Category / Health, Wellbeing & Society

Midwifery success in Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight

PG research, Publishing

Denyse King’s My Mini Midwife is due for publication in February.  Denyse King is Lecturer in Midwifery / Public Health Practitioner based in Portsmouth.

My Mini Midwife by Denyse Kirkby is published by VIE Books, a new imprint of Summersdale Publishers. The book is priced at £8.99 (ISBN: 978-1-84953-516-8)

 

The second success story is Wendy Marsh Lecturer/Practitioner in Midwifery also based in Portsmouth who had an abstract accepted for the ‘Safeguarding the Vulnerable International Symposium’ to be held at Bucks New University in High Wycombe.

 

Also the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health won three BU matched funded Ph.D. studentships.  The first two are with Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust:

An Exploration of the Community by Midwives and Maternity Support Workers in the Postnatal Period – supervisors: dr. Carol Wilkins, dr. Janet Scammell & dr. Sue Way

Just one drink!  An exploration of the conflict between harm reduction and abstinence in UK maternity care – supervisors: Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, dr. Liz Norton and dr. Greta Westward (PHT)

The third one is a new collaboration with the Isle of Wight NHS Trust:

Can Pelvic Positioning help women cope with pain in early labour – supervisors: Prof.  Vanora Hundley, dr. Carol Clark and dr. Sue Way

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen & Prof. Vanora Hundley

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

New research web pages and removal of old pages

Training

On Monday 27 January the Digital Communications Team will integrate the new research web pages into the main BU site.

This will include a link from the homepage and from the School pages. (School copy has been developed with the Deans and DDRs to introduce the new site, provide an overview of the School’s research and outline the research themes the School is involved in).

The Digital Communications Team will also start removing the old research pages on Monday. This will include removing the research centre pages, which have either been moved to the new site, elsewhere, or identified as no longer required.

In addition to notification from Professor Matthew Bennett and the Schools, the research website team have tried to speak to all staff in person to ensure required content is moved across and outdated content is removed. This has been a massive exercise and apologies if we have missed anyone. If you do have any concerns regarding your pages, please email the website team as soon as possible. All old content will be moved onto an internal BU server, where it will be kept for a period of six months before being finally deleted.

Screenshot of the new research website

Feedback from researchers already using the new site is that it is very flexible, quick and easy to use and allows easy integration of a variety of different media content types.

If you would like to find out more about using the new site or joining us for a training session, please read my blog post from earlier in the week.

Good start of the year: Early crop of 2014 publications

Publishing, Research Ethics

HSC staff saw the fruit of their hard work in 2013 as a great number of papers have been accepted for publication or actually appeared in print in the first three weeks of January.  

 

 

There are a number of 2014 papers in health care journals, including papers in Nurse Education in Practice, The Practising Midwife, Journal of Clinical Nursing, Birth, ISRN Family Medicine, Perspective in Public Health, an editorial in Midwifery and two in the same issue of Health Science Journal.  There was also an early contribution from our social science colleagues in The Journal of Adult Protection and, last but not least a book chapter in Case Studies in e-Learning Research.

 

  1. Morley, D., 2014. Supporting student nurses in practice with online communication tools. Nurse Education in Practice, 14, 69-75.
  2. Bennett, S and Scammell, J (2014) Midwives caring for asylum-seeking women: research findings.  The Practising Midwife. 17 (1) p9-12
  3. Whitford, H., Aitchison, P., Entwistle V.A., van Teijlingen, E., Davidson, T., Humphrey, T., Tucker, J. Use of a birth plan within woman-held maternity records: a qualitative study with women and staff in northeast Scotland, Birth (accepted).
  4. Norton, E. 2014 The application of humanization theory to health-promoting practice. Perspectives in Public Health, (online first 2013)
  5. Sapkota, T., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen, E. (2014) Nepalese health workers’ migration to the United Kingdom: A qualitative study.  Health Science Journal 8(1):  57-74.
  6. Hunt, J.A., Hutchings, M. (2014) Innovative group-facilitated peer and educator assessment of nursing students’ group presentations, Health Science Journal 8(1): 22-31.
  7. Harding, A., Sanders, F., Medina Lara, A., van Teijlingen, E., Wood, C., Galpin, D. Baron, S., Crowe, S., Sharma, S. Patient choice for older people in English NHS primary care: theory & practice,  ISRN Family Medicine (accepted).
  8. Norton, E., Holloway, I., Galvin K. 2014. Comfort vs risk: a grounded theory about female adolescent behaviour in the sun. Journal of Clinical Nursing. (online first 2013)
  9. van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., Matthews, Z., Lewis, G., Graham, W.J., Campbell, J., ten Hoope-Bender, P., Sheppard, Z.A., Hulton, L. (2014) Millennium Development Goals: All good things must come to an end, so what next? Midwifery 30: 1-2.
  10. Parker, J.,  Ashencaen Crabtree, S. (2014) Covert research and adult protection and safeguarding: an ethical dilemma? The Journal of Adult Protection (accepted).
  11. Hutchings, M, Quinney, A., Galvin, K.  Clark, V. book chapter IN: ‘The Yin/Yang of Innovative Technology Enhanced Assessment for Promoting Student Learning’ Case Studies in e-Learning Research.   Book is now available at:  http://www.academic-bookshop.com/ourshop/prod_2915879-Case-Studies-in-eLearning-Research-for-Researchers-teachers-and-Students.html

 

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

Toward a better science of promoting walking: A cross-school Fusion project

Fusion

 

Samuel Nyman (Psychology, DEC), Andrew Callaway (ST), and Kelly Goodwin (ST) were awarded Research Development Fund – Small Grant funding for 2013 to conduct a study to promote walking among older people. Over the summer they identified a further fusion opportunity so that students from both schools could be involved. They report their experience here:

Co-creation in the School of Tourism

Our study began with the purchase of pedometers (small device to count walking steps) and actigraphs (small device to count walking steps but can also measure intensity, i.e. if walking or running). These were then used by students in the School of Tourism in a group project. Their task was to recruit 10 older people from the local community to take part in a study whereby they wore the devices every day for 60 days to measure how much walking they did. But this was not just a sports science project to look at whether pedometers or actigraphs reported the same results. It was multidisciplinary in that participants were enrolled into an N-of-1 randomised controlled trial (RCT), whereby each day they took part in a different psychological condition. Each morning participants had to set a goal for the day that was either to increase their walking steps or eat more fruit and vegetables (active control condition). They also had to either wear a pedometer that showed them how many steps they had walked so far that day, or a pedometer that was sealed (and so they would not know how many steps they had walked; another active control condition). These different conditions were based on control theory, that suggests that if people set themselves a goal to walk more, and can keep check on how much they have done, then they will be likely to walk more steps on those days than on the other days (when they had to state a goal for fruit and vegetable intake and could not see how many steps they have done). N-of-1 trial designs are recommended by the MRC framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions and help ascertain whether theories work at the individual level.

This part of the project was completed before the summer of 2013, and provided students in the School of Tourism a group project and a very useful learning experience. Students were posed with a more challenging and rewarding project of engaging with older people with the local community. They also had to contend with the challenges of group work, project management, learning and teaching others to use the objective physical activity monitors, and dealing with the challenges of conducting short-longitudinal data collection in the field. The students helped in the co-creation of new knowledge to test if pedometers or actigraphs were better at measuring walking activity, and in testing whether control theory shows promise as a means of behaviour change at the individual level measured by walking activity.

Co-creation in the School of Design, Engineering and Computing

Before launching into the analysis over the summer, the project team (Nyman, Callaway, and Goodwin) identified a further opportunity to enhance the data collected by the above student group project and provide a further opportunity for fusion.

Andrew Callaway identified that published studies in this area simply compare one measure of physical activity with another, as we had done, with no evidence as to which is the closest to a ‘true’ measure of what really happened (both devices will not be completely accurate). He proposed a further study that compares the two measures of pedometers and actigraphs against a criterion measure – a measure that was known to be truly accurate. This entailed the design and implementation of a laboratory-based study whereby students would walk on a treadmill and have their physical activity monitored by several devices simultaneously, including manual and video-recording of steps walked.

The set up entailed volunteers to walk on a treadmill at different speeds (all comfortable walking paces) with pedometers, actigraphs, and a sensewear armband strapped on them, and a video camera recording their walking plus other volunteers manually counting the number of walking steps performed. You will be surprised how difficult it can be to correctly count the number of steps walked in a two minute period! With the combination of all these measures we should arrive at a close to ‘criterion’ measure to compare the devices with.

