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BU Research Matters: ADRC adapt their approach in the time of COVID-19

BU research, BU2025, Featured academics

In today’s blog post, Dr Michelle Heward, explores how the fantastic work of the Ageing & Dementia Research Centre has adapted to enable community engagement during the pandemic. Our older population, especially those who are extremely clinically vulnerable, have risked not being able to participate in shaping our future research owing to the restrictions in place over the last year. This engagement aspect is so important for ensuring research benefits society, and offers the bonus of social interaction for those who are having to isolate! Here Michelle explains how it is done: 

Michelle Heward

“The COVID-19 pandemic has had a detrimental impact on face-to-face interaction. To meet UK Government guidance and stop the spread of the virus, we have been unable to meet up with family, friends, and colleagues in the ways that we are used to. For older people, people with dementia and family carers, this has exacerbated many existing difficulties and problems they face, whilst also further intrenching feelings of loneliness and isolation. Technology has been a saviour for many and has proved invaluable in connecting people with their loved ones. The team from the Ageing and Dementia Research Centre (ADRC) have overcome the barriers by using digital approaches to continue our engagement and expand our networks with members of the public, service users and carers.  We have achieved this by developing a new series of monthly virtual ‘coffee mornings’ hosted on ZOOM.

We have designed each coffee morning to have a different theme/topic that may be pitching new ideas for research or sharing new findings. The group are invited to share their ideas, thoughts and ask questions. Ensuring that older people, people with dementia and family carers remain at the heart of our research activities has been central to the coffee mornings. The sessions have been well attended and the group have really engaged with the research topics and attendees are starting to get to know one another socially – many are returning each month which is fantastic!

So far, the group have contributed to discussions about nutrition with Prof Jane Murphy and wayfinding with Prof Jan Wiener. In the next session they will discuss nursing training in response to COVID-19 with Dr Michele Board. The discussion and questions raised have offered ‘food for thought’ for the presenters and will no doubt help us to shape future study ideas and generate new ideas for research.  In fact, one of the key challenges has been keeping within the allocated time for the session as there has been so much discussion!

The sessions are facilitated by Dr Michelle Heward (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow and ADRC Service User and Carer Involvement Lead) and Caroline Jones (ADRC Administrator). On reflection it has been beneficial to have two facilitators; one to lead the session and the other to be on hand to help with IT issues and check the chat messages. We also offer support for people who have had little or no experience of using ZOOM beforehand to make sure they are comfortable using the technology and its functions prior to attending a session.

We acknowledge that the idea for the virtual coffee morning was drawn through our collaborative working with the Wessex Public Involvement Network (PIN), who shared their successes and experiences of developing a similar engagement model with us. This work has also been undertaken in consultation with BU Public Involvement in Education and Research partnership to ensure we are following current policy/procedures.

Although we recognise that not everyone is able to access the internet from home, we will continue to offer these sessions for the foreseeable future as they provide an alternative to those who may find it more difficult to travel or take part in our existing face- to-face approaches. Anyone interested in presenting their ideas or research in ageing or dementia that might be of interest to the group please contact Michelle to discuss.”

BU Research Matters: the evolution of research during a global pandemic – joining our research community

BU research, COVID-19, Featured academics

Dr Marc Vander Linden - Bournemouth University Staff Profile PagesThis week on the Research Blog, we are exploring how our amazing community of researchers have evolved and adapted their research activities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dr Marc Vander Linden, who joined BU in March 2020 as part of the creation of the Institute for the Modelling of Socio-Environmental Transitions starts the mini-series off. Below, Marc shares his reflections, details how he has adapted and explains why we still need face-to-face interaction: 

“A year ago, I joined Bournemouth University as a senior lecturer within the newly created Institute for the Modelling of Socio-Environmental Transitions (IMSET). Obviously, the prospect of a national lockdown was then looming closer and closer but I never thought that, several months later, I would still be a “virtual colleague”, delivering my – new-ish by now – duties from home and through the 13inch window of my laptop screen. We all have experienced first hand the challenges of the current situation. Being married to an academic and parent of two (very resilient, I must proudly add!) children, it goes without saying that home-schooling has taken its toll on working conditions. These have not been ideal to discover and manage the many administrative and teaching tasks incurred by a new job. In this sense, doing research has been indeed a challenge, but overall less a luxury than a necessary intellectual lifeline.

I am an archaeologist working on past population history, and long-term human-environment interactions, especially the mechanisms and consequences of the introduction and development of early farming techniques across Europe. My research covers multiple facets, each having been affected in different ways by COVID-19. The most-well-known, “romantic” thing about being an archaeologist is the field, in my case digging in caves in Montenegro. Obviously, with travel bans and the local hardships of the pandemic, any form of fieldwork has been impossible to undertake. As I was about to start surveying a new region, the lack of fieldwork not only has an immediate effect upon my research, but will also have negative repercussions felt over several years to come as I cannot dig new sites, identify new research problems and apply for corresponding funding. Yet, this unexpected pause also offered opportunities to revisit and complete older work, and prepare it for final publication thanks to a collective effort involving former post-docs, PhD students, and local Serbian and Montenegrin collaborators.

Another part of my research draws on legacy data, which is assembling, compiling and analysing datasets from published and unpublished literature. This includes, among others, collating information scattered in a multitude of individual reports related to changes in past farming regimes (e.g. presence of certain crops and weeds, or the preference for particular animal domesticates, or the contribution of hunting to the economy). The resulting “big data” not only constitute the empirical baseline for a range of analyses, but these results can also be used by collaborators from disciplines that consider estimates of anthropogenic activity (e.g. anthropogenic land cover models). Such multi-layered work is only possible by being part of an extensive international network of researchers, meeting regularly in a virtual world of Zoom meetings, shared folders, google documents, sometimes spiced up by the pleasure of doodle polls to identify the right meeting slot across multiple time zones. In many respects, the COVID-19 induced familiarity of online platforms and tools has bolstered this dimension of my research and made me more open to new collaborations.

This being said, the picture is not entirely rosy and, in so many ways, I’d say the most difficult part has actually been to become a BU colleague. After all, it is difficult to lose sight, when constantly stuck at home in front of a laptop, that you’re part of a new institution, with rules to follow and timelines to respect. As part of IMSET, “older hands” have provided outstanding support to us newbies, and lots of energy has gone into creating and maintaining contact through weekly – virtual obviously – lab meetings. Though we’ve made huge strides to come together as a group, the biggest drawback still remains to not being able to pop in someone’s office for advice or a simple chat. Online collaboration presents numerous advantages when relying upon and interacting with a huge body of collaborators and, arguably, my research has developed well despite, if not thanks, to the “new normal” imposed by COVID-19.

Yet, I’m desperately craving for the inherent simplicity and spontaneity of unplanned interactions with talented colleagues for diverse scientific horizons, those simple moments which, in my experience, are so essential in generating successful, innovative and fun research”.

 

New BU reproductive health paper

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

Congratulations to Dr. Pramod Regmi (Lecturer in International Health) in the Department of Nursing Sciences on today’s publication of ‘The unmet needs for modern family planning methods among postpartum women in Sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review of the literature’ [1].  The paper in the international peer-reviewed journal Reproductive Health is co-produced with BU MSc Public Health graduate Jumaine Gahungu and Dr. Mariam Vahdaninia who left the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences in mid-2020. 

Well done.

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Reference:

  1. Gahungu, J., Vahdaninia, M. & Regmi, P. (2021) The unmet needs for modern family planning methods among postpartum women in Sub-Saharan Africa: a systematic review of the literature. Reprod Health 18, 35   https://doi.org/10.1186/s12978-021-01089-9

Congratulations to Prof. Jonathan Parker

Featured academics, international, open access, Publishing, Research news, Uncategorized, writing

Congratulations to Professor Jonathan Parker on his latest publication ‘By Dint of History: Ways in which social work is (re)defined by historical and social events‘.  This interesting paper is co-authored with Magnus Frampton from the Universität Vechta in Germany and published in the international journal Social Work & Society.

 

Reference:

  1.  Parker, J., Frampton, M. (2020) By Dint of History: Ways in which social work is (re)defined by historical and social events, Social Work & Society, Volume 18, Issue 3: 1-17.

 

 

Congratulations to Prof. Ashencaen-Crabtree on publication of new book

Featured academics, international, Publishing, Research news, Women's Academic Network, writing

Congratulations to Prof. Sara Ashencaen Crabtree on the publication of her new Routledge research monograph, Women of Faith and the Quest for Spiritual Authenticity [1].    This new book is based on 59 interviews with women in Malaysia and the UK concerning their experiences, beliefs and practices across the faiths of Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and diverse Pagan pathways. These accounts are often very personal and detailed in referring to both the micro (individual) and the macro (social) in terms of how faith and gender are negotiated in multicultural societies that struggle with the politics of diversity.

