The interview with Nirmal Aryal in Nepali can be read online, click here!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
The interview with Nirmal Aryal in Nepali can be read online, click here!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
Yesterday (Sunday 15th October) Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen from BU’s Department of Midwifery and Health Sciences presented a PhD Thesis Writing Workshop at Tribhuvan University (TU), the largest and oldest university in Nepal. The session was organised by Prof. Dr. Bhimsen Devkota in the Graduate School of Education, he is also Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences at BU. Prof. Devkota is currently also involved in a major grant application to the NIHR. This application is together with colleagues in Pakistan and led by Prof. Vanora Hundly in the Department of Midwifery and Health Sciences.
Most people, including students, in Nepal only have one day, Saturday off as weekend. So teaching on a Sunday is normal here. As you would expect from an audience of largely PhD students, during and at the end of the session there was a very good range of very good questions. The teaching session was also an opportunity to promote our textbook ACADEMIC WRITING AND PUBLISHING IN HEALTH AND SOCIAL SCIENCES. This book was published April last year in Kathmandu.
This week Bournemouth University organised two dissemination events for our risk of kidney disease study in Nepalese migrant workers in the Middle East and Malaysia. A previous blog reported on the first event in the capital Kathmandu (see details here!) . These dissemination events have generated a loads of media coverage in Nepal, both in Nepali and in English.
The study was led by Bournemouth University and a charity in Nepal which whom we have been collaborating for two decades, called Green Tara Nepal. This important study, the first of its kind, was conducted among the Nepalese migrant workers and a comparison group of non-migrants from the same community. This study was funded by The Colt Foundation, based in the UK. In the field it was supported by the Madhes Province Public Health Laboratory, the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration and University College London (UCL).
Dr Pramod Raj Regmi (Principal Academic in International Health in Bournemouth University’s Department of Nursing Sciences) is the lead researcher and our team further comprises researchers Dr Nirmal Aryal and Prof Edwin van Teijlingen (both from BU’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences), and in Nepal clinicians: Prof Dr Arun Sedhai, Dr Radheshyam KC and Dr Shrawan Kumar Mishra.
Prof Edwin van Teijlingen
Selective Travel offers interesting combinations of airlines to fly to far away destinations. This is great as it offers staff the opportunity to seek out the cheapest flight combination or the one with the shortest stop-over time, especially when traveling on research project funded by charities. What is not always clear is that these airlines in in your deal don’t share codes, as I found out at Heathrow two yesterday when I checked in for a my flight to Nepal. This trip to Nepal is part of The Colt Foundation study into the risk of kidney disease in Nepalese migrant workers. The first leg was with British Airways (BA) to Delhi and the onward flight was with Air India to Kathmandu. I could not check in online nor on one of the machines at Heathrow as BA treated this as a flight to India and I have no visa for India. I needed to queue thrice to speak to BA staff member who could check me in to Delhi, she also informed me that Air India and British Airways don’t code share, and I should get my onward ticket in Delhi. However, she could check in my luggage and send it on to Kathmandu! Arriving in Delhi I was told at the transfer desk for Air India that my ticket was not ready yet, as my luggage had to be located. after I told the guy my BA story. Luckily I had a stop-over of five hours, because after an hour or so there was still no sign of y ticket. It finally arrived a little later, and luckily I have traveled often enough in South Asia not to be worried by delays in paperwork, bureaucratic procedures, and the simple statement; “You have to wait, Sir”.
CMWH
After many emails about predatory journals and conferences, today I received an email about a predatory academic prize. Over the years there have been many BU Research Blogs warning readers about predatory journals, for example in 2014, 2015, 2018, and in 2019, and also about fake conferences (e.g. in 2017). It was inevitable that fake academic prizes would be the next trick. The email announces that for US$ 225 the prize is mine! This development fits in with the many messages I have received about having ‘won’ prizes on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Today’s predatory prize announcement is still very much in its infancy as scammers from the ‘Asia International Research Award 2023’ did not pick the greatest paper written in 2020 by the first author Dr Preeti Mahato, formerly in BU’s Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, and now Lecturer in Global Health at Royal Holloway , University of London. If they had wanted to make the award scam more believable they would have chosen the PloS one paper from her BU PhD work in Nepal [1]. Instead the announcement list a paper with much older data based on secondary analysis [2], not a bad paper, but not a winner either.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
References
Yesterday I wrote my resignation letter to the journal BMC Pregnancy & Childbirth. After acting as Associate Editor for fifteen years the time has come for me to give it up, and I found ‘giving up’ very difficult. The enormous growth in my workload at Bournemouth University and the increasing requests to take on new papers as Associate Editor, on top of the many requests to review papers and grants, just became too much. It made me realize I needed to reduce several tasks and jobs to have a slightly better balanced work-home life.
