Participants wanted: Brain Networks of Sharing Attention
Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
We would like to please draw your attention to a seminar organized by the Department of Psychology this Thursday 25th from 13.00 to 14.00 at the Inspire Lecture Theatre (Fusion Building).
The guest speaker is Dr Kia Nobre (Oxford University), invited by Dr Ben Parris.
Kia Nobre is a distinguished figure in cognitive neuroscience, renowned for her groundbreaking research contributions. She leads the Brain & Cognition Lab at the University of Oxford. Current research in her group investigates how the brain prioritises and selects information from sensory input and from memories, to build our psychological experience and guide human behaviour. In addition, they examine how these mechanisms develop over the lifespan and how they are disrupted in psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
Her research combines behavioural methods with brain imaging and brain stimulation. During her prolific career, Prof. Nobre contributed to discovering brain areas specialised for word recognition and face processing, describing the functional neuroanatomy of the brain network for controlling spatial attention and characterizing the relationship between attention and memory.
Kia Nobre is one of the most recognised cognitive neuroscientists worldwide, you are all warmly invited to attend her talk.
Kind regards,
Ellen and Emili on behalf of all of us
Today there was an interesting article in The Himalayan Times about Hari Budha Magar who became the world’s first double above-the-knee amputee to climb Mount Everest. He lost both his legs as a British Gurkha soldier, in the words of the newspaper put it “while fighting for the UK alongside Prince Harry in April 2010.” Budha Magar wants to inspire people with disabilities, and he highlights that disabilities are not sins of a previous life that people with disabilities are a burden.”
A decade ago we conducted research into attitudes towards disability in rural Nepal and found very similar notions [1]. At the time we wrote most participants only considered physical conditions that limit function of an individual and are visible to naked eyes, such as missing a leg or arm, to be disability. Attitudes towards people with disability were generally positive, for example most women believed that disabled people should have equal rights and should be allowed to sit on committees or get married. Most respondents thought that disability could result from: (i) accidents; (ii) medical conditions; or (iii) genetic inheritance. Fewer women thought that disability was caused by fate or bad spirits.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
References:
Simkhada, P. P., Shyangdan, D., Van Teijlingen, E. R., Kadel, S., Stephen, J., & Gurung, T. (2013). Women’s knowledge of and attitude towards disability in rural Nepal. Disability and Rehabilitation, 35(7), 606-613. https://doi.org/10.3109/09638288.2012.702847
You are invited to a two-hour ‘Workshop on Health Systems in Nepal’ at Bournemouth University (BU) on Thursday 25th May in the Bournemouth Gateway Building (BGB room 315) starting at 14.00, aiming to finish at 16.00. We have the pleasure of welcoming three academic visitors from Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Kathmandu who are at BU on an Erasmus+ exchange.
‘Prof. Sujan Marahatta, Dr. Sujata Sapkota and Dr. Sujan Gautam from MMIHS are part of an international project examining the consequences for the health system of Nepal’s move to a federal government structure. This project, launched in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, is led by the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with BU, the University of Huddersfield, PHASE Nepal and MMIHS. This nearly four-year project is UK-funded by the MRC (Medical Research Council), the Wellcome Trust and DFID (now called Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office [FCDO]) under the Health Systems Research Initiative.
The project has resulted in several publications, all in Open Access journals. The first of three papers introduced the research project ‘The impact of federalisation on Nepal’s health system: a longitudinal analysis’ [1], the second focused on COVID-19 when examining the effects of changing Nepal’s constitution towards a federal republic on its health system [2], and the third one highlighted Public Health approaches around the ongoing federalisation of the state of Nepal and the associated decentralisation processes in its health system [3].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (formerly CMMPH)
References:
On May 19, BU researchers in the Centre for Comparative Politics and Media Research | Bournemouth University, Alina Dolea, Tabitha Baker and Dawid Pekalski, are organizing an interactive knowledge exchange workshop with local stakeholders to facilitate sharing of experiences and best practices in supporting refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Dorset.
Academics researching issues of displacement and forced migration across BU will be joined by representatives from Dorset Council, BCP Council, Citizen advice, Public Health Dorset, International Care Network, British Red Cross, Migrant Help UK, Dorset Race Equality Council, as well as other local groups and stakeholders.
One objective of the workshop is to understand the dimensions of displacement and migration in the BCP and Dorset area, mapping the programs run, but also the issues faced by the councils and the different organisations in their work with refugees, asylum seekers and other migrant communities. Another objective is to understand, also from the beneficiaries’ perspective, their needs, gaps and current issues they are facing. Together we aim to get to know more about each other’s work, discuss and reflect on the national and local policies, programs, networks of support and integration that are in place.
Our overall goal for the day is to identify areas of collaborations so that we as academics and researchers can help and actively contribute to the current infrastructure of support and integration. The collaboration can range from volunteering and exploring placement opportunities for our students, co-creating projects, and organizing joint events, to delivering applied workshops and trainings, as well as providing research insights to inform policy making.
