BU Research Blog

Prof Ann Hemingway, Dr Caroline Ellis Hill and Dr Liz Norton have recently completed a research project with a local Care  Farm in Dorset. They were interested to see what staff felt they were offering to people who visited the care farm. They found that the Care Farm offered an inclusive environment conducive to visitors’  personal growth; enabling them to connect with themselves, others and nature and to develop autonomy and a greater sense of wellbeing.

The team are planning to bid for funding to investigate further the impact of nature on young people’s health and wellbeing in partnership with local care farms and schools.

If you would like to find out more about the study please see the published paper here  http://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S1573521416300501

or contact Ann Hemingway, Liz Norton, Caroline Ellis-Hill

At the Royal College of Midwives conference in Harrogate over the 19^th and 20^th October a strange ‘art’ installation appeared formed of, in the region of, 500 knit and crochet midwives. The purpose of the display was to highlight the current shortage of midwives throughout the UK and started as a light hearted conversation on twitter between Dr Jenny Hall from the midwifery team in Bournemouth University and midwifery lecturer Lindsay Hobbs in the University of Bradford. (More information is here https://knittedmidwife.wordpress.com/)

When the conversation took place the statistics showing the number of midwives required was 2600 (by the time the project had commenced it had risen to 3500). To highlight the situation, the @knittedmidwife was born, encouraging midwives and others to ‘knit a midwife’ to solve the problem in time for the RCM conference. Instructions for a simple pattern were placed on a blog and participants were encouraged to create their own clothes. The campaign caused some amusement and inspiration with non-knitters persuading friends and family to knit one for them. Some midwife teams had ‘knit-evenings’. They arrived in batches from as far afield as Texas and Germany. The display at the conference was well received but the knowledge that the number presented was only 500 of the 3500 missing midwives gave impact. A final twist was that each was sold in aid of the RCM benevolent fund; midwives being sold to aid other midwives.

As an adjunct to the project the ‘knitters’ were asked to send with their midwife a message as to why they had done so. At the conference itself questionnaires were also present to inquire about the impact of the display. This ‘knitted midwife’ project will therefore live on as the lecturers mentioned will now be evaluating the messages and questionnaires.

And here is the mini-me midwfery lecturer, complete with pinards stethescope and tablet computer….. More will follow as the project develops.

Over the next decades, the number of the elderly people is expected to grow faster, which is projected to more than double its size, reaching nearly 2.1 billion in 2050 from 901 million in 2015. The ageing population has been one of important global challenges, which leads to health, social and quality of life issues to be concerned for society in the coming decades.

The recent 2.2 million Euro project, CHARMED (Characterisation of a green microenvironment and to study its impact upon health and well-being in the elderly as a way forward for health tourism), funded under the Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme aims to address the above challenges. The BU team headed by Dr Shuang Cang has an international reputation in the emerging digital health and digital tourism area. For example, one of recent papers published by Dr Cang has received about 100 citations in a short time. Digital technology is transforming healthcare, tourism and other industry sectors. There is a need for interdisciplinary teams at local, national and international levels to collaborate in order to realise potential. BU is one of the front runners in this emerging industry revolution. The BU team in this project including active researchers from three faculties has multidisciplinary knowledge which covers pattern recognition, artificial intelligence, multivariance statistics and quantitative analysis (Dr Shuang Cang, FM); digital and mobile technology (Prof Hongnian Yu, SciTech); community healthcare (Dr Carol Clark, HSS); environmental geology and ecosystem services (Prof Adrian Newton, SciTech); collaborative communities and collaborative travel (Prof Janet Dickinson, FM); hospitality management (Dr Viachaslau Filimonau, FM); and four PhD researchers who are researching in the related area.

