Dr Akudjedu, Associate Professor in Clinical Imaging at Bournemouth University, was named the first winner of the EFRS Research Awards, which aim to recognise research achievements in the field of radiography.
His work explores radiography and healthcare research, neuroimaging and clinical neuroscience, and general clinical imaging research.
The EFRS aims to represent, promote and develop the profession of radiography in Europe, representing more than 100,000 radiographers and 8,000 radiography students across the continent.
Dr Akudjedu said: “It is really exciting and yet humbling that my research programme and activities in radiography practice and education from Bournemouth University’s Institute of Medical Imaging and Visualisation has been recognised by our European-wide professional organisation.
“This is a culmination of years of research together with numerous collaborators and students.”
Dr Ellie Jennings and Dr Alice Hunter write for The Conversation about the problems that can occur when young people are treated as athletes rather than children…
The problem with seeing young sportspeople as athletes first, children second
A recent report commissioned by Swim England, the national governing body for swimming in England, has found evidence of a “culture of fear” in swimming clubs. The report finds that children involved in competitive swimming can be treated like professional athletes, and the importance of sporting performance held above all else.
Sport can be a positive influence on young people’s wellbeing. Children are encouraged to participate in sport, and the aspiration to become an elite athlete is widely seen as an admirable goal.
Many children will find competitive sport enjoyable and rewarding. But problems can occur when the athletic identity of a young person overshadows their identity as a child. There is a risk that clubs, coaches and parents may treat young people as athletes rather than as children. And this can take place at all levels of sport, from children taking part in sports like swimming at local clubs to those who compete at the highest level.
One participant in the Swim England report said that a focus on swimming performance led to their social and academic life suffering, and that they would frequently push themselves in training to the point of vomiting or collapse to please their coach. “The way in which the sport is delivered to children and hiding under the label of ‘high performance athletes’ is driving people away from the sport they once loved,” they said.
“We’re not here to have fun, we’re here to win!” one parent told a researcher for the Swim England report.
A focus on sporting success above all can compromise children’s wellbeing and safety. Young people may be exposed to environments that are highly pressurised, psychologically demanding and often tolerant of abuse.
Certain practices that take place in youth sports, such as coaches and parents screaming on the sidelines, that would be considered unacceptable in other settings. A teacher would be unable to behave like this towards their charges in a school setting, for instance.
In football academies, child athletes are potential future stars – and money spinners. A business mindset shifts the focus from nurturing children to moulding them into “assets” for potential profit.
Treating children like products rather than unique individuals with their own childhood experiences overshadows children’s vital developmental needs.
Accelerated adulthoods
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp recently spoke about the need to protect young football players, including from media attention, as academy youth players made their debut in senior-level games. “But from tomorrow, leave the boys in the corner, please. And don’t ask: ‘Where are they now? Where are they now? Where are they now?’” he told reporters after Liverpool’s FA cup win over Southampton.
Darts player Luke Littler competed in the World Darts Championships and other major darts tournaments at the age of 16. Littler has received intense levels of public scrutiny that extended beyond the reaches of sport: his private life, including his relationship status, has made headlines.
Attention on the personal life of a minor rushes them towards adulthood but also shows a lack of respect for the privacy of young athletes: a significant safeguarding concern.
Children’s names have even been included in reports about doping. Kamila Valieva, a Russian figure skater, experienced the unwelcome publicity of having her positive test revealed at the age of just 15, causing controversy at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Children have the right to be protected from all forms of harm in sport. This extends to their right to participate in sports within a safe and enjoyable environment. There are evidently distinct challenges that arise when young people compete in elite and often adult-dominated sporting spaces.
The abuse of children in sports is a concern at both community and elite levels. It is essential to address these concerns to ensure that the pursuit of athletic excellence does not come at the cost of the fundamental rights and safety of young people.
When children are treated solely as athletes, the excitement around their potential means that the fact that they are still minors may be forgotten. They must be recognised as children first, especially when their performance in elite sports takes place prior to reaching adulthood.
It is the moral obligation of all adults involved in sport to develop an approach that keeps children in sport safe, even when they are classed as elite athletes.
Congratulations to Drs. Louise Oliver and Orlanda Harvey who had their latest article published in the British Association of Social Workers magazine. The article is titled: The seven-eyed social worker: a tool for critical self-reflection”. This article is about how a supervision model, developed by Hawkins and Shohet, which focuses upon the relationship between the service user/client and the social worker. The two BU academics noted that “This model supports critical reflection, delving into the use of self when working with others. It promotes professional curiosity, which is at the heart of critical reflection”. This gives an alternative lens and approach to social work practice.
“The most powerful critique of socialist planning and the socialist state”, is how Margaret Thatcher described Friedrich von Hayek’s book, The Road to Serfdom. Published in March 1944 during the Austrian economist’s tenure at the London School of Economics (LSE), the book has been enduringly popular among free-market liberals.
Among its admirers was Winston Churchill, who as prime minister released 1.6 tons of precious war-rationed British government paper to allow additional copies to be printed. More recently Elon Musk tweeted a photo of The Road to Serfdom with the caption “Great Book by Hayek” to his 174 million followers, no doubt bringing Hayek’s work to a new generation.
On the other hand, the Austrian is often seen by the left as an intellectual bogeyman, an enabler of unfettered greed, minimal social responsibility and soaring inequality.
So who was Hayek and why does The Road to Serfdom matter?
How laissez-faire fell out of favour
Born into an upper middle-class Vienna family in 1899, Hayek earned doctorates in law (1921) and political science (1923) at the city’s university. He first made a name for himself in economics in 1928, publishing a report for his research institute employer that predicted the Wall Street crash of 1929 (some critics argue that his achievement gets exaggerated).
Hayek spent 18 years at the LSE (1932-1950), before moving to the University of Chicago (1950-1962). There he worked alongside Milton Friedman, another seminal advocate for free-market principles.
These views were profoundly unfashionable at the time. The social democrat consensus had been shaped by the “robber barron” period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Key industries such as rail and oil had been dominated by cartels and monopolies, leading to massive wealth inequalities.
Then came the Wall Street crash and great depression, prompting a loss of confidence in economists and economic reasoning. Free-market capitalism took much of the blame. Socialism was offered as a realistic and even desirable alternative.
Prominent colleagues of Hayek’s at the LSE, including political scientist Harold Laski and sociologist Karl Mannheim, believed socialist planning was inevitable in the UK. The Labour party explicitly warned in a 1942 pamphlet against a “return to the unplanned competitive world of the inter-war years, in which a privileged few were maintained at the expense of the common good”.
Hayek disagreed. He thought this wave of popular “collectivism” would lead to a repressive regime akin to Nazi Germany.
In The Road to Serfdom, he accepted the need to move beyond the laissez-faire approach of classical economics. But he argued in favour of “planning for competition” rather than the socialists’ “planning against competition” approach. He opposed the state being the sole provider of goods and services, but did think it had a role in facilitating a competitive environment.
In a central theme of the book, Hayek described the difficulties that democratic decision-making would face under central planning. He believed it would lead to policy gridlock and present opportunities for unscrupulous characters to become the key decision-makers.
Hayek’s goal was to show that the British intelligentsia was getting it wrong. Socialist planning, he believed, would see citizens returned to the types of limited freedoms endured by serfs under feudalism.
Hayek and conservatism
The Road was especially popular in the US. This was helped by Reader’s Digest publishing a shortened edition in 1945, introducing Hayek to a non-academic audience of some 9 million households. He was seized upon by conservatives opposing Franklin D Roosevelt’s interventionist New Deal, who feared for the loss of personal freedoms and a drift to totalitarianism.
However, Hayek was concerned his ideas had been oversimplified and misinterpreted. He warned of “the very dangerous tendency of using the term ‘socialism’ for almost any kind of state which you think is silly or you do not like”. By the mid-1950s he had distanced himself from American and European conservatives.
Ultimately, though, after the second world war most western countries adopted a more Keynesian approach. Named after Hayek’s greatest intellectual rival, John Maynard Keynes, this involved using government spending to influence things like employment and economic growth.
Hayek’s work, meanwhile, was mostly ignored until the 1970s, a period during which the UK became mired in stagflation and industrial action. He then became the inspiration for Margaret Thatcher’s policy mix of deregulation, privatisation, lower taxes and a bonfire on state controls of the economy. With the US also facing domestic economic challenges, the then US president, Ronald Reagan, followed suit.
What the critics say
If that was perhaps peak Hayek, he has been heavily criticised from some quarters in recent years. The American economist John Komlos, in his 2016 paper, Another Road to Serfdom, convincingly argues:
Hayek failed to see that any concentration of power is a threat to freedom. The free market that he advocated enabled the concentration of power in the hands of a powerful elite.
Such over-concentration had created the “too big to fail” environment in the financial sector in the run-up the global financial crisis of 2008, and many thought Hayekian deregulation was the culprit.
More recently, the tax-cutting economic policies during Liz Truss’s short stint as UK prime minister were incubated by think tanks who regard themselves as the keepers of the Hayekian flame. Similarly, Argentinian president Javier Milei’s libertarian vision of a minimalist state is said to be influenced by Hayek.
Equally, however, it is easy to fall into that trap of oversimplifying Hayek. It is worth noting, for instance, that in the Road, he also envisaged a substantial role for the state. He saw the state providing a basic minimum income for all. He also argued that “an extensive system of social services is fully compatible with the preservation of competition”.
Even Keynes congratulated him on his publication, saying, “morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it”.
In short, while it’s probably fair to say that the world has had to suffer the flaws in Hayek’s ideas, it is important to separate him from his supporters. He was certainly no statist, but his vision for how best to run an economy was not as uncompromising as many would have us believe.
Today we received a copy of the book Appreciating Health and Care in the post. This book has a sub-title ‘A practical appreciative inquiry resource for the health and social care sector’ and refers to the work led by Bournemouth University’s Dr. Rachel Arnold. Appreciative Inquiry values people’s expertise and vision and can motivate people to see the world differently and instigate positive change. Rachel been the lead author on several publications around Appreciative Inquiry [1-3].
Drs. Pramod Regmi and Nirmal Aryal in the Department of Nursing Sciences published a new paper with colleagues from Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines in PLoS ONE under the title ‘Assessing the basic knowledge and awareness of dengue fever prevention among migrant workers in Klang Valley, Malaysia’. [1] Globally, 390 million dengue virus infections occur per year. In Malaysia, migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to Dengue Fever (DF) due to mosquito breeding sites exposure and poor health literacy. This study reports on assessing the current Dengue Fever knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP). The paper identifies strategies to promote awareness around Dengue Fever among migrant workers in Malaysia. Most respondents were male, working in the services industry, had completed high school, aged between 30–39 years and with less than ten years work experience in Malaysia. Overall, respondents’ knowledge was positively correlated with attitude but negatively with practices. Older respondents, who had completed higher education, obtained higher knowledge scores. Similarly, those with working experience of >20 years in Malaysia obtained higher attitude scores. Respondents with a previous history of Dengue Fever strongly considered the removal of mosquito breeding sites as their own responsibility, hence tended to frequently apply preventive measures. Respondents’ knowledge was also positively correlated to their understanding of Dengue Fever information sourced from social media platforms.
Congratulations!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Reference:
Chaudhary MN, Lim V-C, Faller EM, Regmi P, Aryal N, Mohd Zain SN, Azman AS, Sahimin B. (2024) Assessing the basic knowledge and awareness of dengue fever prevention among migrant workers in Klang Valley, Malaysia. PLoS ONE 19(2): e0297527. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297527
You are invited to a Zoom meeting of the PRME UKI (Principles of Responsible Management Education, UK and Ireland) Interest Group on Employability, Sustainability and Jobs of the Future (co-led by Dr Jonathan Louw MCIPD SFHEA and Dr Karen Cripps) that will take place on 13th March from 2.30pm – 4.00pm. This will host Arti Kumar MBE as a keynote presenter to celebrate the close of the ‘Career Story Telling for the Sustainable Development Goals’ workshops.
Arti’s keynote speech will unravel the key features of SOARing to Success as a principled, inclusive and interconnected approach. She will show how staff can animate the four dimensions of SOAR as a process of personalised learning that enables all students to constructively align their aspirations and employability development with sustainable development goals.
The SOAR framework was used to structure the ‘Career Story Telling for the Sustainable Development Goals’workshop that was delivered at over 20 universities as part of PRME seed funding for pedagogic innovations 2023 (by Karen Cripps, Cathy d’Abreu and Dr Milena Bobeva).
