Congratulations to two Faculty of Health & Social Sciences PhD students, Preeti Mahato and Elizabeth Waikhaka, who co-authored a paper published in the WHO South-East Asia Journal of Public Health. Their paper is called ‘Social autopsy: a potential health-promotion tool for preventing maternal mortality in low-income countries’.[1] Co-authors include Dr. Puspa Pant from the Centre for Child and Adolescent Health, University of the West of England (Bristol) and Dr. Animesh Biswas based at the Reproductive & Child Health Department, Centre for Injury Prevention & Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB) in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka.
The authors argue that verbal autopsy is used to attribute a clinical cause to a maternal death. The aim of social autopsy is to determine the non-clinical contributing factors. A social autopsy of a maternal death is a group interaction with the family of the deceased woman and her wider local community, where facilitators explore the social causes of the death and identify improvements needed. Although still relatively new, the process has proved useful to capture data for policy-makers on the social determinants of maternal deaths. This article highlights the potential role of social autopsy in health promotion.
Reference:
Mahato, P.K, Waithaka, E., van Teijlingen, E., Pant, P.R., Biswas, A. (2018) Social autopsy: a potential health-promotion tool for preventing maternal mortality in low-income countries. WHO South-East Asia Journal of Public Health7(1): 24–28.
BU’s PR team (M&C) and Knowledge Exchange & Impact Team (RKEO), are jointly hosting an intensive research communication day on 23rd May 2018. The event is intended to be a one-stop shop for learning how to communicate your research and who you can get help from within BU. Subjects covered will include: planning and promoting your Festival of Learning event, practicing in our radio studio and in front of a camera, writing for the research website and sharing your research via social media.
The day is in development with indicative content including:
Presentations by high-profile and experienced external media professionals
Sharing knowledge with BU academics, with an established track-record in media engagement
Workshops anticipated to cover: social media, using BU’s research website, running a public engagement event and time to practice in BU’s radio and film studios
Places for this event are likely to fill up quickly, so please do book your space now.
The paper addresses issues around men’s involvement in programmes or interventions aimed at the improvement of maternal health. One such innovative intervention is an educational board game which offers a unique approach to present health information where learning is reinforced through group discussions supporting peer-to-peer interactions. The authors would like to thank Gill Phillips for permission to use the Whose Shoes? board game and all participants for their participation in the PhD study.
Alice PhD is focused on Uganda and this particular paper reports a qualitative study with men from Uganda who live in the UK on their views of an educational board game. This pilot study explored perceptions on whether a board game was relevant as a health promotional tool in maternal health prior to implementation in Uganda.
Reference:
Ladur, A.N., van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V. (2018) `Whose Shoes?’ Testing an educational board game with men of African descent living in the United Kingdom, BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth 18:81.http://rdcu.be/JXs0
Congratulations to Daisy Wiggins in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) on the publication of her paper ‘The effect of a birthplace decision support tool on women’s decision-making and information gathering behaviours during pregnancy: mybirthplace study protocol’. The paper is published in the Open Access journal Journal of Innovation in Health Informatics and can be accessed by clicking here! The paper is co-authored by CMMPH’s Prof. Vanora Hundley, Dr. Carol Wilkins, as well asProf. Carol Bond (University of Wolverhampton) and the Chief Executive of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) Gill Walton.
Congratulations to all!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
Reference:
Wiggins D, Hundley VA, Wilkins C, Bond C, Walton G. The effect of a birthplace decision support tool on women’s decision-making and information gathering behaviours during pregnancy: mybirthplace study protocol. J Innov Health Inform.2018;25(1):001–006.
Congratulations to Mrs. Preeti Mahato on the acceptance of her paper ‘Qualitative evaluation of mental health training of Auxiliary Nurse Midwives in rural Nepal’ by Nurse Education Today, an academic journal published by Elsevier. Preeti is currently registered as PhD student in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH). The paper is co-authored by CMMPH’s Catherine Angell and Edwin van Teijlingen as well as BU Visiting Faculty Padam Simkhada and Jillian Ireland. The paper is a result of the evaluation part of the ‘Mental Health Training for Community-based Maternity Providers in Nepal’ project and written on behalf of this THET team.