The CHARMED’s goal is to innovate a solution to the consequential health, social and quality of life issues that result from the demographic change in Europe where the average age of the population will rise. The project is to create an innovative social-economic infrastructure based around health tourism and ecosystems and elevating the well-being through social and therapeutic horticulture. The proposed approach has the unique potential to address environmental, social, cultural and economic factors, which all have an impact on individual and population health and well-being. The CHARMED project will

1. derive cross-disciplinary and inter-sectorial knowledge of how to improve physical and mental well-being in the elderly
2. characterise the environmental geology of a selected exemplar site and to correlate the identified features with improvements in health, well-being and recovery
3. train a new generation of specialists in the sector of recreation and health for the tourism industry
4. train specialists in social and therapeutic horticulture as a way to improve physical and mental health
5. create a model for health tourism
6. and produce a business plan with an economic impact analysis.

The project will not only create the new digital health tourism service for the elderly, but will also generate new jobs in this emerging sector.

The CHARMED project fits in the BU innovation themes of digital and creative industries, health and wellbeing, and leisure, recreation and tourism very well and will contribute and promote the BU international reputation and research capacity in this important emerging sector. The project is an excellent exemplar in fulfilling the BU FUSION vision and providing essential synergy between education, research and professional engagement as below

1. Initiating and developing the new courses and education programmes in the emerging areas such as digital health, digital tourism, health tourism
2. Contributing in achieving strong and improved performance in REF2020 through publications, patents, external research incomes and international activities
3. Promoting and strengthening Global Engagement for BU staff and students
4. Creating a vibrant knowledge exchange community of students, staff and other business and organisational stakeholders through the project planned mobility between cross sectors (academic & industry partnership)
5. Enhancing the student experience and training the early-stage researchers through the planned project mobility, workshops, seminars, etc.
6. Enhancing the students and early-stage researchers’ employment capacity through this research mobility programme.

The Business School and BU Centre for Entrepreneurship were delighted to hold the first of the 2016/17 series of ‘Meet the Entrepreneur’ events at the EBC on Wednesday 19th October at the EBC.

Open to BU students and staff, these seminars are a great opportunity to hear the personal journey of a profiled entrepreneur and learn more about their experiences as a business owner and their approach to founding and growing an innovative business.

Entrepreneur Rupert Holloway, Founder of Conker Spirit, kicked off the series with a fascinating insight into how he approached turning a vision to create Dorset’s first independent gin distiller into a reality.

Beginning the journey only 2 years ago, after losing the love of his career as a chartered surveyor, Rupert had the lightbulb moment of producing a beautifully crafted spirit representative of the Dorset landscape. Refining the flavours and teaching himself the tools of his trade, Rupert arrived at a product that rivals the best in the industry.

Mark Painter, Business Development Manager for the Faculty of Management, said, ‘it was really great to start this series of seminars with such an interesting and thought provoking presentation’. Mark added, ‘Rupert’s story is all about being proactive, seizing opportunities and, as Rupert described it, ‘leaning into’ challenges to avoid falling over’.

The next seminar in this series will be held on Friday 25th November at Talbot Campus and will profile Paul Tansey, Founder and MD of Intergage. For more information and to book your place follow the link to: www.bucfe.com/events

This morning (Wednesday 19 October) I’m basing myself in the cafe area on the ground floor of Fusion to answer all your Festival of Learning questions.  If you’ve got an event idea you want to discuss, or want help writing your application come along and say hello.  I’ll be here 11am-12pm.

To find out more, including when future drop in sessions are taking place have a look at this blog post.  To submit your Festival event take a look at the guidance available here on the staff intranet.

BU’s Promotional Cultures & Communication Centre in CMC-FMC, has recently completed a research project for Exterion Media Ltd., in partnership with Cog Research, which sought to understand more fully the way in which commuters engage with advertising on the Tube.

The research has just been shortlist for ‘Best Research Inititative‘ in the Media Research Group awards.  The awards celebrate the achievements of the media research industry.

Further details about the project can be found here and in recent media coverage here.

There are plans to submit the project to the 2017 Admap Prize and ESOMAR awards.