Stress, burnout and coping strategies in the emergency and intensive care hospital departments

Doctors and nurses working at the accident and emergency (A&E), and intensive care departments are at risk of burnout. They often spend substantial time in intense interactions with other people, centered on patients? health problems (physical, psychological and social) that may lead to feelings of anger, anxiety and frustration, and eventually to burnout. Burnout is a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment (Maslach & Jackson, 1981) The purpose of this chapter is to assess work stressors, burnout and stress-coping mechanisms among doctors and nurses at the A&E and intensive care departments. A quantitative design using the survey approach was used to collect data from a sample of 200 participants with a response rate of 71% (n=154) Work stressors were associated with burnout in both doctors and nurses. Workload was the most salient work stressor in the sample. Nurses experienced more stress (M=1.5, SD=0.4) than doctors (M=1.2, SD=0.4) in all the work stressor variables examined. The A&E department was reported as more stressful than the intensive care department. Avoidance-oriented and task-oriented coping were the most and the least frequently reported coping strategies respectively. Additionally, only emotion-oriented coping strategy was significantly different between doctors and nurses, and this strategy was also significantly positively correlated with all the variables in the adapted nursing stress scale, and the three burnout variables. Death and dying was most strongly correlated with emotion-oriented coping. This chapter provides an assessment of stress, burnout and coping experienced by both doctors and nurses within the A&E and intensive care departments. Methods that may mitigate stress in these environments may be adequate staffing, supportive management, stress management programs, as well as improvement in communication strategies between doctors and nurses.

Relational work in synchronous text-based CMC of virtual teams

Based on close examinations of instant message (IM) interactions, this chapter argues that an interactional sociolinguistic approach to computer-mediated language use could provide explanations for phenomena that previously could not be accounted for in computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA). Drawing on the theoretical framework of relational work (Locher, 2006), the analysis focuses on non-task oriented talk and its function in forming and establishing communication norms in the team, as well as micro-level phenomena, such as hesitation, backchannel signals and emoticons. The conclusions of this preliminary research suggest that the linguistic strategies used for substituting audio-visual signals are strategically used in discursive functions and have an important role in relational work

Taller de Escritura Creativa para el desarrollo de la Competencia Literaria en Brasil

Este artículo describe una propuesta de innovación docente basada en la corriente educativa de la Educación para el Desarrollo, así como la mejora de Competencia Comunicativa en L2 y de las Competencias Literarias e Interculturales por medio de un taller diseñado para tal fin. El propósito de este artículo es doble: por un lado mostrar las posibilidades que ofrece el Taller de Escritura e Ilustración Creativa para el desarrollo de las Competencias Literaria, Intercultural y Comunicativa en L2. Se muestra cómo el taller cumple con las directrices marcadas por la Educación para el Desarrollo que se describe en el marco teórico. El segundo objetivo es narrar cómo se han organizado, coordinado e implementado el Taller de Escritura e Ilustración Creativa en la Universidade Federal do Amazonas en Manaos (Brasil), basándose en la metodología del aprendizaje basado en tareas, y cómo se ha conseguido (i) promover la creación de puentes para la consolidación de las relaciones bilaterales entre universidades; (ii) motivar la colaboración científica con los centros brasileños que cuentan con un departamento de español, y (iii) emplear y crear herramientas que permitan incluir la Educación para el Desarrollo.

Konflikter, ogräs eller frön? : Arbetsplatskonflikter utifrån ett ledarskapsperspektiv

