Tagged / BU research

Introducing Dianne Goodman the New RKEO Funding Development Officer for Media School

 

Hi, my name is Dianne Goodman, I am the new Funding Development Officer within the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office where I look after the Media School – which means that I support Media School academics with their Research applications/bids through the processes to submission (otherwise known as pre-award). This can include checking applications meet the guidelines of the Research Councils and other funding organisations, providing costings, sense checking proposals, obtaining institutional approvals. Previously people will know me as the Support Administrator for the Grants Academy. You will find me in Weymouth House in room W116 on Thursdays and Fridays (meetings and deadlines permitting!).

I have over 20 years of work experience in the Interior Design Business and the Banking Industry in both the UK and Canada. During this time I set up my own Interior Design Business. I have a BA First Class (Hons) in Interior Design and Furniture which is how I first came to work at Bournemouth University where I taught the 4th Year students within the Interior Design Unit framework.

 I enjoy hiking, biking and snowboarding and I relax with yoga classes, walking on the beach near where I live and making my own craft items and soft furnishings. I am very interested in recycling and I often ‘freecycle’ unwanted items. I also enjoy having a good rummage in charity shops and am a bit of a ‘magpie’. I am a big fan of Orla Kiely products and there are few moments in my life when her scribble stem leaf design is not far away from me in some form or other.

Dianne Goodman

Funding Development Officer (MS)

dgoodman@bournemouth.ac.uk
(01202) 961300

Congratulations to BU Visiting Faculty on latest publication

PG research, Publishing

Congratulations to Bournemouth University’s Visiting Faculty Dr. Bibha Simkhada and Prof. Padam Simkhada for the paper on financial barriers to the uptake of antenatal care in a rural community in Nepal.1   The first author (a native Nepali-speaker) conducted 50 face-to-face interviews with women and their families in rural Nepal.  These interviews were thematically analysed after transcription.

This latest paper adds to our knowledge into user costs related to maternity services in Nepal as we had already published our findings on users costs in the largest obstetric hospital in the capital. 2

 

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

References:

  1. Simkhada, B., van Teijlingen, E.R., Porter, M., Simkhada, P. & Wasti, S.P. (2014) Why do costs act as a barrier in maternity care for some, but not all women? A qualitative study in rural Nepal International Journal of Social Economics 41 (8), 705-713

 

  1. Simkhada, P.P., van Teijlingen, E., Sharma, G., Simkhada, B., Townend, J. (2012) User costs and informal payments for care in the largest maternity hospital in Kathmandu, Nepal, Health Science Journal 6(2): 317-334.  www.hsj.gr/volume6/issue2/6212.pdf

 

Congratulations to Dr. William Haydock

Publishing

 

Congratulations to William Haydock, researcher in HSC, for his recently published paper in Capital & Class 38 (3): 583-600. 

The paper “‘20 tins of Stella for a fiver’: The making of class through Labour and Coalition government alcohol policy” is available from: http://cnc.sagepub.com/content/38/3/583.abstract

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

Beware of rogue journals.

Guidance, Publishing, REF Subjects, Research themes

Open Access: not every new journal is rogue!

Open Access publishing is the hot topic in academic publishing.  It comes from the idea that publicly funded research used to end up in expensive journals which are difficult to access and which are expensive to users.  It also made for real ivory tower research and it did not give the general public, often the funder of research through taxation or charity access to the studies which they ‘paid’ for in the first instance.   The success shows in (a) the rising Impact Factors of online Open Access journals, such as, for example BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth; (b) the requirement for the UK funding bodies that all research its funds needs to be published as Open Access by 2016; and (c) the growing number of traditional academic journals that now offer authors the option to pay for online Open Access in addition to the traditional paper-based journal publication, for example Midwifery.  Two further signs of success are:  (d) the growing popularity of Open Access Week, this month (20-26 Oct.) we celebrate for the 7th time Open Access Week ( http://www.openaccessweek.org/); and (e) the growing number of rogue journals trying to cash in on the Open Access trend.