More details about the workshop are available here: Supporting refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in Dorset Tickets, Fri 19 May 2023 at 10:00 | Eventbrite
Dr Hari Mohan Pandey is a recipient of the 2022 Best Paper Award (visit: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/neural-networks/awards/announcement-of-the-neural-networks-2022-best-paper-award):
“Cross-modality paired-images generation and augmentation for RGB-infrared person re-identification”
This paper is published in Neural Networks, volume 128, pp. 294-304, August 2020. The paper can be accessed at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.2020.05.008
The Neural Networks Best Paper Award recognizes a single outstanding paper published in Neural Networks annually.
Last we took a new step into the academic publishing by submitting a paper to Qeios. This Open Access journal publishes papers for free, more or less immediately and after the paper has appeared online peer-reviewers are being invited. The paper ‘Impact of Men’s Labour Migration on Non-migrating Spouses’ Health: A Systematic Review‘ [1] is part of Shraddha Manandhar’s Ph.D. study at the University of Huddersfield. Her supervisors are Huddersfield’s Prof. Philip Brown and Prof. Padam Simkhada and Bournemouth University’ Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. This journal uses AI to find and invite reviewers, and these reviews will the be are published alongside our article. Should we advised by reviewers to make changes, edits or improvements the next version of the paper will be published online alongside the original submission and the reviews.
We have had some previous experience with the process of post-publication review, in 2017 BU’s Dr. Sarah Collard and Prof. van Teijlingen wrote a referee report for F1000Research after it published a methods paper on online focus groups [2]. More recently we published a COVID-19 paper in a so-called pre-print journal SSRN [3], but this was later in published in a traditional peer-reviewed journal called Scientific Reports [4], part of the Nature publishing family.
References
We would like to invite you ALL to our very exciting CELEBRATION EVENT on 17th May 2023 in BG-302.
We have been exploring disabled, chronically ill, visually impaired and neurodivergent people’s experiences of cancer services. We also explored how using the community research model can provide a level of shared understanding between researchers and community members to enable the capture of the perspectives of individuals currently underserved by health and social care research.
This project was commissioned by Macmillan Cancer Support and Wessex Cancer Alliance, and overseen by Involving People – Help & Care, Bournemouth University’s Public Involvement in Education and Research (PIER) partnership and the Research Centre for Seldom Heard Voices.
At this event, we will be sharing the outcomes of our research project, with opportunities to take a look at the report, a film which has been developed using the attendee’s artistic creations for the visuals, with the experiences they shared in a voiceover, and to engage in a creative arts workshop. A variation of healthcare professionals, academics and those with lived experience have been invited to this event, so we can all discuss the success of the project, as well as what more needs to be done.
Everyone is welcome and there will be refreshments!
Please get in touch with Stevie Corbin-Clarke (scorbinclarke@bournemouth.ac.uk) with any queries.


Today one of my co-editors of the Journal of Asian Midwives emailed me to announce that our journal has been accepted for inclusion by Scopus.
Scopus, which is owned by the publishing house Elsevier, is the world’s largest electronic database of peer-reviewed literature. The Scopus assessors of our application made some very nice comments about the Journal of Asian Midwives, for example that it:
“consistently includes articles that are academically sound and relevant to an international academic or professional audience in the field. The journal has scholarly relevance as evidenced by citations in other journals currently covered by Scopus… The journal has clear aims and scope/journal policies that are consistent with the journal’s content. Although the scope of this journal is narrow, it addresses the need of an important niche audience.”
We are very proud of this achievement and we, as editors (Prof. Rafat Jan, Ms. Kiran Mubeen, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, with editorial assistant Ms. Abeer Musaddique), thank all our supporters, especially the library staff at The Aga Khan University in Pakistan, our reviewers, our authors and of course, you, our readers! I personally like to thank our former CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health) PhD student Dr. Sheetal Sharma for suggesting many years ago that I might like to help this, at the time, new journal. It is a proper well-run peer-reviewed journal, and I know that from personal experience, as a few years ago one of the papers on which I am a co-author was rejected after peer review by ‘my’ journal!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
Co-editor Journal of Asian Midwives

Yesterday Plos ONE published our latest study on the health system in Nepal under the title ‘Barriers in accessing family planning services in Nepal during the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative study‘ [1]. This qualitative study, in an Open Access journal, explores what sorts of barriers are faced by women needing family planning services in Nepal during the pandemic. It was conducted in five districts of Nepal. Telephonic in-depth interviews were conducted with 18 women of reproductive age (18–49 years) who were the regular clients of family planning services. Data were coded deductively using the preexisting themes based on a socio-ecological model (e.g., individual, family, community, and health-facility levels).
