Bridging the gap: Exploring the barriers to using economic evidence in healthcare decision making and strategies for improving uptake

Evidence from economic evaluations is often not used to inform healthcare policy despite being well regarded by policy makers and physicians. This article employs the accessibility and acceptability framework to review the barriers to using evidence from economic evaluation in healthcare policy and the strategies used to overcome these barriers. Economic evaluations are often inaccessible to policymakers due to the absence of relevant economic evaluations, the time and cost required to conduct and interpret economic evaluations, and lack of expertise to evaluate quality and interpret results. Consistently reported factors that limit the translation of findings from economic evaluations into healthcare policy include poor quality of research informing economic evaluations, assumptions used in economic modelling, conflicts of interest, difficulties in transferring resources between sectors, negative attitudes to healthcare rationing, and the absence of equity considerations. Strategies to overcome these barriers have been suggested in the literature, including training, structured abstract databases, rapid evaluation, reporting checklists for journals, and considering factors other than cost effectiveness in economic evaluations, such as equity or budget impact. The factors that prevent or encourage decision makers to use evidence from economic evaluations have been identified, but the relative importance of these factors to decision makers is uncertain.

Teaching and Assessing Reflective Writing in a Large Undergraduate Core Substantive Law Unit

The focus of higher education has shifted towards building students’ skills and self-awareness for future employment, in addition to developing substantive discipline knowledge. This means that there is an increasing need for embedding approaches to teaching and learning which provide a context for skills development and opportunities for students to prepare for the transition from legal education to professional practice. This chapter reports on a large (500-600 students) core undergraduate Equity law unit in an Australian University. ePortfolio has been embedded in Equity as a means of enabling students to document their reflections on their skill development in that unit. Students are taught, practice and are assessed on their teamwork and letter writing skills in the context of writing a letter of advice to a fictional client in response to a real world problem. Following submission of the team letter, students are asked to reflect on their skill development and document their reflections in ePortfolio. A scaffolded approach to teaching reflective writing is adopted using a blended model of delivery which combines face to face lectures and online resources, including an online module, facts sheets designed to guide students through the process of reflection by following the TARL model of reflection, and exemplars of reflective writing. Although students have engaged in the process of reflective writing in Equity for some years, in semester one 2011 assessment criteria were developed and the ePortfolio reflections were summatively assessed for the first time. The model of teaching and assessing reflective practice was evaluated in a range of ways by seeking feedback from students and academic staff responsible for implementing the model and asking them to reflect on their experiences. This chapter describes why skill development and reflective writing were embedded in the undergraduate law unit Equity; identify the teaching and learning approaches which were implemented to teach reflective writing to online and internal Equity students; explain the assessment processes; analyse the empirical evidence from evaluations; document the lessons learnt and discuss planned future improvements to the teaching and assessment strategies.

Power law distributions in entrepreneurship : implications for theory and research

A long-held assumption in entrepreneurship research is that normal (i.e., Gaussian) distributions characterize variables of interest for both theory and practice. We challenge this assumption by examining more than 12,000 nascent, young, and hyper-growth firms. Results reveal that variables which play central roles in resource-, cognition-, action-, and environment-based entrepreneurship theories exhibit highly skewed power law distributions, where a few outliers account for a disproportionate amount of the distribution's total output. Our results call for the development of new theory to explain and predict the mechanisms that generate these distributions and the outliers therein. We offer a research agenda, including a description of non-traditional methodological approaches, to answer this call.

Do we need a law to help people try experimental drugs?

People with life-threatening or incurable diseases may be willing to try experimental drugs and unproven treatments, but they face the risk of exploitation. Is the law the best avenue to ensure that they are protected while medical innovation is encouraged? Protection of vulnerable people is a thread running through many laws, in Australia and elsewhere. In medical law, for instance, children and people with impaired decision-making capacity warrant special attention. But what of the ordinary person diagnosed with a life-threatening disease? Such people are vulnerable to harm and potential exploitation when they seek access to innovative, experimental or unproven treatments that depart from the existing range of accepted medicine.

Reducing workplace safety incidents : bridging the gap between safety culture theory and practice

This thesis explored safety culture in a large Australasian construction and mining organisation, with a view to understanding how theory and practice can be integrated to improve safety culture and related outcomes within the industry. The research comprised three studies that investigated the relationship between safety culture, safety motivation, leadership and safety behaviour, and examined differences in perceptions of safety culture across the organisation. Research methodologies and samples included a modified Delphi method with safety leaders (n=41), a quantitative survey with a cross-section of the organisation (n=2,957), and group interviews with frontline supervisors and workers (n=29).

Class participation as a learning and assessment strategy in law : facilitating students’ engagement, skills development and deep learning

Assessment has widely been described as being ‘at the centre of the student experience’. It would be difficult to conceive of the modern teaching university without it. Assessment is accepted as one of the most important tools that an educator can deploy to influence both what and how students learn. Evidence suggests that how students allocate time and effort to tasks and to developing an understanding of the syllabus is affected by the method of assessment utilised and the weighting it is given. This is particularly significant in law schools where law students may be more preoccupied with achieving high grades in all courses than their counterparts from other disciplines. However, well-designed assessment can be seen as more than this. It can be a vehicle for encouraging students to learn and engage more broadly than with the minimums required to complete the assessment activity. In that sense assessment need not merely ‘drive’ learning, but can instead act as a catalyst for further learning beyond what a student had anticipated. In this article we reconsider the potential roles and benefits in legal education of a form of interactive classroom learning we term assessable class participation (‘ACP’), both as part of a pedagogy grounded in assessment and learning theory, and as a platform for developing broader autonomous approaches to learning amongst students. We also consider some of the barriers students can face in ACP and the ways in which teacher approaches to ACP can positively affect the socio-emotional climates in classrooms and thus reduce those barriers. We argue that the way in which a teacher facilitates ACP is critical to the ability to develop positive emotional and learning outcomes for law students, and for teachers themselves.

‘Works well with others’ : examining the different types of small group learning approaches and their implications for law student learning outcomes

In the current regulatory climate, there is increasing expectation that law schools will be able to demonstrate students’ acquisition of learning outcomes regarding collaboration skills. We argue that this is best achieved through a stepped and structured whole-of-curriculum approach to small group learning. ‘Group work’ provides deep learning and opportunities to develop professional skills, but these benefits are not always realised for law students. An issue is that what is meant by ‘group work’ is not always clear, resulting in a learning regime that may not support the attainment of desired outcomes. This paper describes different types of ‘group work', each associated with distinct learning outcomes. It suggests that ‘group work’ as an umbrella term to describe these types is confusing, as it provides little indication to students and teachers of the type of learning that is valued and is expected to take place. ‘Small group learning’ is a preferable general descriptor. Identifying different types of small group learning allows law schools to develop and demonstrate a scaffolded, sequential and incremental approach to fostering law students’ collaboration skills. To support learning and the acquisition of higherorder skills, different types of small group learning are more appropriate at certain stages of the program. This structured approach is consistent with social cognitive theory, which suggests that with the guidance of a supportive teacher, students can develop skills and confidence in one type of activity which then enhances motivation to participate in another.