 

The latter is the ugly face of capitalism whereby opportunists, i.e. unscrupulous publishers jump on the bandwagon cashing in on a successful service.  BU librarian Jean Harris recently shared an interesting article about Predatory Publishers (see: www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/blog/are-we-doing-enough-warn-users-about-predatory-journals?utm_source=Communicator_membership_list&utm_medium=Email&utm_content=Untitled21&utm_campaign=Weekly+News+from+CILIP%2c+18+Sept+2014).   Predatory publishers create a convincing looking scientific journal on the web, often borrowing details from other journals. They then email academics and researchers for both manuscripts and the offer to sit on the journal’s editorial board.  Submissions are then “peer reviewed” and an invoice for Open Access publishing emailed by return. No submission is rejected!  Many of us will have received such spam emails.

The message is not the fall for the scam.  Prospective authors should check the webpages of the journal (although some fake ones can be convincing).  Talk to more experienced colleagues in your field or your librarian to find out what they know about the ‘new’ journal, do they know someone on the editorial board.   Is the journal listed in reputable electronic databases such as SCOPUS?  Please, do not rely on information from Google on the journal you are trying to suss out!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

 

 

WHO statement on eliminating disrespect & abuse in childbirth

The World Health Organization (WHO) statement issued this week challenges governments, clinicians and researchers to respond to the call for the prevention and elimination of disrespect and abuse during childbirth.1   This includes:

  1. Greater support from governments and development partners for research and action
  2. Programmes to improve the quality of maternal health care, with a strong focus on respectful care
  3. Emphasizing the rights of women to dignified, respectful healthcare through pregnancy and childbirth
  4. Generating data related to respectful and disrespectful care practices, systems of accountability and meaningful professional support
  5. Involving all stakeholders, including women, in efforts to improve quality of care and eliminate disrespectful and abuse practices

We, at the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH), strongly support the WHO’s statement that: “Every woman has the right to the highest attainable standard of health, including the right to dignified, respectful care during pregnancy and childbirth.”

Disrespect and abuse are significant barriers to facility birth in many low and middle income countries; an area that CMMPH has been exploring. Lesley Milne and colleagues have been working on this area in Nepal2, while PhD student Rachel Arnold has been working in Afghanistan3.  In addition, CMMPH researchers are looking at dignity within the UK. Dr Jenny Hall is working with the charity Birthrights to explore dignity in maternity care for women with disabilities.

More widely, lack of compassion in health care has triggered HSC researchers to study the issue of the de-humanisation of care.  Consequently, the School of Health and Social Care has a long-standing reputation in the field of humanising care research.  Scholars such as Professor Les Todres, Professor Kate Galvin (now at the University of Hull), Dr. Caroline Ellis-Hill and Dr. Ann Hemingway to name but a few, are at the forefront of this field globally.

CMMPH applauds the WHO stand on this issue and hopes that it helps to maintain the global momentum to eliminate disrespectful care.

 Prof Edwin van Teijlingen and Prof Vanora Hundley

References:

  1. http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/maternal_perinatal/statement-childbirth/en/
  2. Milne L, van Teijlingen E, Hundley V, Simkhada P. Barriers within hospital (either real or perceived) to women seeking facility based birth in Nepal. Final report to Wellbeing of Women. 2014
  3. Arnold R, van Teijlingen E, Ryan K, Holloway I. Understanding Afghan health care providers; a qualitative study of the culture of care in a Kabul maternity hospital. BJOG (submitted).

 

 

 

Calling All Consumer Behaviour Researchers … A forum for discussion around CB research.

Research themes

 

The study of consumer behaviour has always been a multi-disciplinary endeavour, so perhaps it is not too surprising that there are pockets of related research activity all around BU.  These include consumer related research clusters in the Business School, the Media School, School of Tourism and Psychology.  What is surprising is how little we are aware of each other’s work.

Given this the ICB research cluster are hosting a ‘Hands-on Information Sharing Session’ to provide a forum for discussion around CB research at BU.  The session will provide an opportunity to meet others with similar research interests and learn more about the variety of consumer research being carried out across the University through brief research presentations, followed by discussions over refreshments to look for potential cross-discipline research opportunities.

