently lay claim to having had the longest lasting hip replacement. He had his first replacement in 1948 and it only needed revising this year! (if I remember correctly)! Far, far longer than most hip replacements last.

Norman, 90 years young, had first hip replacement in 1948!

Norman, 90 years young, had first hip replacement in 1948!

 Other presentations included work on fracture prevention (increasingly important for our aging and increasingly frail population), developing post-graduate education in orthopaedic nursing, recognition of delirium, and the latest on the timely identification of compartment syndrome (a life-threatening complication).

Having a couple of hours to spare before returning to Bournemouth I took a look at some of the beautiful architecture in Cardiff. It had the feeling of a city that values its past:

The clock tower of Cardiff Castle

The clock tower of Cardiff Castle

but is also embracing the future…

Wales Millenium Centre

Wales Millenium Centre

Many thanks to the Faculty of Health and Social Sciences for supporting my attendance.

 

Tourism Management Institute Annual Convention- 11-12 October 2016

The Tourism Management Institute Annual Convention will take place over two days, on the 11-12 October 2016.

The TMI Annual Convention is an annual gathering and conference for all those who work in destination management across the UK, whether in DMOs, regions, towns, national parks or events, and is open to all directors, practitioners, academics, consultants and students.

11th October will see a ‘University/Practitioner/Student Summit’ hosted at Bournemouth University Talbot Campus from noon until 3.30pm, which will be especially relevant for our members working in higher education. A selection of study tours will follow then an informal evening get together at the Keywest Restaurant at the Pier at 7.30pm preceeded by the TMI AGM at 7pm. The following day, the TMI 2016 Convention will take place at the new Bournemouth Hilton Hotel, between 9am-4:45pm.

For more information about this event, please click here.

14:Live with Dinusha Mendis

Student Engagement

14:Live is back on Thursday 20 October, at 14:00-15:00! Join Dr Dinusha Mendis on the 5th Floor of the Student Centre, for an exciting talk around her research.

What’s it about you ask? Going for Gold! 3D Scanning and 3D Printing of Jewellery and Implications for Intellectual Property Law.

Have you ever seen 3D printing and 3D scanning happen in reality? By allowing physical objects to be replicated, 3D printing is increasing in popularity. However, this can raise questions about intellectual property (IP) laws.

Unfortunately, there can be implications to modifying and replicating someone else’s existing design or Computer Aided Design (CAD) file. Does it infringe the IP rights of the creator? How much ‘modification’ is needed to create a new and non-infringing product? Are we about to see a new wave of file sharing in 3D designs? While the technology has significant potential to expand into various sectors, including jewellery, it raises many issues in relation to ownership and authorship. Can IP law deal with this growing technology or will we see a new wave of piracy and counterfeiting which will be hard to control?

All staff and students are welcome to attend so come down and join us for what is going to be an exciting and engaging session, over lots of free snacks and drinks! So pop it in your calendars and we can’t wait to see you.

If you have any questions about 14:Live or other student engagements events, then send over an email to Hannah Jones.

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Webinar: Emotional Processing Scale from Prof Roger Baker 6th Oct 2pm

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Professor Roger Baker, the lead author of the Emotional Processing Scale, is running a webinar on Thursday 6th October 2-3pm, hosted by Hogrefe UK.

Roger Baker is a clinical psychologist and has taught clinical psychology at BU.  He specialises in emotions and the treatment of anxiety disorders and has worked as a researcher and clinical psychologist at several universities and NHS Trusts.

Please follow this link to sign up to the webinar:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7941554061013769986

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The Emotional Processing Scale is a questionnaire measure of a person’s emotional processing style, their typical way of processing emotional situations and it can be applied to mental health, pain, medical conditions and psychosomatic conditions.  For more information please visit: http://emotionalprocessing.org/