I am still co-editor of the Journal of Asian Midwives, book review editor of Sociological Research Online, guest editor for a special issue of Frontiers in Public Health, and I am still on the editorial or advisory boards of: Birth (published by Wiley), Sociological Research Online (published by SAGE), Nepal Journal of Epidemiology, Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences, and Midwifery (published by Elsevier), so still plenty of work to be done.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
Half of the authors are associated with Bournemouth University, two are Visiting Faculty (Prof. Dr. Padam Simkhada and Dr. Brijesh Sathian) and the third one is Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH). The Nepal Journal of Epidemiology is an Open Access journal and therefore the paper is freely available to read to anyone across the globe.
References:
In the latest issue of the Journal of Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences appeared two articles focusing on the ERASMUS+ programme. This new issue of the journal was published earlier this month, it is an Open Access journal hence its articles can be read free of charged. Unfortunately, due the UK leaving the European Union (EU), ERASMUS+ has just come to an end this summer for universities in the UK.
The first article is an editorial that outlines the benefits of the staff and student exchange between Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Nepal and Bournemouth University [1]. The paper concludes that the world is rapidly becoming a smaller place with globalisation occurring everywhere. The process of internationalising higher education institutions through partnerships like ours, brings benefits to both MMIHS and BU and to both staff and students. For the latter, it offers new ideas, alternative ways of thinking, insights in the other people’s value systems and cultures, etc. It equips students and staff with knowledge, skills and dispositions to work in culturally diverse and international contexts, providing them with a wider diversity of knowledge and greater understanding of global issues and challenges. In short, the partnership offers many opportunities to gain new experiences, explore new sources and perspectives, and improve their cross-cultural capabilities and, ultimately, their employability.
Secondly, there is an article co-authored by the seven MMIHS students, who came to BU in late 2022-early 2023, highlighting what they had learnt from one of the modules they attended [2]. This paper has as it central feature involving patients and the general public in all aspects of research, which was very much a new idea for these seven MSc students from Nepal.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
References:
This week the Journal of Asian Midwives published its latest issue. Celebrating a decade of publishing, this is the first issue of volume 10. The journal is Open Access and freely available online for anybody who wants to read it (click here!). In the editorial of this new issue the editors highlighted online events around the International Day of the Midwife, the ICM (International Confederation of Midwives) Triennial Congress in Bali, Indonesia in June, and the acceptance of the Journal of Asian Midwives by SCOPUS [1]. The editorial finishes by highlighting new additions to the journal, including the opportunity to submit short research proposals, or proposals for improvement in service or practice, blogs and from the next issue onwards, short view point articles.
Reference:
Today ResearchGate alerted me that our paper ‘Women, Midwives, and a Medical Model of Maternity Care in Switzerland’ [1] has been read 2,500 times. This paper published in the International Journal of Childbirth focuses on the organisation of maternity health care in Switzerland. Switzerland has a costly health care system with high intervention rates within an obstetric-led maternity care model. Evidence has shown that midwifery care is associated with lower cost, higher satisfaction rates among women, and less intervention. However, in this model, midwives are both marginalized and underused.
The article focuses on the distribution of power and knowledge between midwives, women, and the medical profession. The varying power structures that shape the maternity care system in Switzerland are examined, using a case study approach that draws on Foucault’s concepts of the gaze, surveillance, disciplinary power, and the docile body. This article critically analyzes the model of maternity care received by women in Switzerland and how it negatively impacts on both women’s personal and midwives’ professional autonomy while simultaneously driving up costs.
A better understanding of the underlying power structures operating within the maternity care system may facilitate the implementation of more midwifery-led care currently being endorsed by the Swiss Midwifery Association and some government agencies. This could result in reduced cost and lower intervention rates with reduced associated morbidity.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
Reference:
Congratulations to Drs. Pramod Regmi and Nirmal Aryal in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences who published their latest paper this week [1]. This peer-reviewed paper ‘Assessing the knowledge of, attitudes towards, and practices in, food safety among migrant workers in Klang Valley, Malaysia’ in the journal Travel Medicine & Infectious Disease assesses the current food safety KAP (knowledge, attitudes and behaviour) as well as strategies to promote food safety awareness, among migrant workers across occupational sectors in Malaysia.
The authors conducted a survey with 403 migrant workers using telephone interviews and online self-administered questionnaires. The respondents were Nepalese, Filipino and Indonesian migrant workers. The majority were male, working in the services industry, had completed high school, aged between 30 and 39 years and had worked in Malaysia for less than ten years. Knowledge was significantly correlated with attitudes and practices. Female respondents had lower knowledge and attitude scores while younger respondents had lower knowledge scores. Indonesian and Filipino respondents had lower knowledge and attitudes scores than Nepalese respondents. Understanding food safety information from social media was positively correlated with the respondents’ food safety knowledge and practices. The paper concludes there is: (i) a to target female, younger, Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers, and (ii) the potential of social media to improve public awareness of food safety and hygienic practices.
Well done!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
Reference:
Worldwide drowning has caused over 2.5 million deaths in the last decade. The overwhelming majority of these deaths (90%) happen in low-middle-income countries. Globally, the highest drowning rates occur among children aged 1–4 years.
To mark this year’s World Drowning Prevention Day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is raising awareness of drowning interventions such as teaching school-age children basic swimming water safety and safe rescue skills. Drowning is a public health issue, through their World Drowning Prevention Day campaign, WHO will be reminding people that: “Anyone can drown, but no one should.”
In Bangladesh, drowning is the leading cause of death in children over the age of one. Globally, the country has one of the highest rates of drowning, especially among children. Additionally, the risk of drowning in rural areas is twice as likely in comparison to cities. Some of the reasons for this are due to access to hazards, e.g., because there are a significant number of ponds and ditches, creating natural drowning hazards for very young children.
Bournemouth University and the Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB) jointly have received funding for research into the number of children drowning deaths in Bangladesh. The project, called ‘Sonamoni’, is being coordinated by Bournemouth University in collaboration with the University of the West of England, Bristol, the University of Southampton, and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). We are working with CIPRB to reduce drownings among newly-mobile children, generally under two years old. The project, with Prof. Dr. Aminur Rahman as Bangladesh lead, includes a PhD project by BU’s Mr. Shafkat Hossain. Shafkat’s thesis focuses on aspects of the Human-Centred-Design element of the Sonamoni project.
This £1.6m project has been made possible thanks to a grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through their Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme. For more information, visit the NIHR website.The interdisciplinary team at Bournemouth University cover three faculties supported by the following academics: Dr. Mavis Bengtsson, Dr. Kyungjoo Cha, Dr. Mehdi Chowdhury, Dr. Yong Hun Lim, Mr. John Powell, and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
The British Sociological Society’s (BSA) journal Sociological Research Online is seeking a new second book review editor. All Editors, including the book review editor, have to be BSA members throughout their term of office and previous engagement with the BSA is desirable. The term of office is three years with the possibility of an extension, starting mid-November 2023. The deadline for applications is 11th October 2013.
Sociological Research Online is published by the international social science publishing house SAGE. The editorial team has just been informed this week that the Impact Factor of the journal has increased to 1.6.
Interested candidates should submit a pro forma application of no more than 2 pages and a short CV. To receive a pro forma application, please contact Selina Hisir, BSA
Publications Coordinator, at email: sro.journal@britsoc.org.uk
As current book review editor I am very happy to talk to interested sociologists informally.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
Email: evteijlingen@bournemouth.ac.uk
Shafkat spoke about Bangladesh’s experience of and contribution to drowning prevention. He introduced the NIHR-funded Sonamoni project with the title ‘Prevention of drowning for under-2 years old in Bangladesh’. The Sonamoni project has been made possible thanks to a grant from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) through their Research and Innovation for Global Health Transformation programme. For more information, visit the NIHR website. Bournemouth University (BU) is the joint lead organisation for the project with Centre for Injury Prevention and Research, Bangladesh (CIPRB) with as key partners the RNLI, the University of West of England, and the University of Southampton. BU’s involvement spans three faculties, namely the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, the Faculty of Science & Technology and the Bournemouth University Business School.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
In May I wrote a BU Research Blog under the title ‘New ways of publishing?’ on the first time we published an academic paper in the post-review journal Qeios. The paper in question ‘The paper ‘Impact of Men’s Labour Migration on Non-migrating Spouses’ Health: A Systematic Review‘ [1] is part of Shraddha Manandhar’s Ph.D. study at the University of Huddersfield. Shraddha is supervised by the University of Huddersfield’s Prof. Philip Brown and Prof. Padam Simkhada and Bournemouth University’ Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. Today’s blog is an update on that novel publishing journey.