Third year students from the BSc Psychology framework who had elected to study the Health Psychology unit volunteered to help with this experiment in the Sports Lab. This was a great learning opportunity for the psychology students as none of them had seen the sports lab before or the equipment used for physical activity monitoring. In the session the students also had the opportunity to engage with two members of staff and five third year student volunteers from the School of Tourism to access their expertise in sports science and performance analysis. Dr Nyman also used the sessions as an opportunity to relate the material from the lecture the day before to the seminar sessions, and to demonstrate to students the output that can be obtained from actigraphs (using TV screens) and what this affords in terms of more nuanced health psychology research questions that can be answered. The students had the opportunity to be involved in the co-creation of new knowledge that will challenge the perceived wisdom of the reliability of objective physical activity monitoring.

Conclusion

After recently completing the laboratory experiment, we now have all the data to begin analysis and writing up. We are pleased with the outcome of the two studies above and feel they are a great example of fusion in terms of cross-school collaboration and co-creation of new knowledge, embedded within existing teaching programmes. Conducting the two studies has also provided us as researchers with new data that will lead to peer-reviewed publications.

We would like to thank the older people and health psychology students that volunteered to help with the studies, and the School of Tourism students that volunteered to help us with the recent laboratory experiment.

 

Students who helped with the project: Front Row (L to R): Sam Sayer, Emma Rylands, Joe Hill. Second row (L to R): Calum Sharpin, James Baum.

 

Dr Samuel Nyman, BUDI and Psychology Research Centre
Andrew Callaway and Kelly Goodwin, Centre for Events and Sport Research

Research website training sessions

Training

 BU’s new research website is an externally facing communications channel. It allows you to add and update research-related content quickly and easily. The site is flexible and accommodates a range of digital media content. You can login with your usual BU username and password and start creating content here.Screen shot of new website

We are hosting a series of 90 minute training sessions, which are open to all BU academic staff, post graduate research students and those supporting researchers in their communications activity.

During the session you will learn the following:

  • Why BU has a new research website
  • How you can upload content to the website
  • How the site can be used most effectively to maximise exposure of BU research.

There are three sessions taking place next month on Talbot Campus and at the Lansdowne. These are hosted by the website designer Matt Northam and me. Sessions are informal and if they fall over lunchtime, do feel free to bring a sandwich!

To book on one of the following sessions please use the links below…

Friday 7 February 2014 12:00-13:30 – S103 Studland House, Lansdowne Campus

Friday 14 February 2014 10:00-11:30 – P131 Poole House, Talbot Campus

Friday 14 February 2014 14:30-16:00 – P131 Poole House, Talbot Campus

If you have any questions about the website or training sessions, please email the research website team.

 

An Update from the Centre for Face Processing Disorders

Awarded & submitted bids, Fusion, Post-award

The Centre for Face Processing Disorders was established in July 2012, supported by investment from both HEIF and Fusion funds.  Our Centre primarily examines prosopagnosia (face blindness) in adults or children who are either born with the condition, or acquire face-processing difficulties following neurological damage.  The close of 2013 not only earmarked the 18-month anniversary of the Centre, but also the end of our internal funding period.  This pump-priming resulted in the rapid consolidation of the Centre, underpinned by the appointment of two post-doctoral research fellows (Dr Nicola Gregory and Dr Rachel Bennetts) and one PGR (Anna Bobak).  These appointments were rapidly followed by the addition of two permanent members of academic staff: Professor Chang Hong Liu and Dr Angela Gosling.

It seems apt that this report should begin with some discussion of the Centre’s contributions to REF-2014.  Indeed, as I’m sure is the case for many individuals across BU, I feel I am still ‘coming down’ from the rather intense preparations that filled many hours over the past couple of years.  Work from the Centre not only resulted in key research outputs that were submitted to the REF, but also to an Impact Case Study for UoA4.    While some of the impact we achieved occurred in rather momentous one-off events (e.g. convincing the NHS Choices website to feature prosopagnosia in its A-Z of conditions, or sparking debate about prosopagnosia in the House of Commons), our other contributions were founded on basic ‘numbers’, or perhaps more fundamentally, the work ethic and sheer hours of research time that were dedicated to this project from research staff and students alike.

Of course, the co-creation and co-production of all our outputs is central to BU’s Fusion agenda.  When this project first started, the concept of Fusion was fresh to our ears; and as the first round of Fusion-funded projects now reach their end dates, it seems timely to reflect on this component of our work.  In our first year, we supported four voluntary second year undergraduate research placements (via the Department of Psychology’s Research Apprenticeship Scheme), two voluntary final-year research placements, six final year projects, two MSc projects, and two paid undergraduate summer research placements.  Importantly, the student projects were co-ordinated with our over-riding research aims, and the projects were therefore more sophisticated and engaging than the typical student dissertation.  Indeed, all students received training and experience in neuropsychological testing and the diagnosis of face-processing deficits, and attended our bi-weekly lab meetings where they contributed to the planning and interpretation of key investigations.  Their significant contributions to our research programme have enabled them to be listed as co-authors in the six research publications that have resulted from Year One.

But the benefits to these students has gone beyond the mere (but very respectable) addition of research papers to their CVs.  Strikingly, over half of the undergraduate members of the Centre have or will remain at BU to complete the MSc Lifespan Neuropsychology – and continue their research with us.  These same individuals wish to pursue doctoral research within the Centre.  In short, this co-creation model of working grabs students in and gives them the ‘research bug’, while of course boosting internal recruitment for postgraduate study.  The benefits to us as staff members are huge – if this model continues, a set of home-trained graduates with considerable expertise in our field will consistently be produced, sustaining the pathway of our research for years to come.

I feel I should stop writing now as this has become a rather long blog.  There are other achievements which I haven’t yet mentioned, including the substantial media coverage of the Centre (e.g. in a CBBC documentary and several national newspapers), some key research publications, and our public engagement activities, which recently received external funding from the British Psychological Society.  As an early-career researcher, I have been very fortunate to receive this pump-priming, and am currently reaping the benefits of the co-creation aspect of this work.  The next step is to secure further external funding to ensure the sustainability and growth of the Centre, and of course to make that critical ‘five-year plan’ to ensure the complementary development of all strands of the Centre’s work.

For more information, visit our website: www.prosopagnosiaresearch.org.

Atrium BRC stand

Emily Loring and I are in the Atrium, Poole House, Talbot Campus today giving out copies of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle (BRC) magazine to academic staff. Do come along and pick up a copy and have a cake with us!

We will be here until 4:30pm today (Tuesday) and again on Thursday between 9am-5pm.

Writing about academic publishing

PG research, Publishing

Academics at the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health have published a series of articles over the past few years on aspects of academic publishing.  The latest addition is called ‘Writing an Abstract for a Scientific Conference’ which has been published recently in the Kathmandu University Medical Journal .1  As the title suggests the paper advises novice researchers and students on the best way to write a scientific abstract.  This paper also highlights some of the common mistakes academics make when drafting such abstract.

An earlier article in the series reflects issues around academic authorship, something which can be a tricky topic.  The paper addressed issues around who should be an author and who should not, the order of authors, and highlighted the different conventions that prevail in different academic disciplines.  The paper ‘Academic authorship: who, why and in what order?’ was published in the academic journal Health Renaissance.2

Further articles have focused on the basics of writing up qualitative research findings, 3 the general process of writing a scientific paper, including an attempt to answer the questions: “What to write? and “When to start writing?”4 and submitting such a paper to a peer-reviewed journal.5  One paper stresses the importance of selecting the target journal wisely6 and a further paper highlights some of the perils of the peer review process under the title ‘The long & winding road to publication’. 7

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen & Prof. Vanora Hundley

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health, HSC, Bournemouth University

 

 

References:

  1. Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen E., Hundley, V., Simkhada, B.D. (2013) Writing an Abstract for a Scientific Conference, Kathmandu University Medical Journal 11(3): 262-265.
  2. Hundley, V., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P. (2013) Academic authorship: who, why and in what order? Health Renaissance 11(2)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        www.healthrenaissance.org.np/uploads/Download/vol-11-2/Page_99_101_Editorial.pdf
  3. Pitchforth, E., Porter, M., van Teijlingen, E.R., Forrest Keenan, K. (2005) Writing up and presenting qualitative research in family planning and reproductive health care, Journal of Family Planning & Reproductive Health Care 31 (2): 132-135.  http://jfprhc.bmj.com/content/31/2/132.full.pdf+html
  4. Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2013) Writing an academic paper for publication, Health Renaissance 11(1): 1-5.  www.healthrenaissance.org.np/uploads/Pp_1_5_Guest_Editorial.pdf
  5. van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada. P.P., Rizyal, A. (2012) Submitting a paper to an academic peer-reviewed journal, where to start? Health Renaissance 10 (1): 1-4. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/HREN/article/view/5997/4950
  6. van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2002) Getting your paper to the right journal: a case study of an academic paper, Journal of Advanced Nursing 37(6): 506-511.
  7. van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada. P.P., Simkhada, B., Ireland, J. (2012) The long & winding road to publication, Nepal Journal Epidemiology 2(4): 213-215.  http://nepjol.info/index.php/NJE/article/view/7093/6388

Bournemouth Research Chronicle

Research themes

The third edition of the Bournemouth Research Chronicle (BRC) is now published. Thank you very much to everyone who contributed.

Front cover of the BRC

This is a glossy ‘coffee table’ magazine with some lovely images.  It is aimed at peer researchers and research collaborators, prospective funders and (perhaps most importantly) research users such businesses, government organisations, policy makers and charities.

We all know that communication is an integral part of the link between research and societal impact and this magazine is a great way to get the message heard by the right people.

Content is presented through BU’s eight research themes. This edition provides a snapshot of some of the work BU submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. In particular it focuses on the societal impact of our research, which forms a key part of REF2014.

 

DistributionInside cover of the BRC

Every BU academic will receive a copy of the BRC. My colleagues and I will be in the Atrium, Poole House on Tuesday and Thursday next week with a large stash so do pop along, say hello and pick up yours. Otherwise, we’ll put it in the internal post for you.

Throughout January I’ll be sending the BRC to an extensive list of research users, including policy makers, community figures, opinion leaders, businesses and journalists. I will be providing a supply to each School so please do send it to your contacts, collaborators, peers, prospective funders, industry partners or anyone else who has an interest in BU’s research.

R&KEO will keep a larger stock of the BRC. If you would like copies for an event or conference then email me (Sally Gates – Editor) to arrange a delivery.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed and happy reading!

Psychology Research Seminar: Laughing in the face of adversity – the influence of affective state on situation awareness

Venue & date: Thursday 30th January at 4pm in K103 (Kimmeridge House)

Situation awareness can be loosely defined as, ‘knowing what’s going on around you and what to do about it.’   In everyday life we make complex decisions – some good, some bad – on the basis of our awareness of what is going on around us.  Sadly situation awareness can sometimes be sub-optimal leading to catastrophic errors such as road traffic accidents and air crashes.  Such errors often appear to result from a ‘tunnelling down’ with available and useful information being ignored. This attentional tunnelling is widely reported by (amongst others) firefighters, medical staff and military personnel.

Dr Graham Edgar from the Centre for Research in Applied Cognition, Knowledge, Learning and Emotion at the University of Gloucestershire will present his research examining information-use in building and maintaining situation awareness, and the influence that affective state has on that process.

All are welcome and there is no need to book – just come along!

BU’s best wishes to Dr. Padam Simkhada (HSC Visiting Faculty)

PG research, Publishing

Dr Padam Simkhada, senior lecturer in ScHARR at the University of Sheffield was awarded the CEA Award of Global Health Research for his contribution to global research at a special ceremony at the Mahatma Gandhi University, India just before last Christmas. Dr Simkhada has been Visiting Faculty at BU in the School of Health & Social Care since 2010. He is involved in various BU projects, including the Fellowship awarded by the charity Wellbeing of Women, in association with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), for research into Nepalese maternity services and women’s health from an international perspective. The research team consists of Lesley Milne, Senior Lecturer in Midwifery, Vanora Hundley, Professor in Midwifery, Edwin van Teijlingen, Professor of Reproductive Health Research at BU, and BU Visiting Faculty Dr. Padam Simkhada.

 

Dr. Simkhada is also co-supervisor of HSC PhD student Ms. Sheetal Sharma.  Sheetal Sharma’s poster presentation recently won the best poster prize at a conference in Birmingham for the poster Getting women to care in Nepal: A Difference in Difference analysis of a health promotion intervention.   Sheetal is supported by Bournemouth University with a studentship and a Santander grant.

