Latest research and knowledge exchange news at Bournemouth University
Dr. Heidi Singleton, Programme Lead for Children’s and Young People’s Nursing in the Faculty of Health & Social Sciences had a paper from her PhD ‘Accounting for complexity in critical realist trials: the promise of PLS-SEM’ accepted this month by the Journal of Critical Realism. This journal is published by Taylor and Francis.
Congratulations!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health
You are invited to a two-hour ‘Workshop on Health Systems in Nepal’ at Bournemouth University (BU) on Thursday 25th May in the Bournemouth Gateway Building (BGB room 315) starting at 14.00, aiming to finish at 16.00. We have the pleasure of welcoming three academic visitors from Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Kathmandu who are at BU on an Erasmus+ exchange.
‘Prof. Sujan Marahatta, Dr. Sujata Sapkota and Dr. Sujan Gautam from MMIHS are part of an international project examining the consequences for the health system of Nepal’s move to a federal government structure. This project, launched in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, is led by the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with BU, the University of Huddersfield, PHASE Nepal and MMIHS. This nearly four-year project is UK-funded by the MRC (Medical Research Council), the Wellcome Trust and DFID (now called Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office [FCDO]) under the Health Systems Research Initiative.
The project has resulted in several publications, all in Open Access journals. The first of three papers introduced the research project ‘The impact of federalisation on Nepal’s health system: a longitudinal analysis’ [1], the second focused on COVID-19 when examining the effects of changing Nepal’s constitution towards a federal republic on its health system [2], and the third one highlighted Public Health approaches around the ongoing federalisation of the state of Nepal and the associated decentralisation processes in its health system [3].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery & Women’s Health (formerly CMMPH)
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Last we took a new step into the academic publishing by submitting a paper to Qeios. This Open Access journal publishes papers for free, more or less immediately and after the paper has appeared online peer-reviewers are being invited. 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. Her supervisors are Huddersfield’s Prof. Philip Brown and Prof. Padam Simkhada and Bournemouth University’ Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. This journal uses AI to find and invite reviewers, and these reviews will the be are published alongside our article. Should we advised by reviewers to make changes, edits or improvements the next version of the paper will be published online alongside the original submission and the reviews.
We have had some previous experience with the process of post-publication review, in 2017 BU’s Dr. Sarah Collard and Prof. van Teijlingen wrote a referee report for F1000Research after it published a methods paper on online focus groups [2]. More recently we published a COVID-19 paper in a so-called pre-print journal SSRN [3], but this was later in published in a traditional peer-reviewed journal called Scientific Reports [4], part of the Nature publishing family.
References
Today one of my co-editors of the Journal of Asian Midwives emailed me to announce that our journal has been accepted for inclusion by Scopus.
Scopus, which is owned by the publishing house Elsevier, is the world’s largest electronic database of peer-reviewed literature. The Scopus assessors of our application made some very nice comments about the Journal of Asian Midwives, for example that it:
“consistently includes articles that are academically sound and relevant to an international academic or professional audience in the field. The journal has scholarly relevance as evidenced by citations in other journals currently covered by Scopus… The journal has clear aims and scope/journal policies that are consistent with the journal’s content. Although the scope of this journal is narrow, it addresses the need of an important niche audience.”
We are very proud of this achievement and we, as editors (Prof. Rafat Jan, Ms. Kiran Mubeen, Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen, with editorial assistant Ms. Abeer Musaddique), thank all our supporters, especially the library staff at The Aga Khan University in Pakistan, our reviewers, our authors and of course, you, our readers! I personally like to thank our former CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health) PhD student Dr. Sheetal Sharma for suggesting many years ago that I might like to help this, at the time, new journal. It is a proper well-run peer-reviewed journal, and I know that from personal experience, as a few years ago one of the papers on which I am a co-author was rejected after peer review by ‘my’ journal!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
Co-editor Journal of Asian Midwives
Yesterday Plos ONE published our latest study on the health system in Nepal under the title ‘Barriers in accessing family planning services in Nepal during the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative study‘ [1]. This qualitative study, in an Open Access journal, explores what sorts of barriers are faced by women needing family planning services in Nepal during the pandemic. It was conducted in five districts of Nepal. Telephonic in-depth interviews were conducted with 18 women of reproductive age (18–49 years) who were the regular clients of family planning services. Data were coded deductively using the preexisting themes based on a socio-ecological model (e.g., individual, family, community, and health-facility levels).
The paper reports that individual level barriers included low self-confidence, inadequate knowledge on COVID-19, myths and misconception related to COVID-19, limited access to family planning services, low priority to sexual and reproductive health services, low autonomy in family and limited financial ability. Family level barriers comprised partner’s support, social stigma, increased time at home with husbands or parents, not accepting family planning services as essential health services, financial hardship due to loss of jobs, and communication with in-laws. Movement restrictions and transportation hindering access, unsecured feeling, violation of privacy, and obstacles from security personnel were the community level barriers and unavailability of preferred choice of contraception, increased waiting time, limited outreach services by community health workers, limited physical infrastructures, the behavior of health workers, stock out of commodities, and absence of health workers were health facility level barriers.
The authors conclude that policymakers and programme managers should consider strategies to ensure continued availability of the full method mix during emergency, particularly since disruptions may go unnoticed and strengthen the provision of services through alternative service delivery channels to ensure sustained uptake of such services in this sort of pandemic.
This is the latest addition to the pool of academic papers published by Bournemouth University academics on the effects of COVID-19 on health care in Nepal or issues related to Nepal [2-11].
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH (Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health)
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The paper reports that of these 23 papers, 21 focused on assessing AHL measures, and 15 addressed the association between AHL and HP. Seven studies used the HL School-Aged Children instrument. The findings suggested that the methodological and conceptual underpinnings of HL measures are insufficient. Furthermore, HL acts as an independent and positive mediator for many facets of HP. Overall, this review offers a warning to practitioners and educationists interested in measuring HL as the number of measurement tools is substantial with different tools applying different scales.
Dr Jonathan Williams, Principal Academic and Deputy Head of the Department of Rehabilitation & Sports Science is the latest BU academic to visit Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Nepal as part of the Erasmus+ exchange funding. Yesterday he run a workshop in Kathmandu on how to conduct a Literature Review for Health Professionals. This session was well attended by medical doctors at Manmohan Memorial Teaching Hospital.
The workshop was organised buy Prof. Sujan Marahatta at MMIHS, who is also Visiting Faculty member in FHSS. BU is currently in the process of renewing its MoA with MMIHS, to continue working together after this successful Erasmus+ programme.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH)
The BNAC (Britain-Nepal Academic Council) twentieth Nepal Study Days (24-25 April) start today in Huddersfield. BU is directly represented through Dr. Pramod Regmi who will be presenting ‘Health Research Priorities and Needs in Migrant Health: A Review of Reviews’ today. 
Dr. Regmi based in the Department of Nursing Sciences and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen in the Department of Midwifery & Health Sciences are also part of the paper ‘Nepal Family Cohort Study: Starting a Longitudinal Population Health Study’ which will be presented by our colleague Dr. Om P. Kurmi from Coventry University.
There will also be a BU paper on ‘Perceptions Around Covid-19 and Vaccine Hesitancy: A Qualitative Study Among People Living in Kaski, Western Nepal’ , presented by Dr. Preeti Mahato. Preeti is based at Royal Holloway (University of London) and she is also a Visiting Faculty member of FHSS. She’ll presenting a study recently published in PLOS Global Public Health.
These Nepal Studies Days pay serious attention to our ongoing interdisciplinary study ‘The impact of federalisation on Nepal’s health system: a longitudinal analysis’ which was reported in several national newspapers in Nepal last week. Tomorrow there will be a plenary session by Prof. Simon Rushton, the PI on this project in which BU collaborates. He will be talking about ‘Nepal’s Health System During Federalisation: Emerging Issues and the Co-production of Policy and Practice Recommendations’. Later that day there will be two further presentations based on this large-scale study, the first one by Dr. Sharada P. Wasti followed by one delivered by Dr. Sujata Sapkota.
Congratulations to Prof. Jonathan Parker, Professor of Society & Social Welfare in the Department of Social Sciences and Social Work, who just published his historical-sociological analysis of British Welfare under the title Analysing the History of British Social Welfare – Compassion, Coercion and Beyond. The book it is published by Policy Press and will be available next week. This book offers insights into the development of social welfare policies in Britain. By identifying continuities in welfare policy, practice and thought throughout history, it offers the potential for the development of new thinking, policy making and practice.
In addition Jonathan also published a new edition of his popular textbook Introducing Social Work SECOND EDITION. This edited volume included chapters by BU academics Dr. Orlanda Harvey (Chapter 26) and Dr. Sally Lee (Chapter 22) as well as an array of internationally renowned social work academics.
Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash
We will examine how knowledge can be translated to a range of stakeholders, with a particular emphasis on the value of publishing in non-academic sources as a pathway to developing societal impact.
| Workshop | Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publishing Strategy Lunchbyte – Developing a Fusion-led Publishing Strategy | Thursday, 4th May 2023 | 10.30 – 11.30 | Online |
This workshop aimed at all Academic staff and facilitated by Prof John Oliver
To book a place on this workshop please complete the Booking Form.
For queries regarding the content of this session, please contact: Pengpeng Hatch:pphatch@bournemouth.ac.uk or RKEDF@bournemouth.ac.uk
Congratulations to Bronwyn Sherriff, Carol Clark, Clare Killingback and Dave Newell. Their manuscript titled “Musculoskeletal practitioners’ perceptions of contextual factors that may influence chronic low back pain outcomes: a modified Delphi study” was recently published in Chiropractic & Manual Therapies. The Delphi study provides initial insights regarding a panel of musculoskeletal practitioners’ attitudes towards contextual factors during chronic low-back pain (LBP) rehabilitation in the UK. If you are interested in their findings, click here: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12998-023-00482-4 or as a PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186/s12998-023-00482-4.pdf.
Congratulations and well done!
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (CMMPH)
BU authors can now publish OA for free in select journals with American Psychological Association. Read on to find out more!
Authors affiliated with UK institutions participating in APA’s Jisc agreement may publish open access in hybrid journals published by APA at no cost to the author, provided that:
All articles under this agreement will be published under the CC-BY copyright license. Upon publication, articles will be made immediately open access.
You can find further information on how to submit an article for consideration and other key information, such as maximum number of articles, here.
As a reminder, BU holds a number of agreements with key publishers, many of which allow you to publish open access for free. You can read more about them here.
If you have any queries, please contact the Open Access team.
Professor Edwin van Teijlingen in the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) has been invited to speak at this week’s annual conference of the Nepal Health Research Council (NHRC). His presentation on Wednesday 12th April ‘Why is evidence synthesis centre important for Nepal? An opportunity for networking, collaboration & partnership’is based on a recently co-authored paper on this topic [1]. On behalf of his colleagues from the University of Huddersfield and the NHRC, he will argue that there is a need for a National Evidence Synthesis Centre under NHRC which can synthesize global, national and local research evidence that is relevant to a local context and meets demand of programme managers and policymakers at every level in Nepal. The Centre should also promote the use of systematic review findings to appropriate decision-makers to ensure they have the best chance of getting implemented. Regular evidence synthesis can also contribute to the tracking of progress of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) indicators. Such national centre should work in close collaboration with national and international academics and research institutions, national, regional and local governments, health experts and care providers.
There are many types of outputs that use evidence synthesis, such as policy briefs, systematic reviews, clinical practice guidelines and so on. Finally, establishing a National Evidence Synthesis Centre would be very timely to help develop mechanisms of evidence synthesis as well as improve research communication. The first step could be the planning of a national workshop to identifying evidence gaps, next independent research teams can be formed for evidence synthesis while experts from institutions in the global north can provide mentoring support for capacity building and help ensure the centre’s sustainability.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen is currently in Kathmandu as through Bournemouth University’s Erasmus+ exchange with Manmohan Memorial Institute of Health Sciences (MMIHS) in Nepal. As part of his teaching commitments at MMIHS he will conducted workshop sessions on academic writing and publishing based on the textbook Academic Writing and Publishing in Health & Social Sciences [2], which was published by Social Science Baha in Kathmandu in 2022.
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The latest Faculty of Health & Social Sciences (FHSS) publication on the last day of March is an editorial in the Nepal Journal of Epidemiology. This editorial ‘The Promising Future for Complex Innovative Trial Design in Clinical Research’ has as its lead author, FHSS’s Visiting Faculty Dr. Brijesh Sathian.
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A recent study of 43 journals in the global health field found that PLOS Global Public Health has the joint highest diversity index, whilst also recording the maximum geographic diversity score! [1] The paper by a team from Pakistan and Canada addressed the question: “What is the current state of ethics of diversity and representation in global health publications?” In order to be able to answer this question they developed their own Journal Diversity Index (JDI) to measure three parameters of diversity and representation, namely gender, geographic & socioeconomic status.
The fact that PLOS Global Public Health came out top is good news for the Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health (CMMPH) as we published a paper in this journal last month. [2] Our qualitative paper ‘Perceptions around COVID-19 and vaccine hesitancy: A qualitative study in Kaski district, Western Nepal’ comprises 19 interviews in the city of Pokhara and its surrounding rural areas.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
CMMPH
References:
A team of Nepal and UK-based researchers are in the process of setting up a National Evidence Synthesis Centre under supervision of the Nepal Health Research Council (NHRC). Recently, we published a paper [1] setting out our arguments on why such a centre is important for a low-income country like Nepal. This centre needs to be responsible for synthesizing evidence specifically relevant to Nepal, as well as producing actionable messages for evidence-informed decision-making.
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (CMMPH)
&
Prof. Padam Simkhada, University of Huddersfield and Visiting Professor at Bournemouth University
References:
18-months ago we published a major study of the UK’s unscripted TV labour market. We found that a staggering 93% of professionals in this sector had experienced or witnessed bullying or harassment at work. An industry defined by highly sought-after creative work had a shadow side. The picture to emerge was one of a troubled workplace in pressing need of reform. Our report made six recommendations that had implications for both government policy and structural change within the industry.
As the issue of bullying in TV has become more widely acknowledged, we have welcomed a number of recent industry initiatives and interventions introduced to deter it (including a campaign to encourage the reporting of bad behaviour and a free Bullying Advice Service). Yet despite these positive developments, not enough attention has been given to the underlying factors that contribute to workplace bullying. There remains an assumption that this is simply a problem of ‘a few bad apples’, when – in reality – it is the condition in which apples are kept that largely determines the damage caused by a bad one.
In our latest publication we examine this issue in more depth. We argue that it is the nature of television work, its organisational structures and the culture of the industry that creates a set of conditions that makes bullying particularly likely. Many of the characteristics shown by our study to be commonplace in television work, are precisely those identified in the field of organisational psychology as risk factors for workplace bullying. This being the case, we call for a risk management approach to this problem; one that systematically recognises, appraises and minimises these risks.
Christa van Raalte, Richard Wallis & Dawid Pekalski (2023) More than just a few ‘bad apples’: the need for a risk management approach to the problem of workplace bullying in the UK’s television industry, Creative Industries Journal, DOI: 10.1080/17510694.2023.2182101
This weekend saw the publication of our paper ‘ Perceptions around COVID-19 and vaccine hesitancy: A qualitative study in Kaski district, Western Nepal’ in the international journal PLOS Global Public Health. [1] This paper reports on a qualitative in-depth study comprising nineteen interviews in the city of Pokhara and its surrounding rural areas. In the interviews people expressed fears about COVID-19, and adherence to public health measures such as social distancing and warring masks. The interviewees generally saw the COVID-19 vaccine as solution but mentioned the vaccine’s potential lack of effectiveness, the uncertain duration of protection and its side-effects.
This paper adds to a growing volume of public health papers on COVID-19 in Nepal or Nepalese people living in the UK written by Bournemouth University academics. [2-11] These papers are co-authored with colleagues based in Nepal and in the UK. They include Nepalese academics based at the University of Sheffield, Royal Holloway, the University of Huddersfield, The University of Greenwich
Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen
Centre for Midwifery, Maternal & Perinatal Health
References:
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