The first point to make is that our paper received twenty-two reviews, not two or three, but 22 different people read and commented on this paper. Sure, some reviews were better than others, some were more insightful, others were more generic, some seem to miss out points, or perhaps skimming the surface a little, but still twenty-two reviews! Secondly, by the nature of post-publication review we have taken the reviews to heart and submitted the second improved version of the paper [2]. The new reference for the paper is very similar to the first one, apart from the new submission data and the indication in the https that we are now on the second version [2]. Thirdly, each of the 22 reviews has its own DOI, and hence can easily be quoted. In the second version of the paper we have cited several of the online reviews [e.g. 3-6]. Last, but not least, Qeois offers Open Access and publishing is free of charge.
The great unknown for us how the academic world is going to view post-publication way of peer-reviewing. We realize that we have been lucky in getting 22 reviews for this paper. As part of learning about Qeios I read a 2022 paper in one of my areas of interest and submitted my own review [7]; this review was only the fifth for the paper.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
References:
Late last week my colleague Dr. Pramod Regmi, Senior Lecturer in International Health, returned home from his Erasmus+ exchange to Nepal. He brought home for me a copy of the MMIHS (Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences) Souvenir 2023, this outliens key events at the institution of the past year. One of the write ups in the Souvenir is from the seven MMIHS M.Sc. students in Public Health who visited Bournemouth University in late 2022-early 2023 for three months. The students have since all completed their M.Sc. in Public Health at MMIHS. Their story highlights some of the British features of student life which were new to them. These included the support they received from our SUBU (=students’ union), or registering with the NHS, and the UNIBUS app, as well as cultural celebrations during their time in Dorset, such Halloween, Christmas and New Year. They rave about the module Public Involvement in Research and specifically thank Dr. Mel Hughes and BU’s PIER (Public Involvement in Education & Research) team. Their second module at BU focused on Systematic Reviewing, they particularly mention the guidance and support received from Prof. Vanora Hundley in the Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH) and our Faculty of Health & Social Sciences librarian Mr. Caspian Dugdale.
Unfortunately, the Erasmus+ scheme has come to an end, but Bournemouth University has just been awarded funding for a serious number of Turing Scheme exchanges. The latter is for BU students to go aboard, and this funding supports study exchanges, work placements, voluntary traineeships and other international extra-curricular or curricular activities worldwide for a minimum of 28 days and maximum of 12 months.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMWH
The BU Erasmus+ visitors included FHSS academics Prof. Steve Ersser, Dr. Michele Board and Dr. Pramod Regmi, as well as the Head of BU International Partnerships Dr. Alistair Morrison and Global Engagement Officer Elaine Hakes, and from the department of Psychology Dr. Shanti Shanker, and last, but not least, FHSS Ph.D. student Yagya Adhikari.
I would personally like to say thank you very much for all the support I have received from GTN over the past two decades!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (CMWH)
On Monday and Tuesday 18-19 June the University of Huddersfield will organize its Global Consortium in Public Health meeting. This meeting is the brain child of Prof. Padam Simkhada, he is Visiting Professor at Bournemouth University and based at the University of Huddersfield. The event brings together public health researchers and experts from the UK, the USA, Ghana, Nepal, India, Qatar and Brazil to discuss the latest developments and challenges in the field. The Global Consortium in Public Health is an international network of public health researchers, practitioners, and policymakers who are committed to advancing the field of public health through collaborative research, education, and advocacy. The consortium provides a platform for sharing best practices and building future collaborations.
On Monday 19th June Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen will be talking about the REF 2028 and the importance of strong international partnerships in the fields of research and education. BU’s Dr. Pramod Regmi was also invited to this event in Huddersfield, but he is on his way to Nepal as part of Bournemouth University’s Erasmus+ staff and student exchange with Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS).