The Rural Clinical Division: a student journey to rural medicine

Background: The University of Queensland has through an Australian Government initiative, established a Rural Clinical Division (RCD) at four regional sites in the southern and central Queensland. Over the fi rst four years of the existence of the RCD, an integrated package of innovative medical education has been developed. Method: The integrated aspects of the RCD program include: The Rural Medical Rotation: Every medical student undertakes an eight week rural rotation in Year 3. Year 3 and 4 MBBS - 100 students are currently spending one to two years in the rural school and demand is increasing. Interprofessional Education - Medical and Allied Health students attend lectures, seminars and workshops together and often share the same rural clinical placement. Rural health projects - allow students to undertake a project of benefi t to the rural community. Information Technology (IT) - the Clinical Discussion Board (CDB) and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) demonstrate the importance of IT to medical students in the 21st century. Changing the Model of Medical Education - The Leichhardt Community Attachment Placement (LCAP), is a pilot study that resulted in the addition of three interns to the rural workforce. All aspects of the RCD are evaluated with surveys using both qualitative and quantitative free response questions, completed by all students regularly throughout the academic year. Results: Measures of impact include: Student satisfaction and quality of teaching surveys – 86-91% of students improved their clinical skills and understanding across all rotations. Academic results and progress – RCD students out-perform their urban colleagues. Intent to work in rural areas – 90% of students reported a greater interest in rural medicine. Intern numbers – rural / regional intern placements are increasing. Conclusions: The RCD proves to be a site for innovations all designed to help reach our primary goal of fostering increased recruitment of a rural medical workforce.

Extending teaching and learning initiatives in the cross-disciplinary field of biotechnology

Our AUTC Biotechnology study (Phases 1 and 2) identified a range of areas that could benefit from a common approach by universities nationally. A national network of biotechnology educators needs to be solidified through more regular communication, biennial meetings, and development of methods for sharing effective teaching practices and industry placement strategies, for example. Our aims in this proposed study are to: a. Revisit the state of undergraduate biotechnology degree programs nationally to determine their rate of change in content, growth or shrinkage in student numbers (as the biotech industry has had its ups and downs in recent years), and sustainability within their institutions in light of career movements of key personnel, tightening budgets, and governmental funding priorities. b. Explore the feasibility of a range of initiatives to benefit university biotechnology education to determine factors such as how practical each one is, how much buy-in could be gained from potentially participating universities and industry counterparts, and how sustainable such efforts are. One of many such initiatives arising in our AUTC Biotech study was a national register of industry placements for final-year students. c. During scoping and feasibility study, to involve our colleagues who are teaching in biotechnology – and contributing disciplines. Their involvement is meant to yield not only meaningful insight into how to strengthen biotechnology teaching and learning but also to generate ‘buy-in’ on any initiatives that result from this effort.

Effect of ionic strength and clay mineralogy on Na-Ca exchange and the SAR-ESP relationship

The relationship between sodium adsorption ratio (SAR) and exchangeable sodium percentage (ESP) for all soils has traditionally been assumed to be similar to that developed by the United States Salinity Laboratory (USSL) in 1954. However, under certain conditions, this relationship has been shown not to be constant, but to vary with both ionic strength and clay mineralogy. We conducted a detailed experiment to determine the effect of ionic strength on the Na+-Ca2+ exchange of four clay minerals (kaolinite, illite, pyrophyllite, and montmorillonite), with results related to the diffuse double-layer (DDL) model. Clays in which external exchange sites dominated (kaolinite and pyrophyllite) tended to show an overall preference for Na+, with the magnitude of this preference increasing with decreasing ESP. For these external surfaces, increases in ionic strength were found to increase preference for Na+. Although illite (2:1 non-expanding mineral) was expected to be dominated by external surfaces, this clay displayed an overall preference for Ca2+, possibly indicating the opening of quasicrystals and the formation of internal exchange surfaces. For the expanding 2:1 clay, montmorillonite, Na+-Ca2+ exchange varied due to the formation of quasicrystals (and internal exchange surfaces) from individual clay platelets. At small ionic strength and large ESP, the clay platelets dispersed and were dominated by external exchange surfaces (displaying preference for Na+). However, as ionic strength increased and ESP decreased, quasicrystals (and internal exchange surfaces) formed, and preference for Ca2+ increased. Therefore, the relationship between SAR and ESP is not constant and should be determined directly for the soil of interest.