Our THET project in Nepal is a collaboration between the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), Tribhuvan University (Nepal’s oldest university) and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). The project receives funding from DFID, and is managed through THET and supported locally in Nepal by a charity Green Tara Nepal.
THET team:
Edwin van Teijlingen, Padam Simkhada, Shyam K Maharjan Preeti Mahato, Bhimsen Devkota, Padmadharini Fanning, Jillian Ireland, Bibha Simkhada, Lokendra Sherchan, Ram Chandra Silwal, Shyam K Maharjan, Ram K Maharjan, Catherine Angell, Flora Douglas.
Last week Sacha Gardener reported on this BU Research Blog on the publication of our most recent article ‘Why suicide rates among pregnant women in Nepal are rising’ in The Conversation. Since then we have been informed that this piece was reproduced in two Indian independent online newspapers, last week in The Wire and today in Scroll.in (India’s leading independent source of news, analysis and culture). Scroll.in used the heading ‘A project is training midwives in Nepal to stem rising suicides of pregnant women’, whilst The Wire used the title ‘Why Suicide Rates Among Pregnant Women in Nepal Are on the Rise’. Suicide in pregnant women and soon after birth is an important issue in both Nepal and India. Just for completeness the original article, written by BU’s Visiting Faculty Dr. Bibha Simkhada and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen based in BU’s Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal health (CMMPH), can be found here!
This weekend Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Kathmandu, Nepal signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with Bournemouth University (BU). The ceremonial signing took place on the final day (24th Feb.) of the International Conference on Quality Education in Federal Nepal. Prof. Stephen Tee, who also spoke at the conference, represented our university.
The UoA formalises a long-standing collaboration between the two institutions. MMIHS and BU academics have jointly applied for research grants, conducted collaborative research and published together. Several BU staff [1-3] and students [4] in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences have published in the Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences, an Open Access journal. Moreover, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health has been a Visiting Professor at MMIHS for nearly a decade and has given several guest lectures over the years to staff and students at MMIHS.
Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P, Kurmi, O, Pant, P. (2017) What can we learn from the Nepal Health Facility Survey 2015? Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences 3(1): 1-5.
van Teijlingen, E., Marahatta, S.B., Simkhada, P., McIver, M., Sharma, J.P. (2017) Developing an international higher education partnerships between high & low-income countries: two case studies Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences, 3(1): 94-100.
Vickery, M. van Teijlingen, E., (2017) Female infanticide in India and its relevance to Nepal Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (JMMIHS) 3(1): 79-85.
Last April representing the research team from Bournemouth University, Sarah Hodge presented cross-discipline PhD research in a competitive symposium in Las Vegas organised by Nick Bowman. The research team included Jacqui Taylor and John McAlaney from the department of Psychology, Davide Melacca and Christos Gatzidis from the department of Creative technology and Eike Anderson for the National Centre for Computer Animation. Since then the research project was invited to contribute a chapter to a book related to the topics from the Symposium, which is due out this summer (see below for further details).
In the spirit of this collaboration, Nick came to BU this month to give a guest talk for the Psychology seminar series, which was open to all departments and faculties. The talk was related to the book from the symposium and was titled: Video Game Demand – Specifying and Measuring an Elusive Construct.
In this talk Nick proposes a model and scale of measuring the demands of video games on the user (see below for further details). It was wonderful to see those from other departments and faculties attending the talk, creating a diverse audience and an engaging atmosphere. The talk also supported the psychology undergraduates; particularly those that selected the Cyberpsychology final year unit, where they had been discussing Nick’s and colleagues research. It was a fantastic experience having Nick visiting Bournemouth from America, and we are looking forward to future collaborations with him.