Wherever you are in BU, if you think that you would like to be part of a forum aimed at developing a stronger research presence in this area please come along to a meeting over coffee and cakes ….

‘CB Hands-on Information Sharing Session’

Wednesday 22nd October at 15:30 in TAG22, Talbot Campus.

Please could those wishing to attend let Juliet Memery know as soon as possible to ascertain likely numbers for catering purposes, and then send three Powerpoint slides (max) that briefly cover your research/interests in issues relating to consumer behaviour research to her by Monday 20th October (email: jmemery@bournemouth.ac.uk ).

All welcome – we look forward to seeing you there!

 

BU social science research on ‘Guns, Pride & Agency’

Worldwide, guns are a topic wrought with emotions. While most democratic countries consider guns in private hands a severe risk for public health if uncontrolled, it is not just in the US that licencing laws face resistance that benefit from a political and emotional rejection of state interference (e.g. UKIP’s Nigel Farage earlier this year). But why and how are ‘gun cultures’ built and sometimes sustained, even if they might undermine, an EU-led, much-desired democratisation and peace-building process after violence and war?

Dr Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, social anthropologist at the HSC, addressed this question in her presentation ‘Guns, Pride and Agency—Albanian Ideals of Militancy Before and After the 1999 War in Kosovo’, at the international conference Comparing Civil Gun Cultures: Do Emotions Make the Difference? at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin from August 26 to 28, 2014 (https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/history-of-emotions/conferences/comparing-civil-gun-cultures-do-emotions-make-the-difference). The wider ethnographic research project, on which her findings are based, was also subject of an interview earlier this year, published on a research blog of the London School of Economics: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsee/2014/04/03/ilegalja-terrorists-or-freedom-fighters-an-albanian-tale-from-yugoslav-times/ .

 

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

September: A good month for CMMPH publications

Publishing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health started well this September with four publications in academic and practitioners’ journal.  Starting with final-year student midwife Joanna Lake who just had an article published in The Practising Midwife.1

Secondly, BU midwifery staff Jen Leamon and Sue Way together with HSC Visiting Fellow Suzie Cro also have had an article published this month in the same journal.2

Susanne Grylka-Baeschlin, a midwife from Switzerland who spent time at BU as an international visitor (see http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/07/02/latest-hsc-midwifery-paper-in-open-access/) had her paper published in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth this month.3

And last, but not least, Wendy Marsh, based in HSC’s Portsmouth office had a paper in the September issue of the British Journal of Midwifery.4

 

Congratulations,

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

 

 

References:

  1. Lake J., 2014. Witnessing the art of woman-centred care by and exceptional mentor. The Practicing Midwife. 17(8), 24-26.
  2. Leamon J, Way S. & Cro S., 2014. Supervision of midwives and the 6Cs: exploring how we do what we do. The Practicing Midwife. 17(8), 41-42.
  3. Grylka-Baeschlin  S., van Teijlingen,  E. & Mechthild, G.M., 2014. Cultural differences in postnatal quality of life among German-speaking women: a prospective survey in two countries. BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth 14:277    www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2393/14/277
  4. Marsh, W. 2014. Removing babies from mother’s at birth: Midwives experiences. British Journal of Midwifery. 22(9):620 – 624.

BU research is ‘Editor’s Choice’ in Journal of Consumer Culture

Publishing

An article by researchers in the Emerging Consumer Cultures Group (ECCG), Media School, has been selected as one of the ‘Editor’s Choice Collection’ in the Journal of Consumer Culture – a top ranked journal in Cultural Studies and Sociology.  The article is highlighted as one of eleven ‘most noteworthy manuscripts’ since the journal launched in 2001 and has been selected alongside the work of internationally esteemed scholars including Daniel Miller, Richard Wilk and Alan Warde.

Dr Rebecca (Becky) Jenkins (Corporate and Marketing Communications, Media School) and ex-Bournemouth colleagues Elizabeth Nixon and Mike Molesworth first presented the paper at the 2010 Consumer Culture Theory Conference in Wisconsin, where it was selected to be published in a special edition of the journal.  Several revisions later and the article was published in 2011.

‘“Just normal and homely”: the presence, absence and othering of consumer culture in everyday imagining’ is based on an aspect of Becky’s PhD thesis, which was a larger study of consumption in the everyday imagination.  It focuses on the different ways in which consumption features in positive imagined futures.  By broadening the methodological framing of existing studies, the study seeks to contextualise consumption in the imagination – exploring how and where consumption may be seen in everyday imagining – a departure from previous research which tends to make consumption the starting point.  Focusing on the lived experience of imagining (using phenomenological interviews) the findings reveal that material goods take a back seat to common cultural desires (for instance, successful relationships, happiness and love) with goods often assumed, simply as part of the background.  Although goods may take a back seat, consumer culture is shown to be the only real choice when it comes to constructing social relationships and cultural ideals – that is, whilst one may desire and imagine a happy family life, that life takes place in a certain kind of house, with particular goods and consumer based activities.  So whilst not always focusing on it directly, the imagination may be restricted by our consumer culture such that we cannot imagine outside it.

The full paper – and others in the Editor’s Collection – can be  downloaded here: http://joc.sagepub.com/cgi/collection/editors_choice_collection

Reflections on an Oasis

Fusion, Women's Academic Network

Our final blog concerning our Fusion Investment Funded study leave, ENABLE: Establishing Sustainable Research Networks and Building Learning Environments, is written with very mixed feelings in mind.

For seven months we have worked across Southeast Asia to develop and establish links and research collaborations, teaching and education partnerships and to rediscover our passion for social action as ‘professional practice’ associated with our disciplines. The work has been intense, tiring, sometimes frustrating, but always illuminating and productive. It was a wrench to leave.

The return journey began with raised anxieties, heightened a couple of weeks earlier by the awful shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines aeroplane following the same route (although by then re-routed), and exacerbated when we were separated into two distinct travelling units, Jonathan with one child and Sara with the other, because the previous university travel firm booked tickets as two separate families! To make matters worse only Jonathan and Isabel’s tickets showed up and we had to wait to secure the other tickets. We were then given seats at opposite ends of the aeroplane and had to wait again for re-seating. The flight began well enough and was fairly smooth, only briefly punctuated by a somewhat antisocial ‘ramming’ of chair in front into one of our legs with particular force by someone who thought ‘turn off your electronics’ meant send texts to your friends!

However, we landed in one piece and breathed a sigh of relief, or possibly resignation, until, as in our usual practice of each taking one of the children through immigration the UKBA officer asked Jonathan rather sternly ‘where is the child’s mother?’ and when indicating where Sara was the officer proceeded to say that children have to be seen with their mother because mother’s are in general the carers of children and if present they have to be with the child. ‘Red rags and bulls’ often appear to Jonathan in unjust situations and he, as usual, took issue with this, but whilst we all got through immigration clearance more quickly, the officer insisted that his rather warped and myopic view of British law and custom was now right. Oh dear! We wondered what had happened in the seven months we had been away and whether we were entering Gormenghast!

But, back to the project itself! Our four key objectives have been met throughout the project, with varying degrees of success and changing morphologies:

1. Establish a sustainable research network promoting social sciences and interdisciplinary research at BU:

We have made contacts with individual academics, departments and universities across Southeast Asia, notably Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), Universiti Utara Malaysia, alongside contacts with Massey University in New Zealand,  Hong Kong University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Myanmar Institute of Theology.

We have given names and contacts to people abroad and within BU to follow up. Research projects are being developed, publications are in train or planned for the future.

2. Develop research streams of locally specific or cross-cultural relevance:

Our research, completed with the Orang Asli as part of the Tasik Chini Research Centre, has culminated in numerous publications being submitted, developed and developing, wide dissemination across many fora, and establishing on-going research links.