The session will include insights from collaborating colleagues and students, share the resources developed through the project, and host an open discussion on approaches to embedding ’employability for sustainability’ within the curriculum. You can read more about the project and collaborators in the link below and the zoom registration link here.
To register in advance for this meeting click here.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
All Sustainability-oriented student organisations associated with PRME Signatory Members from the PRME Chapter UK & Ireland are encouraged to apply! Submissions should be completed through a SUBMISSION FORM (deadline: 31st March 2024 at 23:59 ET) to be filled by a student organisation representative, who must be a student formally enrolled with a PRME Signatory Member during the 2023 calendar year.
Applicants can find all the information about the Awards structure, submission criteria and requirements by accessing the CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – TERMS OF REFERENCE. There, you will see that the PGS Sustainability Awards are divided into two phases: Regional Awards (February to May) and Global Awards (May to June).
Due to a partnership with Marketplace Simulations, on the 18th June 2024, PRME will celebrate the Regional Winners and award the Global Winner during the 2024 PRME Global Forum. On occasion, the student organisation awarded as the Global Winner will receive a USD $2,000 monetary prize to increase the impact of their local initiatives! The PGS Team will host two informational webinars to present the 2024 PGS Sustainability Awards and answer any questions regarding the application processes. Please find below the registration links to these informational sessions:
Informational Webinar 1 – 8th March, 12.00 to 13.00 CET (register here)
Informational Webinar 2 – 18th March, 17.00 to 18.00 CET (register here)
PRME UK and Ireland Conference and Doctoral Colloquium 2024
The Calls for Proposals are open for the PRME UK and Ireland Conference and Doctoral Colloquium 2024 ‘Educating for Deep Transformation: Business Schools’ contribution to a Greener, Healthier, Fairer Society’ to be held at the University of Exeter 19th-21st June 2024.
Additional information can be found in the link below.
2024 PRME Faculty Teaching Awards: Applications are Open
The PRME Faculty Teaching Awards recognize excellence in teaching sustainable development and responsible management practices in business education. They seek to honour innovative and impactful pedagogical contributions that advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and align with the pedagogical interests of the PRME community.
Eligibility: Faculty at PRME Signatory institutions from all levels and disciplines. Applications can be submitted from individuals or as a team application of no more than six.
Submissions close: 31st March 2024. For more details click here.
The Month in Research is our monthly round-up sharing research and knowledge exchange successes from across the previous month, showcasing the amazing work taking place across BU.
Your achievements
Thank you to everyone who has used the online form to put forward their achievements, or those of colleagues, this month.
Dr Luciana Esteves (Faculty of Science and Technology) is part of a team of coastal scientists, artists and educators who worked on the writing/production of Coasts for Kids, a series of videos narrated by 6-8 year old children about coastal processes. Coasts for Kids won 1st place at the Climate Creatives Challenge #04 (Coastal Change), which received submissions from 56 countries. A video about the challenge and the winning entries can be found here: https://youtu.be/7fWiRj8pq48
Funding
Congratulations to all those who have had funding for research and knowledge exchange projects and activities awarded in January. Highlights include:
Professor Janice Denegri-Knott (Faculty of Media and Communication) has been awarded c.£200,000 by Horizon Europe: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for their project Mapping the full scope of consumer engagement on social media
Dr Richard Wallis (Faculty of Media and Communication) has been awarded c.£111,000 by the British Academy for their project Supportive offboarding: Developing new practices to support sustainable freelance careers in TV
Dr Anna Metzger (Faculty of Science and Technology) has been awarded c.£70,000 by the Royal Society for their project Perception of objects’ 3D shape – from active sensing to multisensory representations
Dr Simant Prakoonwit (Faculty of Science and Technology) has been awarded c.£35,000 by Innovate UK for their project Artificial Intelligence Content Moderation project
Publications
Congratulations to all those who have had work published across the last month. Below is a selection of publications from throughout February:
Content for The Month in Research has been collected using the research and knowledge exchange database (RED), the Bournemouth University Research Online (BURO) repository and submissions via The Month in Research online form. It is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list. All information is correct as of 28.2.24.
Please use The Month in Research online form to share your highlights and achievements, or those of colleagues, for the next monthly round-up.
Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) February 2024 Open Call
HEIF funding is now available for innovative Knowledge Exchange projects.
Research England provide universities with funding for knowledge exchange (Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF)) to enable them to support and develop a broad range of knowledge-based interactions and work with business, public and third sector organisations, community bodies and the wider public, to exchange knowledge and increase the economic and societal benefit from their work.
The primary purpose of the funding is to support a small number of projects which can include:
significant projects that are underway and require a further injection of funds;
existing knowledge exchange projects to develop these ideas to the next stage of development;
projects with ambition that require a seed funding, capacity building, proof-of-concept or launchpad (please note that follow-up funding to support further development of your successfully funded HEIF-projects will be available to apply for in the 2024-25 academic cycle; we encourage applications for this call as an opportunity to kick-start your work).
The HEIF FEBRUARY 2024 OPEN CALL fund supports the ambition of the UK Government’s Plan for Growth to support and incentivise creative ideas and technologies that will shape the UK’s future. Further developing BU’s work in this area will also enable us to support UKRI’s aims to support cooperation and collaboration, as well as developing our academic talent. The aim is to provide a platform for academics to take their knowledge exchange ideas to the next stage of development or to completion.
If you would like to discuss your application or your project’s eligibility, there will be a drop in session on Thursday 29th between 1pm – 2.30pm in the Reception Area of Dorset House (BUBS). Or you can contact Dr Wendelin Morrison, the Knowledge Exchange Manager by email wsmorrison@bournemouth.ac.uk
Key details
Amount: This year, £50000 of BU’s HEIF grant will be allocated through this open call, to support up to 6 knowledge exchange and innovation projects.
Timeframe: Projects should span a maximum of 4 months. The funds awarded must be spent by 31 July 2024.
Closing date: Friday, 8 March 2024
The link to the Guidance and Application form is below – please ensure you DOWNLOAD a copy to your own computer and do not edit directly on the SharePoint: HEIF February 2024 Open Call.docx
There are growing calls for young people under the age of 16 to be banned from having smartphones or access to social media. The Smartphone Free Childhood WhatsApp group aims to normalise young people not having smartphones until “at least” 14 years old. Esther Ghey, mother of the murdered teenager Brianna Ghey, is campaigning for a ban on social media apps for under-16s.
The concerns centre on the sort of content that young people can access (which can be harmful and illegal) and how interactions on these devices could lead to upsetting experiences.
However, as an expert in young people’s use of digital media, I am not convinced that bans at an arbitrary age will make young people safer or happier – or that they are supported by evidence around young people’s use of digital technology.
In general, most young people have a positive relationship with digital technology. I worked with South West Grid for Learning, a charity specialising in education around online harm, to produce a report in 2018 based upon a survey of over 8,000 young people. The results showed that just over two thirds of the respondents had never experienced anything upsetting online.
Large-scale research on the relationship between social media and emotional wellbeing concluded there is little evidence that social media leads to psychological harm.
Sadly, there are times when young people do experience upsetting digital content or harm as a result of interactions online. However, they may also experience upsetting or harmful experiences on the football pitch, at a birthday party or playing Pokémon card games with their peers.
It would be more unusual (although not entirely unheard of) for adults to be making calls to ban children from activities like these. Instead, our default position is “if you are upset by something that has happened, talk to an adult”. Yet when it comes to digital technology, there seems to be a constant return to calls for bans.
We know from attempts at prevention of other areas of social harms, such as underage sex or access to drugs or alcohol, that bans do not eliminate these behaviours. However, we do know that bans will mean young people will not trust adults’ reactions if they are upset by something and want to seek help.
I recall delivering an assembly to a group of year six children (aged ten and 11) one Safer Internet Day a few years ago. A boy in the audience told me he had a YouTube channel where he shared video game walkthroughs with his friends.
I asked if he’d ever received nasty comments on his platform and if he’d talked to any staff about it at his school. He said he had, but he would never tell a teacher because “they’ll tell me off for having a YouTube channel”.
This was confirmed after the assembly by the headteacher, who said they told young people not to do things on YouTube because it was dangerous. I suggested that empowering what was generally a positive experience might result in the young man being more confident to talk about negative comments – but was met with confusion and repetition of “they shouldn’t be on there”.
Need for trust
Young people tell us that two particularly important things they need in tackling upsetting experiences online are effective education and adults they can trust to talk to and be confident of receiving support from. A 15 year old experiencing abuse as a result of social media interactions would likely not be confident to disclose if they knew the first response would be, “You shouldn’t be on there, it’s your own fault.”
There is sufficient research to suggest that banning under-16s having mobile phones and using social media would not be successful. Research into widespread youth access to pornography from the Children’s Commissioner for England, for instance, illustrates the failures of years of attempts to stop children accessing this content, despite the legal age to view pornography being 18.
The prevalence of hand-me-down phones and the second hand market makes it extremely difficult to be confident that every mobile phone contract accurately reflects the age of the user. It is a significant enough challenge for retailers selling alcohol to verify age face to face.
The Online Safety Act is bringing in online age verification systems for access to adult content. But it would seem, from the guidance by communications regulator Ofcom, that the goal is to show that platforms have demonstrated a duty of care, rather than being a perfect solution. And we know that age assurance (using algorithms to estimate someone’s age) is less accurate for under-13s than older ages.
By putting up barriers and bans, we erode trust between those who could be harmed and those who can help them. While these suggestions come with the best of intentions, sadly they are doomed to fail. What we should be calling for is better understanding from adults, and better education for young people instead.
Yesterday we received the proofs of the recently accepted paper ‘Improved Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Facilities at School and their Effect on Educational Achievement in Basic Level Students in Nepal’ [1]. Luckily these are only the proof pages as my family name is misspelt, and the paper still lists the old name of our Centre for Midwifery and Women’s Health, which was, of course, the correct name at the time of submission.
The last time I published a paper on hygiene was also with colleagues in Nepal seven years ago, this time it was on menstrual hygiene [2].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
References:
Sharma, M., Adhikari, R., van Teijlingen, E., Devkota, B., Khanal, S. (2024) Improved Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Facilities at School and their Effect on Educational Achievement in Basic Level Students in Nepal, International Journal of Health Promotion & Education (accepted). https://doi.org/10.1080/14635240.2024.2314459.
Budhathoki, S.S., Bhattachan, M., Pokharel, P.K., Bhadra, M., van Teijlingen, E. (2017) Reusable sanitary towels: Promoting menstrual hygiene in post-earthquake Nepal. Journal of Family Planning & Reproductive Health Care43(2): 157-159.
Congratulations to Mr. Musa Lewis Nhlabatsi whose paper ‘Clinicians’ barriers to screening and diagnosing diabetes distress in patients with type 1 and 2 Diabetes Mellitus: a systematic review’ has just been accepted by the African Journal of Health Sciences[1].This systematic review’s initial search identified 1,579 studies, but only four primary studies from three countries met the inclusion criteria. The studies reported five barriers: (1) lack of knowledge, (2) lack of time, (3) lack of accessibility to mental health services, (4) lack of motivation and (5) patients’ denial of their diabetes distress. The two most reported barriers were lack of knowledge and time. In conclusion this review identifies critical barriers to the underdiagnosis of diabetes distress by clinicians and highlights the need for policymakers and organisations to conduct pragmatic research to understand clinicians’ experiences in assessing diabetes distress in various healthcare settings to improve diabetes management.
Nhlabatsi, M.L., van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2024) Clinicians’ barriers to screening and diagnosing diabetes distress in patients with type 1 and 2 Diabetes Mellitus: a systematic review’, African Journal of Health Sciences (forthcoming)
The Month in Research is our monthly round-up sharing research and knowledge exchange successes from across the previous month, showcasing the amazing work taking place across BU.
Your achievements
Thank you to everyone who has used the online form to put forward their achievements, or those of colleagues, this month.
With an international team of researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Illinois, and Juntendo University, Dr Daniel Lock (Business School) co-authored a new study in Social Science and Medicine. The research demonstrated that the well-being benefits of physical activity were activated when the activity was internalised as a meaningful feature of participants self-concept. Shared by Dr Daniel Lock on behalf of Dr Yuhei Inoue, Dr Daniel Lock, and Dr Miki Satoro
Fred McClintock (Faculty of Health and Social Sciences) has completed the first publication of his PhD: Assessing the Impact of Sensor Orientation on Accelerometer-Derived Angles: A Systematic Analysis and Proposed Error Reduction.
Funding
Congratulations to all those who have had funding for research and knowledge exchange projects and activities awarded in January. Highlights include:
Dr Szilvia Ruszev (Faculty of Media and Communication) has been awarded c.£172,000 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for their project Shared Post-Human Imagination: Human-AI Collaboration in Media Creation
Professor Marcin Budka (Faculty of Science and Technology) has been awarded c.£225,000 by Innovate UK for their KTP (Virtual): This is Crowd Ltd – Generative AI driven marketing campaign customisation tool
Professor Marios Angelopoulos (Faculty of Science and Technology) has been awarded c.£28,000 by Ofgem for their project Affordable carbon monoxide and heat verbal warning alarm
Publications
Congratulations to all those who have had work published across the last month. Below is a selection of publications from throughout January:
Content for The Month in Research has been collected using the research and knowledge exchange database (RED), the Bournemouth University Research Online (BURO) repository, and submissions via The Month in Research online form. It is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list. All information is correct as of 30.1.24.
Please use The Month in Research online form to share your highlights and achievements, or those of colleagues, for the next monthly round-up.
New paper on migrant workers from Nepal was published this week in KMC Journal. The paper ‘Risk Perception and Protective Health Measure Regarding COVID-19 among Nepali Labour Migrants’ Returnee from India’ has Shanti Khanal as lead author [1]. The journal is Open Access, hence freely available online across the globe. The paper examines the association between risk perception and protective behaviour regarding COVID-19 in returnee migrant workers. A total of 384 returnee migrants, based in a quarantine centre on return from India, participated in the study. Using the health belief model (HBM) as a theoretical framework, a structured interview questionnaire was designed and administered. A further three health workers were interviewed face-to-face.
The study showed that the perceived risk of COVID-19 among participants was medium to low. Participants perceived few barriers and had low self-efficacy levels compared to other constructs. This study further showed that participants were more likely to follow a range of protective health behaviours, but not found all. The study revealed a significant association between all risk perception constructs and protective behaviours (p=< 0.05). This study accordingly highlighted a significant relationship between the respondents’ risk perception level and protective health behaviours. The study envisaged that public awareness of risk to the people who returned from India is essential to increase risk perception during the outbreak.
The study works towards fulfilling SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), especially ‘Good health and well-being’ (SDG 3) and Decent work and economic growth (SDG 8).
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
Reference:
Khanal, S.P., van Teijlingen, E., Sharma, M., Acharya, J., Sharma, C., Kharel, S., Gaulee, U., Bhattarai, K., Pasa, R.B., Bohora, P. (2024) Risk Perception and Protective Health Measure Regarding COVID-19 among Nepali Labour Migrants’ Returnee from India. KMC Journal, 6(1): 313–330. https://doi.org/10.3126/kmcj.v6i1.62364
Our article ‘Understanding health education, health promotion & public health’ [1] is getting read according to ResearchGate. This conceptual/ theoretical paper was published open access in late 2021 in the Journal of Health Promotion and it reached 4,500 reads yesterday. Whilst the web side of the journal suggests today that the PDF of the paper has been downloaded 8,511 times.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
Reference:
van Teijlingen, K. R., Devkota, B., Douglas, F., Simkhada, P., van Teijlingen, E. R. (2021). Understanding health education, health promotion and public health. Journal of Health Promotion, 9(1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.3126/jhp.v9i01.40957
On my latest trip to Nepal I noticed a number of related newspaper stories about those wanting to migrate abroad for work. Yesterday there was an article with the headline ‘Three held for defrauding unemployed youths’ (The Himalayan Times, January 11, page 2), which could be seen as story about crime, just like the one next to it on the same page with was headed ‘Vehicle stolen’ (The Himalayan Times, January 11, page 2) . Both fit under the category of people suffering from crime committed by naughty people. However, having studied labour migration as a sociologist for over a decade it also speaks of the desperation of young people to leave Nepal. In that sense, the ‘Three held for defrauding unemployed youths’ story, is more like the story the day before ‘Family of Nepali who joined Russian Army worried after hearing about his death’ (The Himalayan Times, January 10, page 1).
In the latter story of a tragic death of a Nepalese mercenary, the most unexpected element I found was that Nepalese victim had paid Rs. 500,000 to criminals, who acted as brokers. I would have expected that Putin’s agents operating in the Middle East were paying large amounts of money to potential army recruits to fight in the invasion of Ukraine. To my great surprise, the payment was the other way round, where Nepalese migrant workers are desperate enough to pay the country at war. When people are desperate to work abroad unscrupulous brokers see opportunities to make money.
Whilst at the end of December 2023 two Nepalese men were killed when Korean language test candidates were staging demonstrations in Kathmandu demanding that they be allowed to appear for language tests for jobs in the manufacturing sector in South Korea. When the Minister for Physical Infrastructure and Transport stopped to intervene, he sparked a riot and his car was set on fire. The police opened fire and killed two protesters in a very un-Nepalese way of dealing with protest. Again to me the underlying issue to note is how desperate these men are to go abroad and get to work in South Korea.
One print daily English-language newspaper The Annapurna Express and one online newspaper Gazzabkoo Magazine published articles this week on our project on strengthening the health system in Nepal. The latter used the title ‘Strengthening Health Systems for Better Health‘ and the former opted for the headline ‘Forum on health system strengthening’.
Our interdisciplinary study ‘The impact of federalisation on Nepal’s health system: a longitudinal analysis’ is funded by the UK Health Systems Research Initiative [Grant ref. MR/T023554/1]. In this Nepal Federal Health System Project we study the consequences for the health system of Nepal’s move in 2015 from a centralised political system to a more federal structure of government . This joint project is led by the University of Sheffield in collaboration with Bournemouth University, the University of Huddersfield, Canterbury Christ Church University and two institutions in Nepal, namely MMIHS (Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences) and PHASE Nepal.
The sixth paper from our interdisciplinary research team focuses on the effective way we applied participatory policy analysis in a study on the effects on the health system in Nepal. In the research we used a methodological approach using the River of Life which we describe in this paper ‘Participatory policy analysis in health policy and systems research: reflections from a study in Nepal’ [1]. The Lead author is Dr. Sujata Sapkota from Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Kathmandu.
This study was funded by the UK Health Systems Research Initiative [Grant ref. MR/T023554/1]. In this larger Nepal Federal Health System Project we study the consequences for the health system of Nepal’s move from a centralised political system to a more federal government structure in 2015. This joint project is led by the University of Sheffield in collaboration with Bournemouth University, the University of Huddersfield, Canter Bury Christ Church University and two institutions in Nepal, namely MMIHS and PHASE Nepal. We have managed to publish five papers from this project prior to today’s one reflecting on the methodology [2-6].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMWH (Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health)
References:
Sapkota, S., Rushton, S., van Teijlingen, E., Subedi, M., Balen, J., Gautam, S., Adhikary, P., Simkhada, P., Wasti, S.P., Karki, J.K., Panday, S., Karki, A., Rijal, B., Joshi, S., Basnet, S., Marahatta, S.B. (2024) Participatory policy analysis in health policy and systems research: reflections from a study in Nepal. Health Research & Policy Systems, 22 (No.7) https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-023-01092-5 .
Wasti, S.P., van Teijlingen, E., Rushton, S., et al. (2023) Overcoming the Challenges Facing Nepal’s Health System During Federalisation: An Analysis of Health System Building Blocks, Health Research Policy & Systems21(117) https://doi.org/10.1186/s12961-023-01033-2
Sapkota, S., Dhakal, A., Rushton S., et al. (2023) The impact of decentralisation on health systems: a systematic review of reviews. BMJ Global Health 8:e013317. doi:10.1136/bmjgh-2023-013317.
Sapkota, S., Panday, S., Wasti, S.P., et al. (2022) Health System Strengthening: The Role of Public Health in Federal Nepal, Journal of the Nepal Public Health Association 7(1):36-42.
Adhikary, P., Balen, J., Gautam, S., et al. (2020) The COVID-19 pandemic in Nepal: Emerging evidence on the effectiveness of action by, and cooperation between, different levels of government in a federal system, Journal of Karnali Academy of Health Sciences 3 (3): 1-11.
Rushton, S., Pandey, S., van Teijlingen, E., et al. (2021) An Investigation into the Impact of Decentralization on the Health System of Nepal. Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences, 7(1): 3–14. https://doi.org/10.3126/jmmihs.v7i1.43146
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