Book: Bowman, N. D. (in press). Video games: A medium that demands our attention (Ed.). New York: Routledge
Chapter 7 contribution from BU: Hodge, S., McAlaney, J., Gatzidis, C., Anderson, E.F., Melacca, D. and Taylor., J. Applying Psychological Theory to in-game moral behaviors through the development of a purpose-made game.
Chapters related to Nick’s talk: Chapter 1 Bowman, N.D. The Demanding Nature of Video Game Play and Chapter 13 Bowman, N.D., Wasserman, J., and Banks., J. Development of the Video Game Demand Scale
Open access is about making the products of research freely accessible to all. It allows research to be disseminated quickly and widely, the research process to operate more efficiently, and increased use and understanding of research by business, government, charities and the wider public.
There are two complementary mechanisms for achieving open access to research.
The first mechanism is for authors to publish in open-access journals that do not receive income through reader subscriptions.
The second is for authors to deposit their refereed journal article in an open electronic archive.
These two mechanisms are often called the ‘gold’ and ‘green’ routes to open access:
Gold – This means publishing in a way that allows immediate access to everyone electronically and free of charge. Publishers can recoup their costs through a number of mechanisms, including through payments from authors called article processing charges (APCs), or through advertising, donations or other subsidies.
Green – This means depositing the final peer-reviewed research output in an electronic archive called a repository. Repositories can be run by the researcher’s institution, but shared or subject repositories are also commonly used. Access to the research output can be granted either immediately or after an agreed embargo period.
To encourage all academic communities to consider open access publishing, Authors Alliance has produced a comprehensive ‘Understanding Open Access‘ guide which addresses common open access related questions and concerns and provides real-life strategies and tools that authors can use to work with publishers, institutions, and funders to make their works more widely accessible to all.
“It is important to remember that impact is not always a moment in the sun, then yesterday’s news”.
Bournemouth University colleagues Kip Jones and Lee-Ann Fenge discuss the “long tail” of meaningful community impact and the outputs needed to get there, featured from today in the LSE Impact of Social Science Blog.
“The ’long tail’ of research impact is engendered by innovative dissemination tools and meaningful community engagement”, an article reported in the LSE Impact Blog, discusses the involvement of Jones and Fenge in almost a decade-and-a-half of research at Bournemouth University on older LGBT citizens in Britain. In addition to in-depth research, their efforts included producing creative outputs alongside traditional publications. Using these tools, they have engaged community partners not only through workshops and trainings, but also as participant researchers and members of an Advisory Committee.
BU produced tools for diversity: Method Deck and the film, RUFUS STONE
For example, the blog highlights the particular relationship formed with Camilla Gibson, Strategic Equality and Inclusion Manager at Hampshire County Council’s Adult Services. She organised staff trainings with the help of the LGBT tools produced at Bournemouth University—a Method Deck to Diversity set of cards, and the research-based short film RUFUS STONE. In this way, Gibson was able to “change hearts and minds” about diversity and equality issues with over 4,000 staff in Hampshire.
Gibson’s story and more are outlined in the LSE Impact Blog, which refers to Fenge & Jones’ longer output published in the Qualitative Research Journal. A draft of that journal article, “Meaningful dissemination produces the ‘long tail’ that engenders community impact” can be downloaded here.
Just before the start of Bournemouth University’s Global Festival of Learning India (12-16 February) the Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences published Michelle Vickery’s paper ‘Female infanticide in India and its relevance to Nepal’ [1]. This article developed out of Michelle’s undergraduate Sociology thesis which she completed as part of her undergraduate degree in 2016. The Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences is an Open Access journal which means its content is freely available to any reader with internet access across the globe.
Over the last few years Bournemouth University academic have published papers on a range of topics related to India, for example on Media Studies [2-3], English literature [4] , Sociology [5], Public Health [6] , and environmental science and conservation [7-9].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
References:
Vickery, M., van Teijlingen, E., (2017) Female infanticide in India and its relevance to Nepal.Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (JMMIHS) 3(1): 79-85.
Sudbury, S. (2016) Locating a “third voice”: participatory filmmaking and the everyday in rural India. Journal of Media Practice, 17 (2-3): 213-231.
Goodman, S. (2018) ‘Ain’t it a Ripping Night’: Alcoholism and the Legacies of Empire in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. English Studies, (forthcoming).
Sahay, G., Devkota, B., van Teijlingen, E.R. (2016) Rebel Health Services in South Asia: Comparing Maoist-led Conflicts in India & Nepal, Sociological Bulletin 65(1):19-39.
Sathian, B. , De, A. ,van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P. , Banerjee, I. , Roy, B. , Supram, H. , Devkota, S. , E, R. (2015). Time Trend of the Suicide Incidence in India: a Statistical Modelling. American Journal of Public Health Research, 3(5A), 80-87. http://pubs.sciepub.com/ajphr/3/5A/17/index.html
Bower, S. D., Danylchuk, A. J., Raghavan, R., Danylchuk, S. C., Pinder, A. C., Alter, A. M., Cooke, S. J. (2017) Involving recreational fisheries stakeholders in development of research and conservation priorities for mahseer (Tor spp.) of India through collaborative workshops. Fisheries Research, 186, 665-671.
Bower S.D., Danylchuk A.J., Raghavan R., Clark-Danylchuck S.E., Pinder A.C., Cooke S.J. (2016) Rapid assessment of the physiological impacts caused by catch-and-release angling on blue-finned mahseer (Tor sp.) of the Cauvery River, India. Fisheries Management and EcologyDOI: 10.1111/fme.12135
Pinder, A.C., Raghavan, R., Britton, J.R. (2015) Efficacy of angler catch data as a population and conservation monitoring tool for the flagship Mahseer fishes (Tor spp.) of Southern India. Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems, DOI: 10.1002/aqc.2543
Last week the Journal of Manmoham Memorial Institute of Health Sciences based in Nepal published as its editorial ‘What can we learn from the Nepal Health Facility Survey 2015. [1] The Nepal Health Facility Survey 2015 is a first of its kind. It is a much needed start to help analyse and improve the workings of the country’s health system. This is very important and timely as one of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is to reduce premature mortality by one-third from non-communicable diseases. Success in this effort will depend on the concerted efforts on health facilities (for both health promotion, prevention and management) for an early and optimal care. The editorial also raises some of the ethical and methodological issues associated with the first ever Nepal Health Facility Survey 2015. The lead author of the editorial is Dr. Pramod Regmi and our co-authors include Prof. Padam Simkhada (Visiting Faculty in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences). The Journal of Manmoham Memorial Institute of Health Sciences is an Open Access journal hence freely available to scholars and politicians and health managers across the globe, including those based in low-income countries such as Nepal.
Reference:
Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P, Kurmi, O, Pant, P. (2017) What can we learn from the Nepal Health Facility Survey 2015? Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (JMMIHS) 3(1): 1-5
BU Visiting Prof. Padam Simkhada and BU’s Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen published a blog post about Nepal’s significant progress in improving the health of women and a striking reduction on maternal mortality. The paper highlights that despite difficult terrain, conflict and political turmoil, Nepal was one of the few countries that managed to achieve Millennium Development Goal 5 on maternal health in 2015.
BU PhD student Mrs Preeti Mahato published her latest scientific paper ‘Determinants of quality of care and access to Basic Emergency Obstetric and Neonatal Care facilities and midwife-led facilities in low and middle-income countries: A Systematic Review’ in the Journal of Asian Midwives [1]. This paper is co-authored by Dr. Catherine Angell and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, who are both based in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) and Prof. Padam Simkhada, BU Visiting Professor and based at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU). Journal of Asian Midwives is a free Open Access journal, freely available for anybody across the globe to read online.
