Questions about multidisciplinary teams

Multidisciplinary care (MDC) involves health professionals from a range of disciplines working together as a team (a multidisciplinary team – MDT) to deliver comprehensive care that addresses as many of a patient's needs as possible. Writing in 2011, Wilcoxon and others concluded: ‘Multidisciplinary care is accepted as best practice in cancer treatment planning and care.’ Yet their report (of the national audit of multidisciplinary cancer care in Australia) indicated that two-thirds of the surveyed hospitals did not have a MDT. Further, they found that where teams did exist, one-third of patients were not told that their case would be discussed by the team; the MDT-recommended treatment plan was not included in the patient’s record one-quarter of the time; and less than 1 per cent of teams reported routine attendance by the tumour-specific minimum core team. There is sparse case authority as to the potential medico-legal consequences of MDC by MDTs. This article raises five questions about legal aspects of MDC for consideration. The questions are not limited to cancer care, as MDTs are increasingly used in other areas of medicine.

Impact of working conditions on the quality of working life: Case manufacturing sector colombian Caribbean Region [Impacto de las Condiciones de Trabajo en Calidad de Vida Laboral: Caso del Sector Manufacturero de la Región Caribe Colombiana]

La presenta investigación centra su atención en evaluar el impacto de las Condiciones de Trabajo en la Calidad de Vida Laboral del talento humano de sector manufacturero de la región Caribe colombiana. Para analizar este proceso se entrevistaron a 518 empleados del sector. El diseño utilizado fue no experimental de tipo transversal descriptivo, puesto que a cada participante se le aplicó una entrevista con el instrumento de Condiciones de Trabajo y la Herramienta de Calidad de Vida Laboral (Condiciones Salariales y Subjetivas). Los datos fueron analizados mediante análisis de correlación y modelos de regresión logística. Los resultados mostraron que el ambiente térmico y las normas de seguridad en el trabajo afectan de forma positiva la Calidad de Vida Laboral de los empleados del sector. Estos resultados ponen de manifiesto que la relación entre las condiciones de trabajo y la CVL se basa en la competencia y distan de ser una relación lineal y simple relacionada con la consideración de la presencia o la ausencia de las condiciones de trabajo. Ello tiene implicaciones a la hora de formular políticas, programas e intervenciones para prevenir, erradicar y amortiguar los efectos negativos de las condiciones de trabajo y mejorar la seguridad industrial dentro de las empresas.

Contemporising the Past: Envisaging the Future Refereed - Proceedings of the 2014 World Dance Alliance Global Summit

With a strong emphasis on the interconnection between theory and practice, and how past/present intersections inform the future, these thirty-one articles by artist/scholars and artist/teachers profile current dance research from thirteen countries. The papers coalesce around five sub-themes: o approaches to choreography and performance o shifting cultural dance identities o contemporary research perspectives o changing dance pedagogies o site & environmental dance In exploring the cognitive and the sensory, the rational and the instinctive, the explicit and the implicit, these writings create and celebrate common and differentiated dance understandings — at times directly and provocatively, and at times liminally and poetically.

Teachers working in an online world

This book brings together a number of academics who have conducted research and written about effective practices and pedagogies that incorporate the use of information and communications technologies (ICT). The book is intended for graduate and undergraduate students in Teacher Education programmes, as well as teachers and those who areinterested in contemporary educational issues. The authors in this book have been engaged in rethinking education with ICT. Implicit in this, is the view that we need to reconceptualise our pedagogies and practices in order to make schools relevant to the lives of the young people who inhabit them. The chapters in this book are based on empirically grounded research work. The chapters illustrate the various dimensions of innovative practices with ICT that can extend teachers’ pedagogies and engage learners so that they are able to extend their potential for knowledge building in new and dynamic ways.

Workers are doing it for themselves? Local labor solidarity in precarious times

Historically, organized labor has played a fundamental role in guaranteeing basic rights and privileges for screen media workers and defending union and guild members (however unevenly) from egregious abuses of power. Yet, despite the recent turn to labor in media and cultural studies, organized labor today has received only scant attention, even less so in locations outside Hollywood. This presentation thus intervenes in two significant ways: first, it acknowledges the ongoing global ‘undoing’ of organized labor as a consequence of footloose production and conglomeration within the screen industries, and second, it examines a case example of worker solidarity and political praxis taking shape outside formal labor institutions in response to those structural shifts. Accordingly, it links an empirical study of individual agency to broader debates associated with the spatial dynamics of screen media production, including local capacity, regional competition, and precariousness. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with local film and television workers in Glasgow, Scotland, I consider the political alliance among three nascent labor organizations in the city: one for below-the-line crew, one for facility operators, and (oddly enough) one for producers. Collectively, the groups share a desire to transform Glasgow into a global production hub, following the infrastructure developments in nearby cities like Belfast, Prague, and Budapest. They furthermore frame their objectives in political terms: establishing global scale is considered a necessary maneuver to improve local working conditions like workplace safety, income disparity, skills training, and job access. Ultimately, I argue these groups are a product of an inadequate union structure and outdated policy vision for the screen sector , once-supportive institutions currently out of sync with the global realities of media production. Furthermore, the groups’ advocacy efforts reveal the extent to which workers themselves (in additional to capital) can seek “spatial fixes” to suture their prospects to specific political and economic goals. Of course, such activities manifest under conditions outside of the workers’ control but nevertheless point to an important tension within capitalist social relations, namely that the agency to reshape the spatial relationships in their own lives recasts the geography of labor in terms that aren’t inherent or exclusive to the interests of global capital.

IMIA working group on health record banking - How complex systems can cooperate towards having individual's consolidated data

This workshop aims at discussing alternative approaches to resolving the problem of health information fragmentation, partially resulting from difficulties of health complex systems to semantically interact at the information level. In principle, we challenge the current paradigm of keeping medical records where they were created and discuss an alternative approach in which an individual's health data can be maintained by new entities whose sole responsibility is the sustainability of individual-centric health records. In particular, we will discuss the unique characteristics of the European health information landscape. This workshop is also a business meeting of the IMIA Working Group on Health Record Banking.

Working Ethically in Child Protection

Rather than a single focus on assessing risk and diagnosing deficit, this book recognises that our child protection systems bear down disproportionately on those from disadvantaged and marginalised communities and argues that what is needed is real support and practical assistance for poor and vulnerable parents and children. It uses real-world case examples to illustrate the relevant ethical and practice principles, and ways in which students and practitioners can practise ethically when dealing with complex, multi-faceted issues.

'More like the kids than the other teachers': One working-class pre-service teacher's experiences in a middle-class profession

While teaching is largely a White, middle-class profession, some teachers, including White teachers, come from low socio-economic backgrounds. This paper examines how one working-class pe-service teacher in Australia experiences studying in a predominantly middle-class teacher education program. Drawing on Bourdieu, this paper seeks to explore what we can learn from the pre-service teaching reflections of one woman who is a member of this smaller group of teachers and who brings to her teaching the habitus and life history that aligns with many of her students and the low socio-economic communities in which she teaches.