End-of-life care in the intensive care unit : a systematic review of qualitative studies investigating the experiences and perceptions of the patient's family

Review question/objective The review objective is to synthesise the best available evidence on experiences and perceptions of family members of intensive care unit patients on the adequacy of end-of-life care, where life-support modalities have been withheld or withdrawn. Inclusion criteria Types of participants This review will consider studies that report on the experiences and perceptions of patients’ families on EOLC in the ICU, where life-support modalities have been withheld or withdrawn. The family is defined as “those who are closest to the patient... the family may include the biological family, family by acquisition, and the family of choice and friends”. Phenomena of interest The phenomena of interest for this review are the patients’ families experiences, perceptions or views on the adequacy of EOLC delivered in the ICU, where life-support modalities were withheld or withdrawn. These experiences may refer to the following views on domains of care considered important at the end-of-life in the ICU, which have been described already in the existing literature: timely, consistent, and compassionate communication, clinician availability, clinical decision making based on patients’ preferences, goals and values, physical care implemented to maintain patient comfort, holistic interdisciplinary care and bereavement care for families of patients who died.

Transitioning from vocational education and training to university : strengthening information literacy through collaboration

"Students transitioning from vocational education and training (VET) to university can experience a number of challenges. This small research project explored the information literacy needs of VET and university students and how they differ. Students studying early childhood related VET and university courses reported differences in how and where they searched for information in their studies. These differences reflect the more practical focus of VET compared with the more academic and theoretical approach of university. The author proposes a framework of support that could be provided to transitioning students to enable them to develop the necessary information literacy skills for university study."--publisher website

Developing a culture to support peer review of teaching in higher education

This presentation addresses issues related to leadership, academic development and scholarship of teaching and learning, and highlights research funded by the Australian Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) designed to embed and sustain peer review of teaching within the culture of 5 Australian universities: Queensland University of Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, University of Adelaide, Curtin University, and Charles Darwin University. Peer review of teaching in higher education will be emphasised as a professional process for providing feedback on teaching and learning practice, which if sustained, can become an effective ongoing strategy for academic development (Barnard et al, 2011; Bell, 2005; Bolt and Atkinson, 2010; McGill & Beaty 2001, 1992; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). The research affirms that using developmental peer review models (Barnard et al, 2011; D'Andrea, 2002; Hammersley-Fletcher & Orsmond, 2004) can bring about successful implementation, especially when implemented within a distributive leadership framework (Spillane & Healey, 2010). The project’s aims and objectives were to develop leadership capacity and integrate peer review as a cultural practice in higher education. The research design was a two stage inquiry process over 2 years. The project began in July 2011 and encompassed a development and pilot phase followed by a cascade phase with questionnaire and focus group evaluation processes to support ongoing improvement and measures of outcome. Leadership development activities included locally delivered workshops complemented by the identification and support of champions. To optimise long term sustainability, the project was implemented through existing learning and teaching structures and processes within the respective partner universities. Research outcomes highlight the fundamentals of peer review of teaching and the broader contextual elements of integration, leadership and development, expressed as a conceptual model for embedding peer review of teaching within higher education. The research opens a communicative space about introduction of peer review that goes further than simply espousing its worth and introduction. The conceptual model highlights the importance of development of distributive leadership capacity, integration of policies and processes, and understanding the values, beliefs, assumptions and behaviors embedded in an organizational culture. The presentation overviews empirical findings that demonstrate progress to advance peer review requires an ‘across-the-board’ commitment to embed change, and inherently demands a process that co-creates connection across colleagues, discipline groups, and the university sector. Progress toward peer review of teaching as a cultural phenomenon can be achieved and has advantages for academic staff, scholarship, teaching evaluation and an organisation, if attention is given to strategies that influence the contexts and cultures of teaching practice. Peer review as a strategy to develop excellence in teaching is considered from a holistic perspective that by necessity encompasses all elements of an educational environment and has a focus on scholarship of teaching. The work is ongoing and has implication for policy, research, teaching development and student outcomes, and has potential application world-wide.

Who struggles most in making a career choice and why?Findings from a cross-sectional survey of highschool students

This paper reports findings from an empirical study examining the influence of student background and educational experiences on the development of career choice capability. Secondary school students attending years 9-12 (N = 706) in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, were invited to participate in an online survey that sought to examine factors influencing their career choices. The survey included questions relating to student demographics, parental occupation, attitudes to school and to learning, student aspirations, and students’ knowledge of the further education or skills required to achieve their desired goal. We found no significant differences in the proportions of students who were “uncertain” of their future career aspirations with respect to their socio-educational background. There were, however, significantly more students struggling with career decision making from an English-speaking background in comparison to households where children spoke a language other than English. Those students were proportionally present in government and non-government schools and had some behavioural and attitudinal characteristics in common.

Video-stimulated recall interviews in qualitative research

Video stimulated recall interviewing is a research technique in which subjects view a video sequence of their behaviour and are then invited to reflect on their decision-making processes during the videoed event. Despite its popularity, this technique raises methodological issues for researchers, particularly novice researchers in education. The paper reports that while stimulated recall is a valuable technique for investigating decision making processes in relation to specific events, it is not a technique that lends itself as a universal technique for research. This paper recounts one study in educational research where stimulated recall interview was used successfully as a useful tool for collecting data with an adapted version of SRI procedure.

Understanding the abnormal brain activity in epilepsy as a potential predictor of the onset of an epileptic seizure

The Brain Research Institute (BRI) uses various types of indirect measurements, including EEG and fMRI, to understand and assess brain activity and function. As well as the recovery of generic information about brain function, research also focuses on the utilisation of such data and understanding to study the initiation, dynamics, spread and suppression of epileptic seizures. To assist with the future focussing of this aspect of their research, the BRI asked the MISG 2010 participants to examine how the available EEG and fMRI data and current knowledge about epilepsy should be analysed and interpreted to yield an enhanced understanding about brain activity occurring before, at commencement of, during, and after a seizure. Though the deliberations of the study group were wide ranging in terms of the related matters considered and discussed, considerable progress was made with the following three aspects. (1) The science behind brain activity investigations depends crucially on the quality of the analysis and interpretation of, as well as the recovery of information from, EEG and fMRI measurements. A number of specific methodologies were discussed and formalised, including independent component analysis, principal component analysis, profile monitoring and change point analysis (hidden Markov modelling, time series analysis, discontinuity identification). (2) Even though EEG measurements accurately and very sensitively record the onset of an epileptic event or seizure, they are, from the perspective of understanding the internal initiation and localisation, of limited utility. They only record neuronal activity in the cortical (surface layer) neurons of the brain, which is a direct reflection of the type of electrical activity they have been designed to record. Because fMRI records, through the monitoring of blood flow activity, the location of localised brain activity within the brain, the possibility of combining fMRI measurements with EEG, as a joint inversion activity, was discussed and examined in detail. (3) A major goal for the BRI is to improve understanding about ``when'' (at what time) an epileptic seizure actually commenced before it is identified on an eeg recording, ``where'' the source of this initiation is located in the brain, and ``what'' is the initiator. Because of the general agreement in the literature that, in one way or another, epileptic events and seizures represent abnormal synchronisations of localised and/or global brain activity the modelling of synchronisations was examined in some detail. References C. M. Michel, G. Thut, S. Morand, A. Khateb, A. J. Pegna, R. Grave de Peralta, S. Gonzalez, M. Seeck and T. Landis, Electric source imaging of human brain functions, Brain Res. 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Living City 2013 Workshop

Living City 2013 Workshop, as part of a school term’s design-based curriculum connected to the KGSC/QUT Design Excellence Program and run from 11 February – 1 May, 2013, was essentially a three-day place-based urban design immersion workshop program for 25 Year 11 Visual Art and Design Students and 2 Teachers from Kelvin Grove State College (KGSC) held at both Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Gardens Point Campus and The Edge, State Library of Queensland. Mentored by 4 design professionals, 2 tertiary design academics, 2 public artists, and 12 QUT tertiary design students, the workshop explored youth-inspired public space design solutions for the active Brisbane City Council redevelopment site of Queens Wharf Road precinct. As well as the face-to-face workshops, for Living City 2013, an interactive web environment was introduced to enable students to connect with each other and program mentors throughout the course of the program. The workshop, framed within notions of ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability, aimed to raise awareness of the layered complexity and perspectives involved in the design of shared city spaces and to encourage young people to voice their own concerns as future citizens about the shape and direction of their city. The program commenced with an introductory student briefing by stakeholders and mentors at KGSC on 11 February, an introduction to site appraisal and site visit held at QUT and Queens Wharf Road on 20 February, and a follow up site analysis session on 6 March. Day 1 Workshop on April 17 at the Edge, State Library of Queensland, as part of the Design Minds partnership (http://designminds.org.au/kelvin-grove-state-college-excellence-in-art-design/), focused on mentoring team development of a concept design for a range of selected sites. Two workshops on April 22 and 23 at QUT, to develop these designs and presentation schemes, followed this. The workshop program culminated in a visual presentation of concept design ideas and discussion with a public audience in the Ideas Gallery on The Deck, King George Square during the Brisbane City Council City Centre Master Plan Ideas Fiesta on 1 May, 2013, as referenced in the Ideas Fiesta Wrap-up Report (http://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/planning-building/planning-guidelines-tools/city-centre-master-plan/city-centre-master-plan-ideas-fiesta). Students were introduced to design methodology, team thinking strategies, the scope of design practices and professions, presentation skills and post-secondary pathways, while participating teachers acquired content and design learning strategies transferable in many other contexts. The program was fully documented on the Living City website (http://www.livingcity.net.au/LC2013x/index.html) and has been recognised by the Brisbane City Council Youth Strategy 2014-2019 as a best practice model for making Brisbane a well-designed, subtropical city.