Det gemensamma intresset för konflikter grundade idén att studera väl ansedda ledares perspektiv på arbetsplatskonflikter och hur dessa ledare löser konflikter konstruktivt. I grunden finns en undran om väl ansedda ledare har förmågor som gör att de löser konflikter mer konstruktivt. Konflikter utgör en stor del av en ledares arbetstid. Konflikter kan förmodligen inte undvikas men hur konflikter hanteras är avgörande för att en organisation och dess anställda skall mogna och utvecklas. Det har utövats forskning inom konflikthantering utifrån ett ledarskapsperspektiv men de studierna har haft en kvantitativ ansats. Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur väl ansedda chefer ser på arbetsplatskonflikter och hur dessa chefer hanterar konflikter. Ett delsyfte är att erhålla kunskap om vilka metoder ansedda ledare använder i konflikthantering. För att besvara syftet har följande frågeställningar använts: Vilka typer av arbetsplatskonflikter uppstår i en organisation? Vad är avgörande om konflikter blir konstruktiva eller destruktiva? Vad har ledarskapet för inverkan på konflikthantering och hur ska ledaren ta sig an konflikter? Vilka förmågor och egenskaper har ledare som hanterar konflikter effektivt? Studien grundar sig på en kvalitativ ansats med semistrukturerade intervjuer som insamlingsmetod. Det införskaffade materialet kodades och tematiserades. Resultaten analyserades med hjälp av teoriramen. Slutligen användes Rahims (2002) teori om conflict management i diskussion då det i resultatet framkom stöd för modellen, dock med en utveckling vilket presenteras i slutsatsen. I studiens analys framkom att ledare som hanterar konflikter konstruktivt behärskar tre huvudområden. Dessa förmågor är människoorienterad, uppgiftsorienterad och lärande- och kulturorienterad. Väl ansedda ledare manövrerar emellan dessa förmågor beroende på situation. I studiens resultat framkom också att undvikande och dominant ledarskapsbeteende skapar barriärer i konflikthantering.

Consumer reactions to different forms of CSR communication

Aim Companies around the world are making sizeable investments into CSR initiatives, but ensuring appropriate returns on these investments remains challenging. Therefore, it is of value to study the communication of corporate CSR efforts. The purpose of this study is to investigate how consumers react to rational versus emotional message strategies in CSR communication. Two categories of consumer reactions were considered: trust and purchase intention. Methods Qualitative research with four focus groups was conducted. Participants discussed three texts regarding a CSR project, utilising a rational, emotional and a hybrid rational-emotional message strategy respectively. The conversations focused on trust towards the communication and purchase intention. Results Trust - All of the respondents viewed the rational text over the emotional text as more trustworthy, but they most positively reacted to the combined strategy. Rational information was viewed as more reliable by many participants, with emotional cues adding value by better holding their attention. Purchase intention – Participants more positively reacted to the rational CSR communication strategy, compared to an emotional strategy. For approximately half of respondents, the hybrid strategy targeting both rational and emotional cues was the most successful in terms of purchase intention. Upon further analysis, it was identified that this division in respondents’ opinions may reflect a gender difference, where men portrayed the more task oriented and women the socially sensitive consumers. Conclusions The findings support previous research championing the use of rational strategies over emotional strategies in CSR communication. A number of managerial implications that can be used by companies in order to better communicate their CSR activities and increase returns on CSR-related investments are provided.

A operacionalização do programa de matemática em vigor no 1.º Ciclo do Ensino Básico pelos professores do concelho de Machico

Trabalho de projeto apresentado à Escola Superior de Educação de Paula Frassinetti para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciências da Educação Especialização em Supervisão Pedagógica

La cultura como eje transversal en el aprendizaje basado en tareas: reflexiones y sugerencias para la enseñanza del español como segunda lengua

Se presenta un modelo de enseñanza del español como segunda lengua o como lengua extranjera mediante la metodología del aprendizaje basado en tareas (ABT). Se enlaza tal metodología con la inclusión del tema de la cultura como eje transversal. Se describe como ejemplo una tarea de una unidad de determinado curso, a fin de que el docente de Español perciba los alcances del plan propuesto.A model of Spanish as a second/foreign language teaching using a task-based methodology is presented here. Likewise, culture is included as a cross-curricular topic. An example is given of a task which is part of a unit of a specific course, with the purpose of enabling an instructor of Spanish to visualize the scope of the plan proposed here.

Consolidating service enginering perspectives

Similar with definition of 'service', the term 'service engineering' (SE) can be broadly defined based on the context and the referring domain. This paper explores the evolutionary definition of SE, with later emphasis on IT/IS perspective. The paper begin with general definition of service and service engineering before elaborating IT perspectives on IT. A review on service orientation, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Service Oriented Methodology (SOM) is also provided in the final part, before concluded with conclusion and suggested future work. In a more general perspective of Service Science, SE is defined as a process of developing newly specified business service, while in IT perspective SE alternately defined as applying service-orientation approach in an enterprise and its IT infrastructure, closely related with SOA approach. Therefore, to consolidate both perspectives, SE can be applied for designing specific business services, as the original definition, combined with bottom up, or meet-in-the-middle approach in the conception of software services during the analysis.