This is an ecumenical and entertaining ethnography where women’s narratives and life stories ground faith as embodied, personal, painful, vibrant, diverse, illuminating and shared. This book will of interest not only to academics and students of the sociology of religion, feminist and gender studies, politics, political science, ethnicity and Southeast Asian studies, but is equally accessible to the general reader broadly interested in faith and feminism.  Sara says that she road-tested some of these Sociology of Religion ideas in the classroom at Bournemouth University and she found that social science students really related to it in their discussions.

I have taken the liberty to reproduce one of the reviews written for the publisher’s website by Prof. Crisp from Deakin University in Australia.

 

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

Reference:

Ashencaen Crabtree S (2021) Women of Faith and the Quest for Spiritual Authenticity: Comparative Perspectives from Malaysia and Britain, London: Routledge.

 

New publication Dr. Orlanda Harvey

BU research, Featured academics, PG research, Publishing, Research news, student research, Uncategorized, Women's Academic Network, writing

Congratulations to Social Work Lecturer Dr. Orlanda Harvey on the acceptance of a paper by the journal Drugs: Education, Prevention & Policy. This latest academic paper ‘Libido as a motivator for starting and restarting non-prescribed anabolic androgenic steroid use among men: a mixed-methods study’ [1] is based on her Ph.D. research.  Previous papers associated with her thesis covered aspects of non-prescribed anabolic androgenic steroid use [2-3] as well as her wider Ph.D. journey [4].

 

References:

    1. Harvey, O., Parrish, M., van Teijlingen, E, Trenoweth, S. (2021) Libido as a reason to use non-prescribed Anabolic Androgenic Steroids, Drugs: Education, Prevention & Policy (accepted).
    2. Harvey, O., Keen, S., Parrish, M., van Teijlingen, E. (2019) Support for people who use Anabolic Androgenic Steroids: A Systematic Literature Review into what they want and what they access. BMC Public Health 19: 1024 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7288-x https://rdcu.be/bMFon
    3. Harvey, O., Parrish, M., van Teijlingen, E., Trenoweth, S. (2020) Support for non-prescribed Anabolic Androgenic Steroids users: A qualitative exploration of their needs Drugs: Education, Prevention & Policy 27:5, 377-386. doi 10.1080/09687637.2019.1705763
    4. Spacey, A., Harvey, O., Casey, C. (2020) Postgraduate researchers’ experiences of accessing participants via gatekeepers: ‘wading through treacle!’  Journal of Further and Higher Education 2: 1-18.

 

IMSET Seminar: Exploring the chaîne opératoire of applied long-term human ecodynamics

BU research, Events, Featured academics, Research communication

Thursday 21st January 4pm – 6pm

Exploring the chaîne opératoire of applied long-term human ecodynamics: examples from the human paleocology of Subarctic and Arctic seas.

Book your place in the seminar with Professor Ben Fitzhugh, Department of Anthropology, University of Washington.

Professor Fitzhugh’s research focuses on human-environmental dynamics and archaeological histories of maritime/coastal hunter-gatherers especially in the North Pacific. His research addresses questions of human vulnerability and resilience in remote subarctic environments.

Researchers studying long-term human ecological histories increasingly promote the relevance of this work to contemporary environmental managers, policy makers, and heritage communities. After all, our case studies and comparative insights capture greater ranges of socio-environmental variation and longer temporal sequences than are available to planners tethered to the short observation scales. These longer time-lines and more varied “completed experiments of the past” make it possible to track dynamic relationships and downstream legacies driving more and less sustainable strategies and relationships. This information should help us to avoid the mistakes of the past and to build policy on robust understandings about the capacities of systems for stability and change. Nevertheless, meaningful engagement remains limited. If we are serious about this effort, we owe it to ourselves to examine the practical challenges and paths to solutions to implementation of applied long-term human ecodynamics. For this talk, Professor Fitzhugh will expand on the need for a “chaîne opératoire of applied long-term human ecodynamics.” Chaîne opératoires are the inferred technical steps perceived to govern the production, use and discard of technological objects like stone tools, and his argument here is that we could stand to investigate the impediments and limitations of practice that keep academic work at arms length from management policy. Using climate, marine ecological and archaeological case studies from the subarctic North Pacific, he will explore key steps involved in forming and bringing compelling human ecodynamic scenarios of the past into dialogue with contemporary management science and policy. These steps involve managing data uncertainties, unequal resolutions and relevance, disparate interpretive constructs, and epistemic and ontological asymmetries.

Professor Fitzhugh is currently Director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington, and in this role, seeks to promote interdisciplinary scholarship in the evolution of the earth surface (and the role of humans in it) over the past two and a half millions years.

https://anthropology.washington.edu/people/ben-fitzhugh

Professor Fitzhugh will speak for approximately 1 hour, followed by Q&A.

Book a place at this seminar via eventbrite.

COVID-19 in Qatar

BU research, COVID-19, Featured academics, international, open access, Publishing, Research communication, Research news, Uncategorized, writing

Peer reviewing is the backbone of academic publishing. It is this peer review process to ensure that papers/publications have been vetted scientifically prior to publication by experts in the field, i.e. one’s peers. However, the process is not without its problems. One such problems is the delay in academic publishing. For example, a few days ago we published a substantive editorial on COVID-19 in Qater [1].  When we submitted this in July 2020 the information in our editorial was very up to date, and it still was when the Qatar Medical Journal accepted it on 26th July 2020.  Unfortunately, with all the incredibly rapid developments in vaccine development, approval and roll out some of the paper now reads like ‘historial data’.

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH)

 

Reference:

  1. van Teijlingen, E.R., Sathian, B., Simkhada, P., Banerjee, I. (2021) COVID-19 in Qatar: Ways forward in public health & treatment, Qatar Medical Journal 2020(38): 1-8 https://doi.org/10.5339/qmj.2020.38

First BU paper accepted for 2021

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

Congratulations to Prof. Vanora Hundley whose article ‘Escalation triggers and expected responses in obstetric early warning systems used in UK consultant-led maternity units’ is now available Open Access online. The paper has been accepted in Resuscitation Plus. Co-authors include FHSS Visiting Faculty Prof. Gary Smith and Dr. Richard Isaacs.

The paper reports on a review of OEWS [Obstetric Early Warning Systems] charts and escalation policies across consultant-led maternity units in the UK (n = 147). OEWS charts were analysed for variation in the values of physiological parameters triggering different levels of clinical escalation. The observed variations in the trigger thresholds used in OEWS charts and the quality of information included within the accompanying escalation protocols is likely to lead to suboptimal detection and response to clinical deterioration during pregnancy and the post-partum period. The paper concludes the development of a national OEWS and escalation protocol would help to standardise care across obstetric units.

 

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Midwifery and the Media

BU research, Featured academics, international, NHS, Publishing, Research communication, Research news, writing

Today we received an end-of-year good-news message from ResearchGate telling us that 700 people had ‘read’ our book Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media [1].  Lee Wright, Senior Lecturer in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Birmingham City University wrote in his review of our edited volume: “…our media image and digital foot print are rapidly becoming the most important window into our profession. In a rapidly changing environment this book provides an up to date and informative insight into how our profession is affected by the media and how our profession can inform and influence the image of midwifery. This area is going to become even more important in the future universities and trusts increasingly use broadcast and social media to manage information and inform our clients of the services we provide.  This book will be the important first text in a new growth area. It brings together an internationally recognised group of authors who are experts in this field. I wholeheartedly recommend it to you.”

This edited collection was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017 and it is part of a larger body of Bournemouth University research on the topic [2-6].

 

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen, Professor Vanora Hundley and Associate Professor Ann Luce

 

References:

  1. Luce, A., Hundley, V., van Teijlingen, E. (Eds.) (2017) Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media, London: Palgrave Macmillan [ISBN: 978-3-319-63512-5].
  2. Luce, A., Cash, M., Hundley, V., Cheyne, H., van Teijlingen, E., Angell, C. (2016) “Is it realistic?” the portrayal of pregnancy and childbirth in the media BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth 16: 40 http://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-016-0827-x
  3. Angell, C. (2017) An Everyday Trauma: How the Media Portrays Infant Feeding, In: Luce, A. et al. (Eds.) Midwifery, Childbirth and the Media, London: Palgrave Macmillan pp: 45-59.
  4. Hundley, V., Luce, A., van Teijlingen, E., Edlund, S. (2019) Changing the narrative around childbirth: whose responsibility is it? Evidence-based Midwifery 17(2): 47-52.
  5. Hundley, V., Duff, E., Dewberry, J., Luce, A., van Teijlingen, E. (2014) Fear in childbirth: are the media responsible? MIDIRS Midwifery Digest 24(4): 444-447.
  6. Hundley, V., Luce, A., van Teijlingen, E. (2015) Do midwives need to be more media savvy? MIDIRS Midwifery Digest 25(1):5-10.