The paper reports that individual level barriers included low self-confidence, inadequate knowledge on COVID-19, myths and misconception related to COVID-19, limited access to family planning services, low priority to sexual and reproductive health services, low autonomy in family and limited financial ability. Family level barriers comprised partner’s support, social stigma, increased time at home with husbands or parents, not accepting family planning services as essential health services, financial hardship due to loss of jobs, and communication with in-laws. Movement restrictions and transportation hindering access, unsecured feeling, violation of privacy, and obstacles from security personnel were the community level barriers and unavailability of preferred choice of contraception, increased waiting time, limited outreach services by community health workers, limited physical infrastructures, the behavior of health workers, stock out of commodities, and absence of health workers were health facility level barriers.
The authors conclude that policymakers and programme managers should consider strategies to ensure continued availability of the full method mix during emergency, particularly since disruptions may go unnoticed and strengthen the provision of services through alternative service delivery channels to ensure sustained uptake of such services in this sort of pandemic.
This is the latest addition to the pool of academic papers published by Bournemouth University academics on the effects of COVID-19 on health care in Nepal or issues related to Nepal [2-11].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
References:
The paper reports that of these 23 papers, 21 focused on assessing AHL measures, and 15 addressed the association between AHL and HP. Seven studies used the HL School-Aged Children instrument. The findings suggested that the methodological and conceptual underpinnings of HL measures are insufficient. Furthermore, HL acts as an independent and positive mediator for many facets of HP. Overall, this review offers a warning to practitioners and educationists interested in measuring HL as the number of measurement tools is substantial with different tools applying different scales.
Disseminating your research findings to a range of stakeholders is an important part of the research impact process. The key is to think about ‘who’ might possibly benefit from knowing more about your research, and importantly, ‘how’ could they use your findings to support, inform and develop their practice.
A good example of this process is the recent keynote address delivered by Prof. John Oliver (FMC) to more than 60 delegates at a one-day event that launched the new Centre of Excellence, Enterprise Portfolio Management Office (UK Parliament). Prof. Oliver’s talk entitled ‘Harnessing the Power of Scenario Planning’ presented the findings of his scenario-planning project that ultimately developed a mission, vision and strategy for the House of Commons Library Service in UK Parliament. Additional keynotes were given by the Chief Operating Officer (House of Lords) and a range of internal and external experts on project delivery and digital transformation.
Prof. Oliver’s work is published in Oliver, J.J., Reid, M., and Gray, K. (2023). The Library of the Future: a scenario-based approach. Journal of Library Administration, Volume 63, Issue 1, Pages
27-41
Dr Jonathan Williams, Principal Academic and Deputy Head of the Department of Rehabilitation & Sports Science is the latest BU academic to visit Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Nepal as part of the Erasmus+ exchange funding. Yesterday he run a workshop in Kathmandu on how to conduct a Literature Review for Health Professionals. This session was well attended by medical doctors at Manmohan Memorial Teaching Hospital.
The workshop was organised buy Prof. Sujan Marahatta at MMIHS, who is also Visiting Faculty member in FHSS. BU is currently in the process of renewing its MoA with MMIHS, to continue working together after this successful Erasmus+ programme.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH)
Yesterday FHSS graduate Dr. Shaqaieq Ashrafi Dost heard from Razi International Medical Journal the the paper from her Ph.D. study had been accepted for publication. Her paper ‘Management capacity in the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) Afghanistan: Political and socio-cultural issues’ is based on a mixed-methods case-study was conducted with staff at the Afghan Ministry of Public Health. The Ph.D. study explores MoPH’s management capacity. Interviews were conducted with 12 senior staff and qualitative data were analysed thematically. A quantitative survey, covering directors of 30 departments, was analysed using descriptive statistics.
The paper reports that management capacity was generally weak. Key appointments including directors were subject to political interference and many directors appointed by politicians lacked the skills to manage well. Consequently, those directors were not able to support employees appropriately or to create a healthy work environment. The respondents reported that there were strong socio-cultural influences such as nepotism and favouritism. Often employees believed they were not treated consistently or fairly. This was compounded by overly complex administrative systems. The authors concluded that the Afghan government needs to appoint competent and committed staff who can recognize/address the gaps in the functioning of the Ministry, especially the negative political and socio-cultural practices that undermine effectiveness.The reader needs to bear in mind that this Ph.D. study was conducted prior to the 2021 takeover by the Taliban. Putting the paper’s conclusion in perspective.
Razi International Medical Journal founded in 2021 is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal from Afghanistan that aims to impact public health and global health and distributed internationally. The journal is Open Access and published in electronic and paper-based format twice a year, and there is no article publishing charge (APCs).
Congratulations to Dr Sally Lee and Dr Lou Oliver on the publication of their important edited collection Social Work Practice with Adults published by SAGE. This excellent book brings together practitioners, academics and, innovatively and most importantly, people who use social work services. The book includes chapters by several BU social work authors in addition to the editors, notably, Jenny Bigmore, Ros Dray, Orlanda Harvey, Stefan Kleipoedszus, Mike Lyne, and Jonathan Parker, and congratulations go to all involved.
The book places people who avail themselves of social work at the centre, demonstrating the commitment of the editors and authors to changing lives for the better. It also represents a phenomenal teaching text for students learning to practise.
Well done everyone!