The roses of success

Sometimes success can be detrimental to learning while failure can be good. What appears as a disaster can often lay the foundations for future success.

Usually, educators and students focus on building confidence through successful completion of learning tasks, summarised by Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. A positive feedback loop is established if learners are successful in mastering new ideas and skills. The problem is if teachers, trainers and instructors never challenge students to the fullest extent of their abilities, as this might also ensure overconfidence, slow progress and boredom.

We should not avoid the risk of failure; science is all about the possible risk of failure. Testable hypotheses have the potential to fail an experimental or computational test; ideas that are not testable are considered to be outside the realm of science. The occasional failure shows the limits and scope of an idea’s validity and enables us to advance scientific ideas.

There is a need to find the balance between challenge that extends students, and over-extension. The former results in greater and true confidence and ability, while the latter leads to catastrophic failure and crises of confidence. Education, like life and like all scientific endeavour is about taking responsible risks safely. When we cultivate the roses of success that grow from the ashes of disaster, we must not forget that roses have thorns, or that the occasional setback or failure is just as important for learning as a succession of successes.

Bush garden ethos in South Australia

The bush garden ethos in South Australia, notwithstanding the state's dearth of water, poor soils and Mediterranean climate, has been slow in evolving. Even today. the logical Mediterranean philosophical arguments of Trevor Nottle, expressed in Gardens of the Sun,' are passed over in favour of struggling or often over-watered gardens containing ubiquitous 'Iceberg' roses, an eclectic exotic collection of plants, and the odd umbrageous eucalypt.'

The gardens on Anlaby - a utopian dream

Anlaby Station is the oldest sheep stud in South Australia (SA) dating back to 1839. The gardens have been noted as significant exemplars, Beames & Whitehill (1992), Swinbourne (1982), and in Pastoral Homes of Australia (1911) published by The Pastoral Review, wherein Anlaby was described as “being of no particular beauty architecturally . But the gardens are unique.” The Anlaby property is on the SA State Heritage Register and the Anlaby Gardens are listed in the Oxford Companion to Australian Gardens (2002). The beginnings of Anlaby in 1839 are integral to the colonial expansion of the interior of South Australia. Anlaby at this time was a completely self-contained community within a sheep station containing a survival garden, much like a self- contained English manor-village. The process of land sales offered by the SA government enabled Anlaby to expand, wherein wealth flowed and gradually the survival garden style at Anlaby was transformed into an extensive decorative garden style. This enabled the garden to act as a backdrop for major South Australian society and public gatherings. The driving force behind the garden during its height was the fashionable plant trends in the United Kingdom. This is evidenced by the inclusion of an extensive stove house, grotto, roses and the Gardenesque style of plantings. Traditional English head gardeners were also employed to manage the garden. The realisation of the beauty of native plants was never allowed in the inner world of this landscape; it always remained on the perimeter. The owner’s vision of the garden was Utopian, however, due to climatic forces, the dream was not fully realised. The challenge now lies in preserving this Utopian dream for future generations. This paper considers the historical evolution of the property, its context as a historical exemplar and the challenges facing its future conservation having regard to Adelaide peri-urban, climate change, and differing owner economic circumstances.

An integrative review of how families are prepared for, and supported during withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment in intensive care

AIM: To conduct an integrative review on how nurses prepare families for and support families during withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments in intensive care.

BACKGROUND: End-of-life care is widely acknowledged as integral to the practice of intensive care. However, little is known about what happens after the decision to withdraw life-sustaining treatments has been made and how families are prepared for death and the dying process.

DESIGN: Integrative literature review.

DATA SOURCES: MEDLINE, CINAHL Plus, PsychINFO, PUBMED, Scopus, EMBASE and Web of Knowledge were searched for papers published between 2000 - May 2015.

REVIEW METHODS: A five stage review process, informed by Whittemore and Knafl's methodology was conducted. All papers were reviewed and quality assessment performed. Data were extracted, organised and analysed. Convergent qualitative thematic synthesis was used.

RESULTS: From an identified 479 papers, 24 papers were included in this review with a range of research approaches: qualitative (n=15); quantitative (n=4); mixed methods (n=2); case study (n=2); and discourse analysis (n=1). Thematic analysis revealed the nurses: equipped families for end of life through information provision and communication; managed the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments to meet family need; and continued care to build memories.

CONCLUSION: Greater understanding is needed of the language that can be used with families to describe death and dying in intensive care. Clearer conceptualisation of the relationship between the medically focussed withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments and patient/family centred end-of-life care is required making the nursing contribution at this time more visible.