Dr. Simkhada has published over 70 research articles on issues such as reproductive and sexual health, migration and sex trafficking and maternal and child health.  Furthermore, he has been working to improve the quality of health research among higher education institutions in Nepal.

This Global Health Research Award for Dr. Simkhada has been reported widely in the media in India, Nepal and in England.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health

Password? Not another one!

Publishing

The increasing volume of academic activity on the internet coupled with a growing obsession about privacy and data protection means for many academics a rapidly expanding number of online accounts and associated passwords. This is, of course, over and above our regular dose of accounts and passwords as citizens of the virtual world. The average adult in the UK must have at least 25 internet accounts, for the bank/building society, supermarkets, phone companies, social media, airlines, trains, insurance companies, eBay, the website of the parents’ council of your children’s school, your electricity provider, the council tax, etc.

I feel as an academic, the burden is even worse. Every single time another scientific journal invites me to review a paper it opens an on-line account for me. Every time I apply for a grant from a funding body to which I have not previously applied, I am required to set up an account with a new password. When you apply for 20-odd grants every year and review manuscripts for a similar number of different journals the number of accounts and passwords add up rapidly. Then there are the other accounts and passwords related to work for sites such as this BU Research Blog, BRIAN, Survey Monkey, for the university for whom you act as external examiner, for Drop Box, the British Library, ORCIC, ACADEMIA.EDU, ResearchGate, Researchfish, Linkedin, and the list goes on.

These last few months I was reminded how non user friendly some systems are. First, I received new secure email account for my part on a REF sub-panel. The account name chosen for me is different from what I would have chosen and what I am used to at Bournemouth University. The importance of confidentiality for the REF work is clear so my password has to be different from anything I use elsewhere. Secondly, a few weeks later I attempted to put my name done for the tri-annual conference of the International Congress of Midwifery in Prague next year. It turns out you cannot join the conference without opening an on-line account first. The account name was automatically chosen for me and so was the password. Unfortunately, both are impossible to remember, neither the account name nor the password (which was case sensitive) were ones I would have selected personally.

There is some hope as some journals allow you to choose your own account name and password. Elsevier has brought most of its journals into one account, with your own email as the account name and all with the same password. Similarly a group of English-language journals in Nepal called Nepal Journals OnLine (NepJOL) use one account name for all participating journals. For the rest of my account names and passwords I can only follow the advice given by Stephen Fry on an episode of QI: “Write it down somewhere on a piece of paper”. The underlying idea is that the people who try to steal your internet account details sit in a bedsit in London or Hong Kong and won’t come to your office or living room to steal a piece of paper with computer addresses. The people who try to break into your house or office are looking for objects with a street value, such as your TV, phone or laptop, they are generally not interested in a piece of paper with some scribbles on it.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health

Jib Acharya awarded funded place on Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) workshop in Morocco

PG research, Training


Congratulations to Health & Social Care PhD student Mr. Jib Acharya who has been offered a funded place at the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) workshop. The SUN workshop will be held in Morocco in early February 2014. The British Council and CNRST have launched a new five-year programme to encourage international research collaboration between ambitious young researchers from the UK and eighteen countries around the world. The forthcoming SUN workshop is a part of this programme. One leading team of researchers from the University of Southampton and from Morocco proposed this bilateral workshop to be held in Morocco to bring together early career researchers to discuss their research and start to build international relationships.

The selection committee wrote to Mr. Acharya: “the selection was challenging. The selection panel (UK and Moroccan coordinators and mentors), has chosen 16 applications that would contribute to and benefit from the workshop most”. The British Council and CNRST will cover the costs related to the participation to the workshop, including: travel (both international and local), visa, accommodation and meals.
Jib is delighted with his award. He commented: “It will give me a chance to build up networks with participants at this workshop. It will help to establish personal and institutional relationships.”

Jib’s PhD thesis is based on A comparative Study on Nutritional Problems in Preschool Aged Children of Kaski District of Nepal. His research applies a mixed-methods approach and he is supervised by a team of three BU supervisors: Dr. Jane Murphy, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, and Dr. Martin Hind.

BU present at European Midwives Association Education Conference

At the end of November Stella Rawnson and Catherine Angell (both Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at BU) attended the European Midwives Association Education Conference in Maastricht, the Netherlands. This two-day event brought together 300 midwife educators from universities across Europe, from Norway to Greece and Ireland to Hungary.

Stella presented ‘The best people for the job’ which focused on our experience of introducing new methods for assessing the suitability of applicants to BU’s BSc Midwifery programme. This generated a considerable amount of interest and discussion. It was clear that student selection was an issue for educators from a wide range of countries, both in terms of identifying competence in numeracy and literacy but also assessing applicants’ communication and ‘people skills’.

Catherine’s presentation was entitled ‘Loosing the luggage; strategies that enable effective learning around infant feeding for student midwives’. This identified how we have used education theories to develop a programme that enables students to ‘unlearn’ negative or unrealistic ideas about infant feeding before embarking on new learning around this subject. This fitted well with a key theme that emerged from the conference relating to the role of emotion in enabling and blocking learning.

The conference included keynote presentations from Prof. Cees van der Vleuten, who spoke about evaluation and assessment of health sciences students, and Prof. Raymond DeVries who discussed the value of academic skills in midwifery. The conference highlighted the considerable differences in terms of length of midwifery programme, entry route and content between different countries in the EU. However, it also enabled us to learn from sharing some of the challenges that we experience in areas such as recruitment and assessment, and in terms of developing curriculums against shifting models of care and changing political priorities. Naturally it also provided an excellent opportunity for networking and identifying potential collaborations.

Winter in Maastricht

Winter in Maastricht

Elevator Pitch – SFC Solutions for Chefs

So what started as a match funded PhD with Solutions for Chefs (SFC), an Austrian software company, has now developed into an exciting portfolio of activity.  Working with DEC we are going to apply for funding through The Global Innovation Initiative (GII) which is a shared commitment of the United Kingdom and the United States to strengthen research collaboration between universities in the UK, and the US. GII will award grants to university consortia focusing on interdisciplinary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related issues of global significance that foster cutting-edge multinational research and strengthen international partnerships. We are proposing an innovative ICT solution to menu design that can be used as a catalyst for improving human health and wellbeing. This will then lead to an EU RISE bid in January 2015.

Bearing in mind Fusion, SFC have also agreed to sponsor a fourth year consultancy project and the visit this week by one of the partners was both inspirational and supportive of BU.

Social/Medical Model and the concept of ‘Normal’ Birth

Publishing

The December issue of The Practising Midwife included the slightly more theoretical article ‘Normal birth: social-medical model’.[1] The paper is written by Ms. Jillian Ireland, midwife and Royal College of Midwives (RCM) Union Learning Rep. at Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Visiting Faculty at Bournemouth University in collaboration with BU Professor Edwin van Teijlingen.

The paper argues that someone’s perspective of birth is not simply semantic. Thus, whether a midwife describes her role as being ‘with woman’ through labour or as someone who ‘delivers’ women of babies does not just demonstrates a more or less currently politically correct description. No, it suggests having different perspectives or world views of pregnancy and childbirth. Sociologists recognise two different approaches as two different models, a social model and a medical model of childbirth. The social model stresses that childbirth is a physiological event that takes place in most women’s lives. The medical model highlights that childbirth is potentially pathological. In the latter view every pregnant woman is potentially at risk, hence she should deliver her baby in an obstetric hospital with its high-technology screening equipment supervised by expert obstetricians. In other words, pregnancy and childbirth are only safe in retrospect.

The Practising Midwife’s paper argues that having some understanding of the underlying sociological models of pregnancy and childbirth can help politicians, journalists, policy-makers, midwives, doctors, and new mothers (and their partners) to put issues around ‘normal birth’ into perspective. This paper builds on previous work by the second author on the medicalisation of childbirth and the social/medical model published in Sociological Research Online[2] and Midwifery.[3]

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health


References:
1. Ireland, J., van Teijlingen, E. (2013) Normal birth: social-medical model, The Practising Midwife 16(11): 17-20.
2. van Teijlingen, E. (2005) A critical analysis of the medical model as used in the study of pregnancy and childbirth, Sociological Research Online, 10 (2) Web address: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/2/teijlingen.html
3. MacKenzie Bryers, H., van Teijlingen, E. (2010) Risk, Theory, Social & Medical Models: a critical analysis of the concept of risk in maternity care, Midwifery 26(5): 488-496.