3. Engage and promote educational initiatives via guest lectures/research seminars, developing joint postgraduate research supervision and educational initiatives promoting student mobility:

We have presented lectures and seminars, provided postgraduate supervision and contributed to curriculum planning and development discussions, as well as negotiated an important credit transfer scheme (although uptake has been delayed until we can find students both able and willing to go on this exciting opportunity!). Professional papers have been written and submitted.

4. Engage in discipline-specific activities in relation to social work:

a number of discipline specific activities concerning social action and development have been undertaken, including curriculum planning, assisting in education developments in Myanmar and in Malaysia in reference to the new (to be implemented) standardised Malaysian Diploma Social Work, alongside contributing to NGO development work.

Overall, during the study leave period, there has been 57 outputs, also including on-going work and connections to be completed over time. The 57 outputs included:

  • 6 books (3 published)
  • 14 book chapters (11 published or in press)
  • 12 peer reviewed papers (9 published or in press)
  • 3 professional papers
  • 1 book review
  • 16 conference presentations/open lectures etc.
  • 10 blogs
  • 6 media presentations

During our time away we have worked across five countries: Malaysia, Hong Kong SAR, Australia, Myanmar and Cambodia in order to carry out our research or present it, along with capacity-building missions for professional, social work training. We have undertaken respectively between 24 to 28 flights (trying, when one of us dislikes flying) and stayed in some extraordinarily interesting as well as very grim places during our fieldwork, resulting in abuse from miscellaneous assortments of blood-sucking insects (outsized mosquitoes, the usual bed bugs and fever-inducing leeches) bedding down with us or boisterously noisy lizards, both small and decidedly large, showering us with ordure from above.

One of us was joyfully returning ‘home’ to pioneering fieldwork in Southeast Asia and the other was equally rapturous to be introduced to it. We have developed a new appreciation of the diversity of international driving styles when finding it not unusual to be driven by taxi in the wrong direction through chaotic Yangon in the middle of two long lines of equally erratic cars heading in the right direction – towards us. Above all, we remember the various wonderfully funny, kind, clever, intriguing and endlessly good-natured people we me: all our participants, our various helpers, interpreters, drivers, guides and advisors, the academic staff and students who welcomed us so warmly, the inspiring NGO workers and service users; not forgetting the local café owner in Penang, who wept when we left before running to get her camera for group photos to remember us by.

Also, we will always remember just how much our children, Isabel and Milly grew and developed in stature (in all ways possible): learning the research process, engaging with children amongst the village communities, and themselves collecting valuable data and compiling magnificent school projects on their adventures and experiences. The children put up with a good deal with great fortitude, willingness and humour (or when the going got tough – heavy irony), easily comprehending the importance of the work undertaken; albeit, as 10 year-old Milly gravely commented in her write-up later, ‘fieldwork has its dark side’! Indeed, so impressed were we with them that they will be contributing their experiences and acting as co-authors to the forthcoming book on the Tasik Chini area.

Alongside the outputs, the work is now to capitalise on the study leave by the development and submission of funded research projects. Currently, these include gendered rituals in professional working, problematizing research ethics and learning disabilities, understanding religion as resistance, and gender in higher education.

The study leave represented a life-giving oasis, somewhere to wash and attend to our own sacred cattle as in the photo from Cambodia, and we gratefully acknowledge the help and supported afforded us by Bournemouth University and our two main host universities in Malaysia (UKM and USM). We would encourage other academic staff to apply for study leave and we think that the productivity of our period of study leave indicates how important this can be to both individual academics but also to the greater good of Bournemouth University.

Jonathan Parker & Sara Ashencaen Crabtree

Surrogate mother producing faulty goods: commodification of childbirth

Publishing

Over the weekend an interesting story appeared on the BBC news and in the Sunday papers.  The story goes that an Australian couple left a Thai surrogate mother with a baby who is genetically their child.  The reason for this abandonment is that the baby is not perfect.  If that is not bad enough the couple has taken the healthy twin sister of this baby back home to Australia.  Some newspapers reported that the Australian parents knew that the baby had Down’s syndrome from the fourth month of gestation onwards, but that they did not ask until the seventh month  – through the surrogacy agency – for selective abortion of the affected fetus.    The surrogate mother, Pattaramon Chanbua, says that the couple were told: (a) that she was carrying twins and (b) that one of the twins had Down’s syndrome as well as heart problems. The surrogate mother refused the intervention on the grounds of her Buddhist beliefs.

Surrogacy is often a commercial transaction e.g. in the USA, although such a ‘business contract’ is not legal in the UK (Ireland 2011) and some parts of Australia as widely reported in the media.  However, in this case the Australian couple had paid Pattaramon Chanbua (a mother of two) to grow and carry the baby for them. She told the BBC that she had engaged in the surrogacy deal to get money to pay for the education of her other children.

This case epitomises several aspects of life that are of interest to sociology: (a) the commodification and commercialization of life (and health); (b) inequality and exploitation; and (c) globalisation.  Commodification refers to the process by which something that was not originally bought and sold becomes a good or service, i.e. a commodity that is for sale.  As we become more modern and with economic progress/the rise of capitalism, more and more parts of our lives become commodified.  Modernisation changes society and its social institutions and organisations. Economic development is based on industrialisation, but is also strongly linked to urbanisation, mass education, occupational specialisation and communication development, which in turn are linked with still broader cultural and social changes (Inglehart 1997).

The second key issue sociologists are interested in is inequality and the link between poverty and poor health.  In a global perspective where we, people in high-income countries, or so-called developed countries exploit people in low-income countries (or Third World, developing countries or under-developed countries).

Thirdly, globalisation refers to the world becoming a smaller place, both in terms of physical travel as well as the way we perceive it (Simkhada & van Teijlingen 2009).  It takes us less time to travel to London, Paris, Kathmandu than it took our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, and at the same time the information about a disaster or a  human tragedy story such as this one in Thailand reaches us more or less instantaneously.  At the same time, modernisation and globalisation, particularly in many low-income societies, are contributing to rapid socio-cultural changes.

Surrogacy as commodification

Surrogacy is the commodification of a couple having a baby themselves.  Other social solutions from the past to the problem of not being able to conceive include: (a) having more than one wife, a solution for men in a patriarchal society; (b) for women sleeping with their husband’s brother, to increase the likelihood that the baby ‘looks like’ the husband; and (c) adopting someone else’s child.

We must remember that aspects of maternity care have always been commodified.  Rich British families in the nineteenth century would have been paying a wet nurse to breastfeed their babies and a nanny to look after their children whilst instant formula baby milk bought from a shop has been replacing breastmilk supplied by the baby’s mother for nearly a century.

We don’t think surrogacy is the interesting issue here, we should ask ourselves the more basic question ‘What makes us think that every birth and every baby is going to be perfect or even okay?’

One explanation is, of course, that we have seen a rapid decline in the number and the proportion of babies dying in high-income countries such as the UK over the past century and a half.  Women having better nutrition, fewer children, having one’s first child later (but not too much later), better sanitation, and improved obstetric care have all contributed to making childbirth safer now for both mother and baby than ever before in the history of humanity.   However, these changes have also affected our ways of thinking about childbirth (Mackenzie Bryers & van Teijlingen 2010).

Social scientists recognise a social model and a medical model of childbirth (van Teijlingen 2005; van Teijlingen & Ireland 2013).  The former sees childbirth as a physiological event in women’s lives.  Pregnant women need psycho-social support, but not necessarily high-technology interventions by doctors.    The medical model stresses that childbirth can be pathological, i.e. every pregnant woman is potentially at risk.  The medical model argues that every birth needs to be in hospital with high-technology screening equipment supervised by expert obstetricians.  In other words, pregnancy and childbirth are only safe in retrospect.  In terms of social changes, we have moved from a more social model to a more medical model in a society which is more risk averse.

 

 

Edwin van Teijlingen1 & Jillian Ireland2

  1. Professor of Reproductive Health Research, Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health, Bournemouth University.
  2. Visiting Faculty, Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health, Bournemouth University; Midwife & Supervisor of Midwives, RCM learning Rep. Poole NHS Hospitals Trust.

