Category / REF Subjects

BU REF 2021 Code of Practice – staff feedback exercise

BU research, REF Subjects, Research assessment

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the system for assessing research in UK higher education institutions HEIs.

Institutions making a submission to the REF 2021 are required to develop, document and apply a code of practice on identifying staff with significant responsibility for research, determining who is an independent researcher and the selection of outputs in their REF submissions.

BU held a comprehensive staff engagement exercise in April 2019 and received agreement from staff representative groups for the Code of Practice submitted in June 2019. UKRI have since asked us to revise and resubmit our REF Code of Practice. In light of these changes, staff are invited to read and comment upon the revised BU REF 2021 draft code of practice, prior to the final revised draft being submitted to UKRI for approval.

The revised draft code of practice, a briefing paper (including equality analysis) amd feedback form are available from the BU Staff Intranet:

https://staffintranet.bournemouth.ac.uk/news/news/thismonth/buref2021codeofpractice-stafffeedbackexercise.php 

The exercise is open for feedback until Tuesday 10 September 5pm.

BMC blog on latest HSS paper

BU research, Featured academics, international, open access, PG research, Publishing, Research news, Uncategorized, writing

Dr. Rachel Arnold’s recent paper in BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth was highlighted in a blog promoted by the publisher.  The paper ‘Villains or victims? An ethnography of Afghan maternity staff and the challenge of high quality respectful care‘ reports on the everyday lives of maternal healthcare providers working in a tertiary maternity hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan (1). BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth is an Open Access journal so the paper is available free of charge to anybody in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) with an internet connection.  The aim was to understand the staff’s notions of care, their varying levels of commitment to providing care for women in childbirth, and the obstacles and dilemmas that affected standards, and thereby gain insight into their contributions to respectful maternity care, whether as ‘villains’ or as ‘victims.’

Dr. Arnold is Postdoctoral Midwifery Researcher in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH).  This is the third paper from Rachel’s excellent PhD project, the previous two papers appeared in BJOG and Social Science & Medicine (2-3).

Click here for BMC Blog post:

Villains or victims? The role of maternity staff in decreasing or enhancing respectful care

Reference:

  1. Arnold, R., van Teijlingen, E., Ryan, K., Holloway, I. (2019) Villains or victims? An ethnography of Afghan maternity staff and the challenge of high quality respectful care, BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth 19 :307 https://rdcu.be/bPqlj
  2. Arnold R., van Teijlingen E, Ryan K., Holloway I. (2015) Understanding Afghan health care providers: Qualitative study of culture of care in Kabul maternity hospital, BJOG 122: 260-267.
  3. Arnold, R., van Teijlingen, E., Ryan, K., Holloway, I. (2018) Parallel worlds: an ethnography of care in an Afghan maternity hospital, Social Science & Medicine 126:33-40.

 

New paper published: Rihova, I., Moital, M., Buhalis, D. and Gouthro, M. (2019), “Practice-based segmentation: taxonomy of Customer to Customer (C2C) co-creation practice segments”, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management,  https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-01-2018-0096

BU research, Events

New paper published: Rihova, I., Moital, M., Buhalis, D. and Gouthro, M. (2019), “Practice-based segmentation: taxonomy of Customer to Customer (C2C) co-creation practice segments“, International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management,  https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-01-2018-0096

Abstract

This paper aims to explore and evaluate practice-based segmentation as an alternative conceptual segmentation perspective that acknowledges the active role of consumers as value co-creators. Data comprising various aspects of customer-to-customer (C2C) co-creation practices of festival visitors were collected across five UK-based festivals, using participant observation and semi-structured interviews with naturally occurring social units (individuals, couples and groups). Data were analysed using a qualitative thematic analysis procedure within QSR NVivo 10. Private, sociable, tribal and communing practice segments are identified and profiled, using the interplay of specific subject- and situation-specific practice elements to highlight the “minimum” conditions for each C2C co-creation practice.

C2C

Unlike traditional segments, practice segment membership is shown to be fluid and overlapping, with fragmented consumers moving across different practice segments throughout their festival experience according to what makes most sense at a given time. Although practice-based segmentation is studied in the relatively limited context of C2C co-creation practices at festivals, the paper illustrates how this approach could be operationalised in the initial qualitative stages of segmentation research. By identifying how the interplay of subject- and situation-specific practice elements affects performance of practices, managers can facilitate relevant practice-based segments, leading to more sustainable business. The paper contributes to segmentation literature by empirically demonstrating the feasibility of practice-based segments and by evaluating the use of practice-based segmentation on a strategic, procedural and operational level. Possible methodological solutions for future research are offered.

C2C

Mentor + Media – a new app for professionals working with refugee youth

BU research, ECR Network, Research communication

The “Media literacy for refugee youth” international project started in 2017 and its aim was to understand how unaccompanied minor refugees use digital technologies and social media. For this, the principal investigator of the project, Dr Annamária Neag, with the support of her mentor, Dr Richard Berger, carried out field work in Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy and the UK. A total of 56 unaccompanied refugee kids were interviewed, and some of them also took part in a digital ethnography phase. Moreover, in London, a group of young people joined the participatory action research phase of the research.

Although the first aim was to understand how these young people use smart phones and social media, the final goal was to create media education materials that can aid their integration into a new society. For understanding the young people’s media lives, Dr Neag also interviewed mentors, guardians and educators who helped her in how to shape these educational materials.

          

Based on the research findings, the team decided that the best course of action was to create an app that could aid the work of mentors and social workers who look after unaccompanied refugee children. With the help of Kyle Goslan, from Bournemouth University, this app is now freely available for iPhones from the AppStore. Those interested in the app should only do a quick search for Mentor + Media on the AppStore and install it from there.

 

About Senait – or the perks of graphically illustrating research

BU research, ECR Network, Research communication

In recent years it has become ever more important to ‘translate’ research findings to people outside academia. While writing blog posts or giving interviews is fairly common, illustrating research is not so much. However, there have been some very interesting projects that trialled this artistic method, and their success led Dr Annamária Neag to contact a Hungarian illustrator, Kata Tóth, to try out this new way at looking at academic research. Their acquaintance is not new, as the artists helped Dr. Neag create a board game to use as a tool for interviewing unaccompanied refugee youth.

The collaboration lasted a couple of months and it involved a very engaged discussion about what and how to represent the two-year long “Media literacy for refugee youth” project. This discussion helped clarify the most important aspects of the research, but it was also relevant to see how someone not involved in academic research sees the relevance of the findings.

Illustration by Kata Tóth

With more than 60 research participants (unaccompanied youth and mentors/educators), it was not an easy task to select just one story to illustrate. That is why, after much thinking and debate, Kata Tóth and Dr Neag decided to work with the metaphor of the digital labyrinth. This metaphor best exemplifies the journey young refugees need to take upon arriving in Europe and starting a new life here. Although the graphic novel presents the story of a 17-year-old girl from Eritrea, Senait, she is a fictional character. Her difficulties in getting settled in a new country and a new digital world, as well as her skills and strengths are representations of those of the young people Dr Neag interviewed during the project.

Illustration by Kata Tóth

Although it is not always easy to ‘translate’ research into a whole different medium, graphically representing academic projects can be fulfilling both professionally and personally. This endeavor can help in distilling the most important findings of your research and it can be a starting point for discussions with young people, students or anyone interested in social science research.

Further information: Finding a Way through the Digital Labyrinth is available from: https://issuu.com/blueanna/docs/illustration_final1

Kata Tóth is a freelance illustrator living in Budapest, Hungary: https://www.behance.net/katatoth

toth.kata.toth@gmail.com

BU medical science in top immunology journal, ‘Immunity’.

BU research, Fusion themes

 

Colleagues at Cornell University and I have used the fruit fly, Drosophila to tease apart the relationship between immunity and the gut microbiome. The work (which took six years to complete) is to be published in Immunity (impact factor 20 for the ‘metricists’ out there) and has major significance because it starts to explain how the human immune response ‘tolerates’ the billions of ‘good’ bacteria in our body.

Many animals carry billions of bacteria in their intestines which are critical for the digestion of ingested foods. This poses a problem for immune cells because signs of the bacteria regularly end up outside the gut and in circulation. Normally, bacterial signals would elicit a powerful immune system but it would be bad news if the gut microbiome was targeted for destruction by immune cells. How this cordial relationship is maintained is therefore of major interest to immunologists and medical science because it has implications for how we understand inflammatory diseases.

We show for the first time that cells called nephrocytes remove bacterial signals (proteoglycans that make bacterial cell walls) from circulation and that this dampens immune responses. Disruption of this removal system causes immune cells to be over-active – a state not unlike chronic inflammation.

I’m duty bound as a basic scientist to make the point that this work also impacts our understanding of insect ecology. Having an over-active immune system shortened the lifespan of Drosophila – an effect likely to be seen in ecologically and medically important species such as honeybees and mosquitoes. How immune responses are affected by the environment in these species is also a very hot topic of research – one that can also be modeled in Drosophila.

Best wishes,

Paul Hartley (Dept of Life and Environmental Sciences)

NIHR RDS Grant Applications – seminar & support event, Truro, Cornwall – 8th October 2019

BU Challenges, Events, Funding opportunities, NHS, pre-award

Are you planning to submit a grant application to NIHR?

We are holding a one-day event at the Knowledge Spa, Truro, Cornwall on Tuesday 8 October that is aimed at helping you to improve your chances of success..

The morning seminar session is open to anyone to come and hear RDS advisers give presentations on what makes a good grant proposal. Topics covered will include:

  • what does the NIHR look for?
  • the application as a marketing document: selling the topic, selling the method, and selling the team
  • the team
  • clarity of description and explanation
  • feasibility issues
  • identifying and avoiding potential pitfalls.

The afternoon support session of one-to-one appointments is for those who would like to discuss their own proposal with an RDS adviser.

This event is FREE and refreshments and lunch will be provided. Places are limited and will be allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. In order to secure your place please register using our online form by 1pm, 25 September 2019. Find out more.

And don’t forget, your local branch of the NIHR RDS (Research Design Service) is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) on the 5th floor of Royal London House. Feel free to pop in and see us, call us on 61939 or send us an email.

RDS Research for Social Care Roadshow

BU research, Funding opportunities, pre-award

The NIHR will be investing in future social care research with annual funding calls via the Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB) programme.  The next call is planned to launch in September and will follow a similar format to the first call, however to give it a clearer social care identity it will be launched as Research for Social Care (RfSC). The RfSC call will have a budget of £3m and further information will be released shortly.

The Research Design Service (RDS) is running an event in Bristol on 30th September which offers an opportunity to gain a greater understanding of RfSC funding. Attendance at these events is FREE and refreshments will be provided.

More details can be found on the NIHR website or on our RDS South West website.

And don’t forget, your local branch of the NIHR RDS (Research Design Service) is based within the BU Clinical Research Unit (BUCRU) on the 5th floor of Royal London House. Feel free to pop in and see us, call us on 61939 or send us an email.

Emerald Literati Highly Commended award for BU paper

BU research, policy

Former PhD student, Dr Andy Harding, now at Lancaster University, and BU Professors Jonathan Parker, Sarah Head and Ann Hemingway have been highly commended for their paper Supply-side review of the UK specialist housing market and why it is failing older people published in Housing, Care and Support.

As a result, this paper has been made available on OpenAccess on the Emerald website for the next six months.

Promoting Nursing CPD in Nepal

Events, Featured academics, Fusion, Impact, international, Research news, Uncategorized, writing

Bournemouth University facilitated a Strategic planning meeting to develop a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Framework for Nepal last week in Kathmandu. The planning meeting was held on 30th July 2019 at the Institute of Medicine IOM Maharajgunj Nursing Campus.  Midwifery is not formally recognised in Nepal, i.e. as a profession separate from nursing, therefore when refer to nursing CPD in this blog we mean both ‘nurses’ and ‘nurse-midwives’.

Bournemouth University is collaborating in this project with Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) in the UK, the IOM Nursing Campus, the Nursing Association of Nepal (NAN), MIDSON, the Nepal Nursing Council (NNC) and several other key stakeholders in Nepal to support nursing regulatory bodies to establish mandatory CPD and/or post-registration training programmes relevant to their current practice in nursing. 