Moneyless business exchange - Practitioners' attitudes to business-to-business barter in Australia

In recent years, domestic business-to-business barter has become institutionalized as an alternative marketing exchange system in Australia, and elsewhere. This article reports the findings of a survey of 164 members of Australia's largest trade exchange, Bartercard There are few, if any, published empirical studies on this topic. This study is exploratory. Most firms surveyed are small firms in the services sectors. Although Bartercard has an extensive membership, trading within the system is limited with most members trading less than once per week and with barter transactions contributing less than 5% of their annual gross sales. The main benefits of membership include new customers and increased sales and networking opportunities. The main limitations include the limited functionality of the trade dollar limited trading opportunities, and practical trading difficulties. In selling, there appears to be no differential between the cash and trade prices, whereas trade dollars are discounted in purchasing. Participants acknowledge that business-to-business barter will remain and grow regardless of cyclical macroeconomic changes. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Inc.

The nurse lecturer role in clinical practice conceptualized: helping clinical teachers provide optimal student learning

Despite the fairly wide reporting in the literature of the ma ny roles of clinical supervision by the nursing teacher, little attention has been given to conceptualizing the relative priorities these roles take during the process of supervising nursing students in clinical practice. The purpose of this paper is to consider the manifestations and implications of conflicting roles when nurse lecturers undertake clinical supervision. Previously published research will provide working examples of issues in a conceptual framework for clinical teaching.

The efficacy of a universal school-based program to prevent adolescent depression

Evaluated whether a universal school-based program, designed to prevent depression in adolescents, could be effectively implemented within the constraints of the school environment. Participants were 260 Year 9 secondary school students. Students completed measures of depressive symptoms and hopelessness and were then assigned to 1 of 3 groups: (a) Resourceful Adolescent Program Adolescents (RAP A), an 11-session school-based resilience building program, as part of the school curriculum; (b) Resourceful Adolescent Program-Family (RAP-F), the same program as in RAP A, but in which each student's parents were also invited to participate in a 3-session parent program; and (c) Adolescent Watch, a comparison group in which adolescents simply completed the measures. The program was implemented with a high recruitment (88%), low attrition rate (5.8%), and satisfactory adherence to program protocol. Adolescents in either of the RAP programs reported significantly lower levels of depressive symptomatology and hopelessness at post-intervention and 10-month follow-up, compared with those in the comparison group. Adolescents also reported high satisfaction with the program. The study provides evidence for the efficacy of a school-based universal program designed to prevent depression in adolescence.

Charge ordering and antiferromagnetic exchange in layered molecular crystals of the theta type

We consider the electronic properties of layered molecular crystals of the type theta -D(2)A where A is an anion and D is a donor molecule such as bis-(ethylenedithia-tetrathiafulvalene) (BEDT-TTF), which is arranged in the theta -type pattern within the layers. We argue that the simplest strongly correlated electron model that can describe the rich phase diagram of these materials is the extended Hubbard model on the square lattice at one-quarter filling. In the limit where the Coulomb repulsion on a single site is large, the nearest-neighbor Coulomb repulsion V plays a crucial role. When V is much larger than the intermolecular hopping integral t the ground state is an insulator with charge ordering. In this phase antiferromagnetism arises due to a novel fourth-order superexchange process around a plaquette on the square lattice. We argue that the charge ordered phase is destroyed below a critical nonzero value V, of the order of t. Slave-boson theory is used to explicitly demonstrate this for the SU(N) generalization of the model, in the large-N limit. We also discuss the relevance of the model to the all-organic family beta-(BEDT-TTF)(2)SF5YSO3 where Y=CH2CF2, CH2, CHF.

Adolescent depressive symptomatology: Improve schools or help students?

