Validation and consistency in the application of a trauma team activation system at a level 1 trauma centre

- The RAH was activated over 2500 trauma calls in 2009. This figure is over twice the number of calls put out by similar services. - Many trauma calls (in particular L2 trauma calls) from the existing system do not warrant activation of the trauma team - Sometimes trauma calls are activated for nontrauma reasons (eg rapid access to radiology, departmental pressures etc) - The excess of trauma calls has several deleterious effects particularly on time management for the trauma service staff: ward rounds/tertiary survey rounds, education, quality improvement, research

Valuing student and community voices in the university : action research as a framework for community service-learning

The Community Service-learning Lab (the Lab) was initiated as a university-wide service-learning experience at an Australian university. The Lab engages students, academics, and key community organisations in interdisciplinary action research projects to support student learning and to explore complex and ongoing problems nominated by the community partners. The current study uses feedback from the first offering of the Lab and focuses on exploring student experiences of the service learning project using an action research framework. Student reflections on this experience have revealed some positive outcomes of the Lab such as an appreciation for positive and strengths-based change. These outcomes are corroborated by collected reflections from community partners and academics. The students also identified challenges balancing the requirements for assessment and their goals to serve the community partner’s needs. This feedback has provided vital information for the academic team, highlighting the difficulties in balancing the agenda of the academic framework and the desire to give students authentic experiences.

Usability extensions for the worklet service

The YAWL Worklet Service is an effective approach to facilitating dynamic flexibility and exception handling in workflow processes. Recent additions to the Service extend its capabilities through a programming interface that provides easier access to rules storage and evaluation, and an event server that notifies listening servers and applications when exceptions are detected, which together serve enhance the functionality and accessibility of the Service's features and expand its usability to new potential domains.

Detecting distributed Denial-of-Service attacks and Flash Events

This thesis investigates and develops techniques for accurately detecting Internet-based Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks where an adversary harnesses the power of thousands of compromised machines to disrupt the normal operations of a Web-service provider, resulting in significant down-time and financial losses. This thesis also develops methods to differentiate these attacks from similar-looking benign surges in web-traffic known as Flash Events (FEs). This thesis also addresses an intrinsic challenge in research associated with DDoS attacks, namely, the extreme scarcity of public domain datasets (due to legal and privacy issues) by developing techniques to realistically emulate DDoS attack and FE traffic.

Something’s coming, something good: Identifying TPACK competence in pre-service teachers’ analyses of learning objects

There is a song at the beginning of the musical, West Side Story, where the character Tony sings that “something’s coming, something good.” The song is an anthem of optimism, brimming with promise. This paper is about the long-held promise of information and communication technology (ICT) to transform teaching and learning, to modernise the learning environment of the classroom, and to create a new digital pedagogy. But much of our experience to date in the schooling sector tells more of resistance and reaction than revolution, of more of the same but with a computer in the corner and of ICT activities as unwelcome time-fillers/time-wasters. Recently, a group of pre-service teachers in a postgraduate primary education degree in an Australian university were introduced to learning objects in an ICT immersion program. Their analyses and related responses, as recorded in online journals, have here been interpreted in terms of TPACK (Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge). Against contemporary observation, these students generally displayed high levels of competence and highly positive dispositions of students to the integration of ICT in their future classrooms. In short, they displayed the same optimism and confidence as the fictional “Tony” in believing that something good was coming.

Rethinking the literacy capabilities of pre-service primary teachers in testing times

As a group of committed literacy teacher educators from five universities across three Australian states, the authors bring professional critique to the problematic issue of what counts in current and possible future measures of pre-service teachers’ literacy capacity. In times when normalising models of literacy assessment ignore innovative developments in technologies, we provide an example of what is happening at the ‘chalk-face’ of literacy teacher education. This paper describes a study that demonstrates how responsible alignment of teacher accreditation requirements with a scholarly impetus to incorporate digital literacies to prepare pre-service teachers will help address changing educational needs and practices (AITSL 2012; Gillen & Barton 2010; Hattie 2003; Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine & Haywood 2011; Klein 2006; Masny & Cole 2012; OECD 2011).

Pragmatism and precision : psychology in the service of civil litigation

While forensic psychology is commonly associated with the criminal and family law domains, its ambit to offer skills and knowledge at the legal interface also makes it particularly suited to the civil law domain. At this time, civil law is arguably the least represented legislative area in terms of psychological research and professional commentary. However, it is also a broad area, with its very breadth providing scope for research consideration, as urged by Greene. The purposes of this article are (1) to review the broad role of the psychologist in the conduct of civil litigation matters in Australia, (2) to assist the novice to the area by indicating a non-exhaustive list of potentially ambiguous terms and concepts common to the conduct of professional practice, and; (3) to highlight, as an example, one area of practice not only where legal direction demands professional pragmatism but also where opportunity arises for psychological research to vitally address a major social issue.

Quality assessment of service bundles for governmental one-stop portals : a literature review

Service bundles, in the context of e-government, are used to group services together that relate to a certain citizen need. These bundles can then be presented on a governmental one-stop portal to structure the available service offerings according to citizen expectations. In order to ensure that citizens utilise the one-stop portal and comprised service bundles for future transactions, the quality of these service bundles needs to be managed and maximised accordingly. Consequently, models and tools that focus on assessing service bundle quality play an important role, when it comes to increasing or retaining usage behaviour of citizens. This study focuses on providing a rigorous and structured literature review of e-government outlets with regards to their coverage of service bundle quality and e-service quality themes. The study contributes to academia and practice by providing a framework that allows structuring and classifying existing studies relevant for the assessment of quality for government portals. Furthermore, this study provides insights into the status quo of quality models that can be used by governments to assess the quality of their service bundles. Directions for future research and limitations of the present study are provided as well.

Queensland police service : an evaluation of HealthStart 2012

The HS program consists of a voluntary health screening and personalised feedback (via a website) which incorporates physical measurements, psychological stress assessment and blood tests. The following report describes the results of a research project that evaluated the effectiveness of the QPS-HS program and examines the health benefits it offers its participants. This report has three main areas that correspond to the research questions and includes three primary aims: 1.Review the literature pertaining to the health, social and economic value of wellness programs in workplaces. In particular, we reviewed policing worksites and other safety sensitive workplaces, to understand best-practice wellness programming and return on investment, in terms of value to employees, social value to the community, and economic value to employers; 2.Evaluate health outcomes of participants in the HS program, including physical measurements, such as blood tests and psychological well-being. These measures were to form an outcome evaluation and assess the effectiveness of the HS program in positively impacting physical and psychological health of HS participants; and 3.Assess employee awareness and perceptions of the HS program for a process evaluation.

Building an augmented map for road risk assessment

Recent road safety statistics show that the decades-long fatalities decreasing trend is stopping and stagnating. Statistics further show that crashes are mostly driven by human error, compared to other factors such as environmental conditions and mechanical defects. Within human error, the dominant error source is perceptive errors, which represent about 50% of the total. The next two sources are interpretation and evaluation, which accounts together with perception for more than 75% of human error related crashes. Those statistics show that allowing drivers to perceive and understand their environment better, or supplement them when they are clearly at fault, is a solution to a good assessment of road risk, and, as a consequence, further decreasing fatalities. To answer this problem, currently deployed driving assistance systems combine more and more information from diverse sources (sensors) to enhance the driver's perception of their environment. However, because of inherent limitations in range and field of view, these systems' perception of their environment remains largely limited to a small interest zone around a single vehicle. Such limitations can be overcomed by increasing the interest zone through a cooperative process. Cooperative Systems (CS), a specific subset of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), aim at compensating for local systems' limitations by associating embedded information technology and intervehicular communication technology (IVC). With CS, information sources are not limited to a single vehicle anymore. From this distribution arises the concept of extended or augmented perception. Augmented perception allows extending an actor's perceptive horizon beyond its "natural" limits not only by fusing information from multiple in-vehicle sensors but also information obtained from remote sensors. The end result of an augmented perception and data fusion chain is known as an augmented map. It is a repository where any relevant information about objects in the environment, and the environment itself, can be stored in a layered architecture. This thesis aims at demonstrating that augmented perception has better performance than noncooperative approaches, and that it can be used to successfully identify road risk. We found it was necessary to evaluate the performance of augmented perception, in order to obtain a better knowledge on their limitations. Indeed, while many promising results have already been obtained, the feasibility of building an augmented map from exchanged local perception information and, then, using this information beneficially for road users, has not been thoroughly assessed yet. The limitations of augmented perception, and underlying technologies, have not be thoroughly assessed yet. Most notably, many questions remain unanswered as to the IVC performance and their ability to deliver appropriate quality of service to support life-saving critical systems. This is especially true as the road environment is a complex, highly variable setting where many sources of imperfections and errors exist, not only limited to IVC. We provide at first a discussion on these limitations and a performance model built to incorporate them, created from empirical data collected on test tracks. Our results are more pessimistic than existing literature, suggesting IVC limitations have been underestimated. Then, we develop a new CS-applications simulation architecture. This architecture is used to obtain new results on the safety benefits of a cooperative safety application (EEBL), and then to support further study on augmented perception. At first, we confirm earlier results in terms of crashes numbers decrease, but raise doubts on benefits in terms of crashes' severity. In the next step, we implement an augmented perception architecture tasked with creating an augmented map. Our approach is aimed at providing a generalist architecture that can use many different types of sensors to create the map, and which is not limited to any specific application. The data association problem is tackled with an MHT approach based on the Belief Theory. Then, augmented and single-vehicle perceptions are compared in a reference driving scenario for risk assessment,taking into account the IVC limitations obtained earlier; we show their impact on the augmented map's performance. Our results show that augmented perception performs better than non-cooperative approaches, allowing to almost tripling the advance warning time before a crash. IVC limitations appear to have no significant effect on the previous performance, although this might be valid only for our specific scenario. Eventually, we propose a new approach using augmented perception to identify road risk through a surrogate: near-miss events. A CS-based approach is designed and validated to detect near-miss events, and then compared to a non-cooperative approach based on vehicles equiped with local sensors only. The cooperative approach shows a significant improvement in the number of events that can be detected, especially at the higher rates of system's deployment.

Investigating the impact of a leadership development program for nurse unit managers on the satisfaction of nursing staff

Background and significance: Nurses' job dissatisfaction is associated with negative nursing and patient outcomes. One of the most powerful reasons for nurses to stay in an organisation is satisfaction with leadership. However, nurses are frequently promoted to leadership positions without appropriate preparation for the role. Although a number of leadership programs have been described, none have been tested for effectiveness, using a randomised control trial methodology. Aims: The aims of this research were to develop an evidence based leadership program and to test its effectiveness on nurse unit managers' (NUMs') and nursing staff's (NS's) job satisfaction, and on the leader behaviour scores of nurse unit managers. Methods: First, the study used a comprehensive literature review to examine the evidence on job satisfaction, leadership and front-line manager competencies. From this evidence a summary of leadership practices was developed to construct a two component leadership model. The components of this model were then combined with the evidence distilled from previous leadership development programs to develop a Leadership Development Program (LDP). This evidence integrated the program's design, its contents, teaching strategies and learning environment. Central to the LDP were the evidence-based leadership practices associated with increasing nurses' job satisfaction. A randomised controlled trial (RCT) design was employed for this research to test the effectiveness of the LDP. A RCT is one of the most powerful tools of research and the use of this method makes this study unique, as a RCT has never been used previously to evaluate any leadership program for front-line nurse managers. Thirty-nine consenting nurse unit managers from a large tertiary hospital were randomly allocated to receive either the leadership program or only the program's written information about leadership. Demographic baseline data were collected from participants in the NUM groups and the nursing staff who reported to them. Validated questionnaires measuring job satisfaction and leader behaviours were administered at baseline, at three months after the commencement of the intervention and at six months after the commencement of the intervention, to the nurse unit managers and to the NS. Independent and paired t-tests were used to analyse continuous outcome variables and Chi Square tests were used for categorical data. Results: The study found that the nurse unit managers' overall job satisfaction score was higher at 3-months (p = 0.016) and at 6-months p = 0.027) post commencement of the intervention in the intervention group compared with the control group. Similarly, at 3-months testing, mean scores in the intervention group were higher in five of the six "positive" sub-categories of the leader behaviour scale when compared to the control group. There was a significant difference in one sub-category; effectiveness, p = 0.015. No differences were observed in leadership behaviour scores between groups by 6-months post commencement of the intervention. Over time, at three month and six month testing there were significant increases in four transformational leader behaviour scores and in one positive transactional leader behaviour scores in the intervention group. Over time at 3-month testing, there were significant increases in the three leader behaviour outcome scores, however at 6-months testing; only one of these leader behaviour outcome scores remained significantly increased. Job satisfaction scores were not significantly increased between the NS groups at three months and at six months post commencement of the intervention. However, over time within the intervention group at 6-month testing there was a significant increase in job satisfaction scores of NS. There were no significant increases in NUM leader behaviour scores in the intervention group, as rated by the nursing staff who reported to them. Over time, at 3-month testing, NS rated nurse unit managers' leader behaviour scores significantly lower in two leader behaviours and two leader behaviour outcome scores. At 6-month testing, over time, one leader behaviour score was rated significantly lower and the nontransactional leader behaviour was rated significantly higher. Discussion: The study represents the first attempt to test the effectiveness of a leadership development program (LDP) for nurse unit managers using a RCT. The program's design, contents, teaching strategies and learning environment were based on a summary of the literature. The overall improvement in role satisfaction was sustained for at least 6-months post intervention. The study's results may reflect the program's evidence-based approach to developing the LDP, which increased the nurse unit managers' confidence in their role and thereby their job satisfaction. Two other factors possibly contributed to nurse unit managers' increased job satisfaction scores. These are: the program's teaching strategies, which included the involvement of the executive nursing team of the hospital, and the fact that the LDP provided recognition of the importance of the NUM role within the hospital. Consequently, participating in the program may have led to nurse unit managers feeling valued and rewarded for their service; hence more satisfied. Leadership behaviours remaining unchanged between groups at the 6 months data collection time may relate to the LDP needing to be conducted for a longer time period. This is suggested because within the intervention group, over time, at 3 and 6 months there were significant increases in self-reported leader behaviours. The lack of significant changes in leader behaviour scores between groups may equally signify that leader behaviours require different interventions to achieve change. Nursing staff results suggest that the LDP's design needs to consider involving NS in the program's aims and progress from the outset. It is also possible that by including regular feedback from NS to the nurse unit managers during the LDP that NS's job satisfaction and their perception of nurse unit managers' leader behaviours may alter. Conclusion/Implications: This study highlights the value of providing an evidence-based leadership program to nurse unit managers to increase their job satisfaction. The evidence based leadership program increased job satisfaction but its effect on leadership behaviour was only seen over time. Further research is required to test interventions which attempt to change leader behaviours. Also further research on NS' job satisfaction is required to test the indirect effects of LDP on NS whose nurse unit managers participate in LDPs.

Shifting from asset dominant to service centric delivery systems: engaging users and communities

Research and practice has observed a shift toward service-oriented approaches that depend on input from users and community as co-producers of services. Yet, in delivering public infrastructure the focus is still on assets rather than services. The contribution of external stakeholders in the co-production of public services is still limited. Using the Policy Delphi with a panel of experts, we found that although practitioners understand the need for asset management to follow the service approach, guidelines and policies still lack that service-centric perspective. Findings revealed a range of obstacles to effective service delivery, related to the sub-optimal involvement of stakeholders’, asymmetric levels of power, the lack of accountability, transparency and availability of government, and the lack of genuine consultations between government and stakeholder groups. The paper concludes by offering directions and strategies for asset managers and policymakers to support and reconnect disengaged government-citizen relations for optimal service delivery outcomes in asset management.

The challenge of integrating climate change adaptation and disaster risk management : lessons from bushfire and flood inquiries in an Australian context

Emergency management and climate change adaptation will increasingly challenge all levels of government because of three main factors. First, Australia is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, particularly through the increasing frequency, duration and/or intensity of disasters such as floods and bushfires. Second, the system of government that divides powers by function and level can often act as a barrier to a well-integrated response. Third, policymaking processes struggle to cope with such complex inter-jurisdictional issues. This paper discusses these factors and explores the nature of the challenge for Australian governments. Investigations into the 2009 Victorian bushfires, the 2011 Perth Hills bushfires, and the 2011 Brisbane floods offer an indication of the challenges ahead and it is argued that there is a need to: improve community engagement and communication; refocus attention on resilience; improve interagency communication and collaboration; and, develop institutional arrangements that support continual improvement and policy learning. These findings offer an opportunity for improving responses as well as a starting point for integrating disaster risk management and climate change adaptation policies. The paper is based on the preliminary findings of an NCCARF funded research project: The Right Tool for the Job: Achieving climate change adaptation outcomes through improved disaster management policies, planning and risk management strategies involving Griffith University and RMIT. It should be noted from the outset that the purpose of this research project is not to criticise the actions of emergency service workers and volunteers who do an incredible job under extreme circumstances, often risking their own lives in the process. The aim is simply to offer emergency management agencies the opportunity to step back and rethink their overall approach to the challenge they face in the light of the impacts of climate change.

A pre-post evaluation of an ambulatory nutrition support service for malnourished patients post hospital discharge: a pilot study

Introduction Malnutrition is common among hospitalised patients, with poor follow-up of nutrition support post-discharge. Published studies on the efficacy of ambulatory nutrition support (ANS) for malnourished patients post-discharge are scarce. The aims of this study were to evaluate the rate of dietetics follow-up of malnourished patients post-discharge, before (2008) and after (2010) implementation of a new ANS service, and to evaluate nutritional outcomes post-implementation. Materials and Methods Consecutive samples of 261 (2008) and 163 (2010) adult inpatients referred to dietetics and assessed as malnourished using Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) were enrolled. All subjects received inpatient nutrition intervention and dietetic outpatient clinic follow-up appointments. For the 2010 cohort, ANS was initiated to provide telephone follow-up and home visits for patients who failed to attend the outpatient clinic. Subjective Global Assessment, body weight, quality of life (EQ-5D VAS) and handgrip strength were measured at baseline and five months post-discharge. Paired t-test was used to compare pre- and post-intervention results. Results In 2008, only 15% of patients returned for follow-up with a dietitian within four months post-discharge. After implementation of ANS in 2010, the follow-up rate was 100%. Mean weight improved from 44.0 ± 8.5kg to 46.3 ± 9.6kg, EQ-5D VAS from 61.2 ± 19.8 to 71.6 ± 17.4 and handgrip strength from 15.1 ± 7.1 kg force to 17.5 ± 8.5 kg force; p<0.001 for all. Seventy-four percent of patients improved in SGA score. Conclusion Ambulatory nutrition support resulted in significant improvements in follow-up rate, nutritional status and quality of life of malnourished patients post-discharge.

A social matching system : using implicit and explicit information for personalized recommendation in online dating service

Online dating websites enable a specific form of social networking and their efficiency can be increased by supporting proactive recommendations based on participants' preferences with the use of data mining. This research develops two-way recommendation methods for people-to-people recommendation for large online social networks such as online dating networks. This research discovers the characteristics of the online dating networks and utilises these characteristics in developing efficient people-to-people recommendation methods. Methods developed support improved recommendation accuracy, can handle data sparsity that often comes with large data sets and are scalable for handling online networks with a large number of users.