The authors highlight that maternal mortality is a major challenge to health systems in Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) where almost 99% of maternal deaths occurred in 2015. Primary-care facilities providing Basic Emergency Obstetric and Neonatal Care (BEmONC) facilities, and facilities that are midwife-led are appropriate for normal birth in LMICs and have been proposed as the best approach to reduce maternal deaths. However, the poor quality of maternal services that leads to decreased utilisation of these facilities is among the major causes of maternal deaths worldwide. This systematic review studied factors affecting the quality of care in BEmONC and midwife-led facilities in LMICs.
Thematic analysis on included studies revealed various factors affecting quality of care including facility-level determinants and other determinants influencing access to care. Facility-level determinants included these barriers: lack of equipment and drugs at the facility, lack of trained staff, poor attitudes and behaviour of service providers, and poor communication with women. Facility-level positive determinants were: satisfaction with services, emotional support during delivery and trust in health providers. The access-to-care determinants were: socio-economic factors, physical access to the facility, maintaining privacy and confidentiality, and cultural values. The authors include that improving quality of care of birthing facilities requires addressing both facility level and non-facility level determinants in order to increase utilization of the services available at the BEmONC and midwife-led facilities in LMICs.
This is the fifth paper co-authored by CMMPH’s current most published PhD student. The evaluation of birth centres in rural Nepal by Preeti Mahato under joint supervision Dr. Angell and Prof. Simkhada (LJMU) and Prof. van Teijlingen.
References:
Mahato, P., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Angell, C. (2017) Determinants of quality of care & access to Basic Emergency Obstetric & Neonatal Care facilities & midwife-led facilities in low & middle-income countries: A Systematic Review, Journal of Asian Midwives 4(2):25-51.
Mahato, P., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Sheppard, Z., Silwal, R.C. (2017) Factors related to choice of place of birth in a district in Nepal. Sexual & Reproductive Healthcare 13: 91-96.
Mahato, P.K., Regmi, P.R., van Teijlingen, E., Simkhada, P., Angell, C., Sathian, B. (2015) Birthing centre infrastructure in Nepal post 2015 earthquake. Nepal Journal of Epidemiology 5(4): 518-519. http://www.nepjol.info/index.php/NJE/article/view/14260/11579
Regmi, P., van Teijlingen, E., Hundley, V., Simkhada, P., Sharma, S., Mahato, P. (2016) Sustainable Development Goals: relevance to maternal & child health in Nepal. Health Prospect 15(1):9-10. www.healthprospect.org/archives/15/1/3.pdf
Lizzie Gadd warns against jumping on ‘bad metrics’ bandwagons without really engaging with the more complex responsible metrics agenda beneath.
An undoubted legacy of the Metric Tide report has been an increased focus on the responsible use of metrics and along with this a notion of ‘bad metrics’. Indeed, the report itself even recommended awarding an annual ‘Bad Metrics Prize’. This has never been awarded as far as I’m aware, but nominations are still open on their web pages. There has been a lot of focus on responsible metrics recently. The Forum for Responsible Metrics have done a survey of UK institutions and is reporting the findings on 8 February in London. DORA has upped its game and appointed a champion to promote their work and they seem to be regularly retweeting messages that remind us all of their take on what it means to do metrics responsibly. There are also frequent twitter conversations about the impact of metrics in the up-coming REF. In all of this I see an increasing amount of ‘bad metrics’ bandwagon-hopping. The anti-Journal Impact Factor (JIF) wagon is now full and its big sister, the “metrics are ruining science” wagon, is taking on supporters at a heady pace.
It looks to me like we have moved from a state of ignorance about metrics, to a little knowledge. Which, I hear, is a dangerous thing.
It’s not a bad thing, this increased awareness of responsible metrics; all these conversations. I’m responsible metrics’ biggest supporter and a regular slide in my slide-deck shouts ‘metrics can kill people!’. So why am I writing a blog post that claims that there is no such thing as a bad metric? Surely these things can kill people? Well, yes, but guns can also kill people, they just can’t do so unless they’re in the hands of a human. Similarly, metrics aren’t bad in and of themselves, it’s what we do with them that can make them dangerous.
Adequacy of the indicator for the object that it measures
Sensitivity to the intrinsic inertia of the object being measured
Homogeneity of the dimensions of the indicator.