Despite the increasing interest in programs designed to improve the social ecology of schools, surprisingly little is known about whether differences between schools influence student mental health. This 3-year prospective, naturalistic study examines the school effect on adolescent depressive symptomatology (measured by the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, CES-D) among 2,489 students from 25 Australian high schools. Multilevel modelling techniques (HLM) formed the basis of the statistical analyses, There were statistically significant school effects on students' depressive symptomatology; however, these were much smaller than expected. Nearly all of the variation in CES-D depression scores was found to be at the student level, indicating that the potential mental health gains from reducing risk factors in school social environments may be extremely limited and have little effect on student depressive symptomatology.

Undergraduate student experience in dental service delivery in rural South Australia: An analysis of costs and benefits

Background, Rural experience for dental students can provide valuable clinical education, change attitudes to rural practice, and make a valuable contribution to clinical service provision. The aim of this paper is to assess the costs and benefits of service delivery by students through rural training programmes Methods: Groups of two students worked in the public dental clinics in adjacent rural centres where there had been long-term difficulties in recruiting staff. The costs and benefits of the programme were assessed by the impact on waiting lists, the total cost per patient of, a course of care and by the marginal cost of adding service provision by students to existing arrangements. Results: The total costs of emergency and complete treatment provided by students were greater than the costs of treatment provided by public-sector dentists but less than the costs of private providers treating public patients. However, the value of services were greater when care was provided by students or private providers and the marginal cost of students providing services was 50-70 per cent of the cost of care provided by public dentists. Conclusion: This assessment suggests that the service benefits achieved compliment the primary objective of influencing the attitude of students to rural practice.

Qualitative assessment of stock prices listed on the Sao Paulo stock exchange: An approach from the perspective of homogeneity analysis

The stock market suffers uncertain relations throughout the entire negotiation process, with different variables exerting direct and indirect influence on stock prices. This study focuses on the analysis of certain aspects that may influence these values offered by the capital market, based on the Brazil Index of the Sao Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa), which selects 100 stocks among the most traded on Bovespa in terms of number of trades and financial volume. The selected variables are characterized by the companies` activity area and the business volume in the month of data collection, i.e. April/2007. This article proposes an analysis that joins the accounting view of the stock price variables that can be influenced with the use of multivariate qualitative data analysis. Data were explored through Correspondence Analysis (Anacor) and Homogeneity Analysis (Homals). According to the research, the selected variables are associated with the values presented by the stocks, which become an internal control instrument and a decision-making tool when it comes to choosing investments.

Real exchange rate and elasticity of labour supply in a balance-of-payments-constrained macrodynamics

A macrodynamic model is proposed in which the real exchange rate and the elasticity of labour supply interact defining different trajectories of growth and income distribution in a developing economy. Growth depends on imports of capital goods which are paid with exports (there are no capital flows) and hence is constrained by equilibrium in current account. The role of the elasticity of labour supply is to prevent the real exchange rate from appreciating as the economy grows, thereby sustaining international competitiveness. The model allows for endogenous technological change and considers the impact of migration from the subsistence to the modern sector on the cumulative (Kaldor-Verdoorn) process of learning.

Analysis of Approaches to Controllership in Mater`s Thesis from Post-graduate Programs in Accounting Sciences

The objective of the Study is to analyze approaches in master`s thesis in Brazilian Post-Graduate Programs in Accounting Sciences in relation to Controllership, in terms of their conceptual, procedural and organizational aspects, as proposed by Borinelli (2006). The research is descriptive and it uses a quantitative approach. The sample consists of 26 master`s thesis which have the word ""Controllership"" in their titles. Resulting from analysis, in Perspective I (conceptual aspects), in which the elements of definition, object of study and relationship with other sciences were referenced, consensus among authors of the master`s thesis was not verified. In Perspective II (procedural aspects), which deals with activities and functions of Controllership by means of how they materialize as areas of knowledge within organizations, it was observed that the approach in the master`s thesis is quite differentiated in terms of the scope of activities. In relation to Perspective III (organizational aspects), there is also no consensus about what constitutes typical Controllership activities, but master`s thesis do include in the definition of Controllership the idea that it is a service or function of information. It was concluded that the approach to controllership, in terms of its conceptual, procedural and organizational aspects is similar to the elements proposed by Borinelli (2006).