Thermodynamic modeling of ethanol fumigation in a diesel engine

Due to rapidly diminishing international supplies of fossil fuels, such as petroleum and diesel, the cost of fuel is constantly increasing, leading to higher costs of living, as a result of the significant reliance of many industries on motor vehicles. Many technologies have been developed to replace part or all of a fossil fuel with bio-fuels. One of the dual fuel technologies is fumigation of ethanol in diesel engines, which injects ethanol into the intake air stream of the engine. The advantage of this is that it avoids any costly modification of the engine high pressure diesel injection system, while reducing the volume of diesel required and potentially increasing the power output and efficiency. This paper investigates the performance of a diesel engine, converted to implement ethanol fumigation. The project will use both existing experimental data, along with generating computer modeled results using the program AVL Boost. The data from both experiments and the numerical simulation indicate desirable results for the peak pressure and the indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP). Increase in ethanol substitution resulted in elevated combustion pressure and an increase in the IMEP, while the variation of ethanol injection location resulted in negligible change. These increases in cylinder pressure led to a higher work output and total efficiency in the engine as the ethanol substitution was increased. In comparing the numerical and experimental results, the simulation showed a slight elevation, due to the inaccuracies in the heat release models. Future work is required to improve the combustion model and investigate the effect of the variation of the location of ethanol injection.

An investigation into increasing the extent of energy efficiency knowledge and skills in engineering education

Today, many sectors across society are recognising the need to swiftly reduce their growing energy demand, as well as meeting remaining demand with low emissions options. A key ingredient to addressing such issues is equipping professionals – in particular engineers – with emerging energy efficiency knowledge and skills. This paper responds to an identified engineering education gap in Australia, by investigating options to increase energy efficiency content for both undergraduate and postgraduate engineers. The authors summarise the findings of the multi-stage methodology funded by the National Framework for Energy Efficiency (2008-2009), highlighting identified key barriers and benefits to such curriculum renewal. The findings are intended for use by engineering departments, accreditation agencies, professional bodies and government, to identify opportunities for moving forward based on rigorous research, and then to strategically plan the transition. This process, focused on energy efficiency, may also provide valuable parallels for a range of sustainable engineering related topics.

Reversible and blind database watermarking using difference expansion

Database watermarking has received significant research attention in the current decade. Although, almost all watermarking models have been either irreversible (the original relation cannot be restored from the watermarked relation) and/or non-blind (requiring original relation to detect the watermark in watermarked relation). This model has several disadvantages over reversible and blind watermarking (requiring only watermarked relation and secret key from which the watermark is detected and original relation is restored) including inability to identify rightful owner in case of successful secondary watermarking, inability to revert the relation to original data set (required in high precision industries) and requirement to store unmarked relation at a secure secondary storage. To overcome these problems, we propose a watermarking scheme that is reversible as well as blind. We utilize difference expansion on integers to achieve reversibility. The major advantages provided by our scheme are reversibility to high quality original data set, rightful owner identification, resistance against secondary watermarking attacks, and no need to store original database at a secure secondary storage.

Turbulence in an inundated urban environment during a major flood : implications in terms of people evacuation and sediment deposition

Floods through inundated urban environments constitute a hazard to the population and infrastructure. A series of field measurements were performed in an inundated section of the City of Brisbane (Australia) during a major flood in January 2011. Using an acoustic Doppler velocimeter (ADV), detailed velocity and suspended sediment concentration measurements were conducted about the peak of the flood. The results are discussed with a focus on the safety of individuals in floodwaters and the sediment deposition during the flood recession. The force of the floodwaters in Gardens Point Road was deemed unsafe for individual evacuation. A comparison with past laboratory results suggested that previous recommendations could be inappropriate and unsafe in real flood flows.

Using visualization tool to help engineering students learning dynamics

Dynamics is an essential core engineering subject. It includes high level mathematical and theoretical contents, and basic concepts which are abstract in nature. Hence, Dynamics is considered as one of the hardest subjects in the engineering discipline. To assist our students in learning this subject, we have conducted a Teaching & Learning project to study ways and methods to effectively teach Dynamics based on visualization techniques. The research project adopts the five basic steps of Action Learning Cycle. It is found that visualization technique is a powerful tool for students learning Dynamics and helps to break the barrier of students who perceived Dynamics as a hard subject.