So, you might have an indicator such as ‘shoe size’, where folks with feet of a certain length get assigned a certain shoe size indicator. No problem there – it’s adequate (length of foot consistently maps on to shoe size); it’s sensitive to the thing it measures (foot grows, shoe size increases accordingly), and it’s homogenous (one characteristic – length, leads to one indicator – shoe size). However, in research evaluation we struggle on all of these counts. Because the thing we really want to measure, this elusive, multi-faceted “research quality” thing, doesn’t have any adequate, sensitive and homogeneous indicators. We need to measure the immeasurable. So we end up making false assumptions about the meanings of our indicators, and then make bad decisions based on those false assumptions. In all of this, it is not the metric that’s at fault, it’s us.
In my view, the JIF is the biggest scapegoat of the Responsible Metrics agenda. The JIF is just the average number of cites per paper for a journal over two years. That’s it. A simple calculation. And as an indicator of the communication effectiveness of a journal for collection development purposes (the reason it was introduced) it served us well. It’s just been misused as an indicator of the quality of individual academics and individual papers. It wasn’t designed for that. This is misuse of a metric, not a bad metric. (Although recent work has suggested that it’s not that bad an indicator for the latter anyway, but that’s not my purpose here). If the JIF is a bad metric, so is Elsevier’s CiteScore which is based on EXACTLY the same principle but uses a three-year time window not two, a slightly different set of document types and journals, and makes itself freely available.
If we’re not careful, I fear that in a hugely ironic turn, DORA and the Leiden Manifesto might themselves become bad (misused) metrics: an unreliable indicator of a commitment to the responsible use of metrics that may or may not be there in practice.
I understand why DORA trumpets the misuse of JIFs; it is rife and there are less imperfect tools for the job. But there are also other metrics that DORA doesn’t get in a flap about – like the individual h-index – which are subject to the same amount of misuse, but are actually more damaging. The individual h-index disadvantages certain demographics more than others (women, early-career researchers, anyone with non-standard career lengths); at least the JIF mis-serves everyone equally. And whilst we’re at it peer review can be an equally inadequate research evaluation tool (which, ironically, metrics have proven). So if we’re to be really fair we should be campaigning for responsible peer review with as much vigour as our calls for responsible metrics.
Bumper stickers by Paul van der Werf (CC-BY)
It looks to me like we have moved from a state of ignorance about metrics, to a little knowledge. Which, I hear, is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge can lead to a bumper sticker culture ( “I HEART DORA” anyone? “Ban the JIF”?) which could move us away from, rather than towards, the responsible use of metrics. These concepts are easy to grasp hold of, but they mask a far more complex and challenging set of research evaluation problems that lie beneath. The responsible use of metrics is about more than the avoidance of certain indicators, or signing DORA, or even developing your own bespoke Responsible Metrics policy (as I’ve said before this is certainly easier said than done).
The responsible use of metrics requires responsible scientometricians. People who understand that there is really no such thing as a bad metric, but it is very possible to misuse them. People with a deeper level of understanding about what we are trying to measure, what the systemic effects of this might be, what indicators are available, what their limitations are, where they are appropriate, how they can best triangulate them with peer review. We have good guidance on this in the form of the Leiden Manifesto, the Metric Tide and DORA. However, these are the starting points of often painful responsible metric journeys, not easy-ride bandwagons to be jumped on. If we’re not careful, I fear that in a hugely ironic turn, DORA and the Leiden Manifesto might themselves become bad (misused) metrics: an unreliable indicator of a commitment to the responsible use of metrics that may or may not be there in practice.
Let’s get off the ‘metric-shaming’ bandwagons, deepen our understanding and press on with the hard work of responsible research evaluation.
Elizabeth Gadd is the Research Policy Manager (Publications) at Loughborough University. She has a background in Libraries and Scholarly Communication research. She is the co-founder of the Lis-Bibliometrics Forum and is the ARMA Metrics Special Interest Group Champion
Pourakhi, meaning self-reliant in Nepali, was established in 2003 to advocate for the rights of women who returned to Nepal after having worked abroad. The current Chair Manju Gurung is co-author on our paper.