The Bournemouth team (led by Dr. Bibha Simkhada with Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen and Dr.Pramod Regmi) argued that CPD offers nurses the opportunity to maintain, improve and broaden knowledge, expertise and develop their personal and professional qualities to enhance practice and career development. Nepal has had limited process and progress in ensuring CPD for nurses and the uptake of post-registration education and training  programmes or CPD tends to be ad hoc.  Generally, CPD in Nepal remains under-developed as showing evidence of having received CPD is not currently a requirement of nurses when they re-register every five year.

This project is a good example of a BU FUSION project as our earlier Research in the form of a needs assessment will to the introduction of CPD which is of course, post-registration Education in nursing, helping to improve Practice in a low-income country.  We think we have had at least some impact on nursing in Nepal as the general feeling of our strategic planning meeting positive towards introducing CPD in the near future in Nepal.

 

 

BU PhD student Peter Wolfensberger has article accepted in Brit J Mental Health Nursing

BU research, Centre for Excellence in Learning, international, PG research, Publishing, Research news, student research, Uncategorized, writing

Congratulations to FHSS PhD student Peter Wolfensberger whose article ‘Uncertainty in illness among people living with mental ill health – a mental health nursing perspective’ was accepted yesterday by the British Journal of Mental Health Nursing [1].   The paper introduces the concept of ‘uncertainty in illness’, which is a well-known concept in health care literature  and a considerable volume of research has investigated how people adapt to different health conditions and how the concept of uncertainty in illness relates to those populations. However, while there is substantial literature focusing on coping strategies and personal recovery, there is a paucity of research about uncertainty in illness among people living with mental ill health. 

This paper therefore, explores uncertainty in illness among mental health nurses and to provide an understanding of its relevance to people living with mental ill health.  The paper concludes that even though mental health nursing does not directly address uncertainty, the concept and its implications need to be considered and raised further among mental health professionals in order to improve support for people living with mental ill health in their process of personal recovery.

This paper originated from Peter’s PhD research on insights into mental health nursing in Switzerland, which has had input from Prof Fran Biley (before he passed away) and Dr. Zoe Sheppard (before she moved to her new job in Dorchester).  His current BU supervisors are: Dr. Sarah Thomas and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen and his Swiss supervisor is Prof. Sabine Hahn (Berner Fachhochschule/ Bern University of Applied Sciences).

 

Reference:

  1. Wolfensberger P. Thomas, S., Sheppard, Z., Hahn, S, van Teijlingen, E.  ‘Uncertainty in illness among people living with mental ill health – a mental health nursing perspective’  British Journal of Mental Health Nursing (Accepted)

 

 

 

 

Congratulations on academic paper by BU PhD student Orlanda Harvey

BU research, Featured academics, open access, PG research, Publishing, Research news, student research, Uncategorized, writing

Congratulations to Orlanda Harvey, PhD student in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences on her PhD publication “Support for people who use Anabolic Androgenic Steroids: A Systematic Scoping Review into what they want and what they access” in the Open Access journal BMC Public Health [1].  Since there is a paucity of research on support for people using Anabolic Androgenic Steroids (AAS), this article searched and synthesised the available evidence in this field. Gaining an understanding of the support both accessed and wanted by recreational AAS users will be of use to professionals who provide services to intravenous substance users and also to those working in the fields of public health and social care, with the aim to increase engagement of those using AAS.

This systematic scoping review identified 23 papers and one report for review, which indicated that AAS users access a range of sources of information on: how to inject, substance effectiveness, dosages and side effects, suggesting this is the type of information users want. AAS users sought support from a range of sources including medical professionals, needle and syringe programmes, friends, dealers, and via the internet, suggesting that, different sources were used dependent on the information or support sought.

The authors argue that AAS users tended to prefer peer advice and support over that of professionals , and access information online/specialist fora, reflecting the stigma that is experienced by AAS  users. These tendencies can act as barriers to accessing services provided by professionals.  The paper concludes that support needs to be specific and targeted towards AAS users. Sensitivity to their perceptions of their drug-use and the associated stigma of being classified in the same sub-set as other illicit drug users is relevant to facilitating successful engagement.

 

Reference: 

  1. Harvey, O., Keen, S., Parrish, M., van Teijlingen, E. (2019) Support for people who use Anabolic Androgenic Steroids: A Systematic Literature Review into what they want and what they access. BMS Public Health 19: 1024      https://rdcu.be/bMFon