The applicability of self-regulation theories in sport: Goal adjustment capacities, stress appraisals, coping, and well-being among athletes

We examined a model, informed by self-regulation theories from the health psychology literature, which included goal adjustment capacities, appraisals of challenge and threat, coping, and well-being. Two-hundred and twelve athletes from the United Kingdom (n 147)= or Australia (n = 65), who played team (n = 135) or individual sports (n = 77), and competed at international (n = 7), national (n = 11), county (n = 67), club (n = 84), or beginner (n = 43) levels participated in this study. Participants completed measures of goal adjustment capacities and stress appraisals two days before competing. Athletes also completed coping and well-being questionnaires within three hours of their competition ending.The way an athlete responded to an unattainable goal was associated with his or her well-being in the period leading up to and including the competition. Goal reengagement positively predicted well-being, whereas goal disengagement negatively predicted well-being. Further, goal reengagement was positively associated with challenge appraisals, which in turn was linked to task-oriented coping, and task-oriented coping positively associated with well-being.When highly-valued goals become unattainable, consultants and coaches could encourage athletes to generate alternative approaches to achieve the same goal or help them develop a completely new goal in order to promote well-being among athletes.

System oriented neural networks - Problem formulation, methodology and application

A novel methodology is proposed for the development of neural network models for complex engineering systems exhibiting nonlinearity. This method performs neural network modeling by first establishing some fundamental nonlinear functions from a priori engineering knowledge, which are then constructed and coded into appropriate chromosome representations. Given a suitable fitness function, using evolutionary approaches such as genetic algorithms, a population of chromosomes evolves for a certain number of generations to finally produce a neural network model best fitting the system data. The objective is to improve the transparency of the neural networks, i.e. to produce physically meaningful

Secure Tropos: A Security-Oriented Extension of the Tropos methodology

Although security plays an important role in the development of multiagent systems, a careful analysis of software development processes shows that the definition of security requirements is, usually, considered after the design of the system. One of the reasons is the fact that agent oriented software engineering methodologies have not integrated security concerns throughout their developing stages. The integration of security concerns during the whole range of the development stages can help towards the development of more secure multiagent systems. In this paper we introduce extensions to the Tropos methodology to enable it to model security concerns throughout the whole development process. A description of the new concepts and modelling activities is given along with a discussion on how these concepts and modelling activities are integrated to the current stages of Tropos. A real life case study from the health and social care sector is used to illustrate the approach.

Service engineering based on service oriented architecture methodology

Service Engineering (SE) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) originally reside on different plateaus of discipline. SE is defined as a set of activity introducing a new business service, while SOA is a technical approach to redefine an enterprise business processes as a set of IT enabled services. This paper proposes a SOA embedded SE framework as a comprehensive approach in re-defining business service and its IT implementation. After an introduction, a review of existing SE frameworks and SOA methodologies is presented in the paper. Afterward, a complete SE framework is proposed with several results on early case studies. A survey results are then presented to prove the usability and benefit of the proposed framework. The framework is designed and proposed to help practitioners and researchers to conduct service engineering by employing principles and methodology offered by SOA approach.

A Methodology for Building Service-Oriented Applications in the Presence of Non-Functional Properties

This thesis presents ⇡SOD-M (Policy-based Service Oriented Development Methodology), a methodology for modeling reliable service-based applications using policies. It proposes a model driven method with: (i) a set of meta-models for representing non-functional constraints associated to service-based applications, starting from an use case model until a service composition model; (ii) a platform providing guidelines for expressing the composition and the policies; (iii) model-to-model and model-to-text transformation rules for semi-automatizing the implementation of reliable service-based applications; and (iv) an environment that implements these meta-models and rules, and enables the application of ⇡SOD-M. This thesis also presents a classification and nomenclature for non-functional requirements for developing service-oriented applications. Our approach is intended to add value to the development of service-oriented applications that have quality requirements needs. This work uses concepts from the service-oriented development, non-functional requirements design and model-driven delevopment areas to propose a solution that minimizes the problem of reliable service modeling. Some examples are developed as proof of concepts