Since 2003, Pourakhi has established a number of programmes around pre-employment, pre-departure, employment and post arrival support. In 2009, it opened a Shelter Facility to provide a safe space for women who returned to Nepal and were not able to rejoin their family and community. Pourakhi recognized that many women who returned from abroad had been victimized abroad and needed to seek relief from the government. In order to provide assistance to these women, In addition, Pourakhi established programmes to empower women after they return to Nepal from foreign employment. More specifically, Pourakhi established a financial literacy programme to educate women and an in business skills.
Pourakhi has been instrumental in ensuring that the voices of migrant women workers are heard and reflected in national policy and law. Additionally, it has successfully lobbied the government to ratify a number of international laws needed to protect the rights of female migrant workers.
Although Pourakhi began as an organisation by and on behalf of women, it has recognized that all migrant workers have the right to safe migration. Therefore, Pourakhi now assists both woman and men in all stages of the migration process.
The other two Nepali-speaking co-authors are Prof. Padam Simkhada from Liverpool john Moores University, who is also Visiting Professor in Bournemouth University’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences and Dr. Sharada Prasad Wasti who is working for the Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University, Washington, DC in the USA.
Congratulations to FHSS Prof. Vanora Hundley and her co-authors from across the globe who published ‘Progression of the first stage of spontaneous labour: A prospective cohort study in two sub-Saharan African countries’ in the journal PLOS Medicine [1].
The authors highlight that since the early 2000s researchers using new statistical methods to have informed changes in recommended labour practices in some settings, they have also generated a lot of controversy. As a result of persistent questions as to whether racial characteristics influence labour progression patterns, recent studies have been conducted among different populations, but not yet in any African population. The authors conclude that
As labour may not naturally accelerate in some women until a cervical dilatation of 5 cm is reached, labour practices to address perceived slow labour progression should not be routinely applied by clinicians until this threshold is achieved, provided the vital signs and other observations of the mother and baby are normal.
In the absence of any problems other than a slower than expected cervical dilatation rate (i.e., 1 cm/hour) during labour, it is in the interest of the woman that expectant, supportive, and woman-centred labour care is continued.
A recent article in the Qualitative ResearchJournal, written by BU’s Lee-Ann Fenge and Kip Jones with input from Camilla Gibson, Strategic Equality and Inclusion Manager, Hampshire County Council’s Adult Services, talk about what it takes to create meaningful community impact with academic research and outputs.
Patience and perseverance remain the watchwords. Locating, then nurturing, community partnerships are key to the success of this kind of approach. The authors consider how tools—including a film and a method deck of cards—were shared with community organisations, and how, in turn, these organisations use the tools to develop awareness of the needs of older LGBT people within their organisations and communities. In the article, Gibson recounts the way in which the tools were used with success with over 4,000 Adult Services staff in Hampshire.
If we are really serious about “impact”, we must remember that, in the case of dissemination of research at least, impact is not always a moment in the sun—an explosion of a scientific “breakthrough” on the public scene—then yesterday’s news. Good research has a “long tail”— (in statistics “a large number of occurrences far from the ‘head’ or central part of the distribution”). To achieve this, first, it takes tenacity on the part of the research team, or an ability to be a bit blinkered about its work, and a willingness to stick to the team’s goals and commitment over the long term. Secondly, it takes allies, and these are often community members, service providers, and so forth, who are energised by the work and take up the mantle. Finally, to create real impact, it takes resources available to carry out the work—not necessarily of the size or scope of the original research funding, but just as important to success.
Funds raised by the very process of REF activities should, therefore, be put to work and managed directly by the researchers creating the impact who are aware of the research potential and maintain familiarity and connectivity with community partners.
The article, Meaningful dissemination produces the “long tail” that engenders community impact can be downloaded here.
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