 

 

References:

Inglehart R. (1997). Modernisation and post modernisation: Cultural, economic, and political change in 43 societies. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Ireland, J. (2011) Reflections on surrogacy-using the Taylor model to understand and manage the emotions in clinical practice, Essentially Midirs, 2(9): 17-21.

Ireland, J., van Teijlingen, E. (2013) Normal birth: social-medical model, The Practising Midwife 16(11): 17-20.

MacKenzie Bryers, H., van Teijlingen, E. (2010) Risk, Theory, Social & Medical Models: a critical analysis of the concept of risk in maternity care, Midwifery 26(5): 488-496.

Simkhada, P.P., van Teijlingen, E. (2009) Health: a global perspective, In: Alder, B. et al. (Eds.) Psychology & Sociology Applied to Medicine (3rd edn.), Edinburgh: Elsevier: 158-159.

Teijlingen van, E. (2005) A critical analysis of the medical model as used in the study of pregnancy and childbirth, Sociological Research Online, 10(2) Web address: http://www.socresonline.org.uk/10/2/teijlingen.html

 

NIHR funds research into community hospitals in England and internationally

Awarded & submitted bids

A research team comprising RAND Europe and Bournemouth University have been awarded a research grant from NIHR to study Community Hospitals. Community Hospitals form an integral part of the NHS in the UK, this study looks at their distinct contribution to patient care. Community Hospitals come in all sorts of shapes, and can be located in rural parts of the country as well as in inner-city areas.  In the UK community hospitals differ in the nature and scope of services on offer; some provide maternity care, others (also) A&E services or day-surgery or care for the elderly.  There are a range of different models of ownership and management or the level of integration with other services.

The study will also explore what comparable models of community hospitals exist in other countries high-income countries, and what the NHS can learn from it.  Community hospitals may offer advantages for selected patients over larger hospitals, but unless we produce the research evidence we would not be able to tell which types of patients would particularly benefit.  Community hospitals have a long tradition of providing more integrated care, perhaps something we can learn from to improve other hospital services and hospitals.

This new study builds on the systematic review of community hospitals Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (HSC) undertook with his colleagues in Scotland about a decade ago.1

For further details: http://www.rand.org/randeurope/research/projects/community-hospitals.html

 

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

Centre for Midwifery, Maternal and Perinatal Health

 

Reference:

  1. Heaney D, Black C, O’Donnell CA, Stark C, van Teijlingen E (2006) Community Hospitals – The place of local service provision in a Modernising NHS: An Integrative Thematic Literature Review BMC Public Health, 6(309).  Web address: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/6/309

South Asian midwifery at ICM 2014

Publishing

Photo from UNFPA Lao PDR

In early June I published a short overview of Bournemouth University’s contribution to the ICM (International Congress of Midwives) conference in Prague (Czech Republic) (see: http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/06/05/cmmph-strong-presence-at-icm-conference/ ).  In addition we highlighted the Nepal contribution in a separate BU Research Blog (http://blogs.bournemouth.ac.uk/research/2014/06/03/46-sharma-s-sicuri-e-belizan-jm-van-teijlingen-e-simkhada-p-stephens-j-hundley-v-angell-c-getting-women-to-care-in-nepal-a-difference-in-difference-analysis-of-a-health-prom/ ).   Today a belated update of our presence at the Special Session on South Asian Midwifery at the ICM conference last month, as I just received photos from our friends at UNFPA Lao PDR.

South Asia posters at ICM conference (photo: UNFPA Lao PDR)

One of the speakers at the South Asian Midwifery session was our friend Kiran Bajracharya, president of the Midwifery Society of Nepal (MIDSON).  Several of our posters describing our work in Nepal were on display.  Bournemouth University friends were involved in the organisation of the event, such as Swedish midwife Malin Bogren and the editor of the newly launched midwifery journal Journal of Asian Midwifery, Dr. Rafat Jan. The session was concluded by another BU collaborator Petra the Hoope-Bender of Integrare.

Professor Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH