BlOMQVIST K, THEANDER E, MOWIDE I and LARSSON V. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 317–323 What happens when you involve patients as experts? a participatory action research project at a renal failure unitAlthough there is a trend towards developing health care in a patient‐centred direction, changes are usually planned by the professionals without involving the patients. This paper presents an ongoing participatory action research project where patients with chronic renal failure, nurses at a specialist renal failure unit, a hospital manager (...) and a researcher worked together to develop patient‐centred care. The project combined the expertise of patients in their own experiences of living with a chronic condition with the professional expertise of nurses, the manager and the researcher. As the workload on the unit was uneven, the development work needed to be low in intensity but long‐term. Based on a number of dialogues in focus groups, four main development areas were identified; access to test results, prerequisites for postponing the progress of the illness, general awareness and understanding of living with chronic renal failure, and family‐focused care. A number of changes have been planned or implemented, such as developing a prototype for a web‐based feed‐back system, expanding patient education to newly diagnosed patients, steering the nurses' role towards a guiding and family‐focused function, and planning a digital story‐telling workshop. Involving committed people who have the mandate to change practices were prerequisites for success. (shrink)

Background With an increasing older population, the pressure on home care resources is growing, which makes it important to ensure the maintenance of quality care. It is known that compassion and ethical sensitivity can improve the quality of care, but little is known about care leaders’ perceptions on ethical sensitivity and compassion in home care and how it is associated with staff competence and thus quality of care. Aim The aim of the study was to explore home care leaders’ perceptions (...) of ethical sensitivity and compassion associated with care quality in home care. Research design, participants, and research context A hermeneutical approach with a qualitative explorative design was used. The data consists of texts from 10 in-depth interviews with home care leaders. Content analysis was used as a method. Ethical considerations The study was conducted following the ethical guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and the Finnish Advisory Board of Research Ethics. Research ethics permission was applied for from a Research Ethics Board. Findings One overall theme and four subthemes were found. The overall theme was: “Compassion provides deeper meaning and ethical sensitivity provides means for knowing how to act”. Discussion If nurses fail to be sensitive and compassionate with patients, good and high qualitative home care cannot be achieved. Ethical sensitivity and compassion can be seen as resources in home care but the organization and the care leaders need to provide the support for these to develop. Conclusion This study provides an understanding of the meaning of ethical sensitivity and compassion as sources of strength and their link to quality of care in a home care context. Further studies could focus on how to build compassion and ethical sensitivity into home-based care and how to ensure adequate support for healthcare professionals’ compassion and ethical sensitivity. (shrink)

The thesis of this article is that the notion of an ethical food consumer is untenable unless it is coupled with a conception of food citizenship. The main arguments delivered against the notion of ethical food consumption are that consumption does not take the operations of moral psychology into account, nor afford means to tackle structural problems inherent in the relation between consumer and producer. The notion of an ethically aware food citizen is on the other hand capable of handling (...) these problems head on. Hence, a realistic food ethics has to operate with an integrative view of consumption and citizenship. (shrink)

The review gives an introductory description of the successive development of data patterns based on comparisons between hearing-impaired and normal hearing participants’ speech understanding skills, later prompting the formulation of the Ease of Language Understanding model. The model builds on the interaction between an input buffer and three memory systems: working memory, semantic long-term memory, and episodic long-term memory. RAMBPHO input may either match or mismatch multimodal SLTM representations. Given a match, lexical access is accomplished rapidly and implicitly within approximately (...) 100–400 ms. Given a mismatch, the prediction is that WM is engaged explicitly to repair the meaning of the input – in interaction with SLTM and ELTM – taking seconds rather than milliseconds. The multimodal and multilevel nature of representations held in WM and LTM are at the center of the review, being integral parts of the prediction and postdiction components of language understanding. Finally, some hypotheses based on a selective use-disuse of memory systems mechanism are described in relation to mild cognitive impairment and dementia. Alternative speech perception and WM models are evaluated, and recent developments and generalisations, ELU model tests, and boundaries are discussed. (shrink)

The social environment influences what information individuals sample: people are often exposed to alternatives that are popular. This can systematically change an individual's evaluation of an alternative if she had previously been avoiding it due to a negative evaluation. The authors show that social exposure can have positive or negative effects on evaluation, depending on how popularity and prior evaluations interact. This theory was supported by a large‐scale analysis of data from a hotel chain.

After proposing an alternative definition of what “law” (jurisprudential concept) is, this article demonstrates the impossibility of identifying “the law” (what law-makers announce, relative to a particular jurisdiction) as something that is in a particular way. Rather, the law is a more or less abstract range of options. Drawing upon this conclusion, the article calls for a reassessment of how we view the role of law-makers. We need to remove the mystery that surrounds the law so as to provide for (...) greater transparency. This transparency can be gained by requiring law-makers to declare their inescapable biases where they influence their lawmaking. (shrink)

Much feminist work on women and computing has identified the difficulties women experience in gaining entry into and acceptance in this important and developing field. Socially constructed relations of education, training and workforce participation tend to perpetuate systems of disadvantage. Yet as the social relations of particular societies differ so the experience of women in different societies can reveal fissures in an apparently seamless terrain of reproduction. This study compares experience in Australia, Finland and Sweden and finds that there are (...) possibilities which can be gleaned from cross-cultural research for women to break with patterns of gender segregation in computing work. (shrink)

En recension av Håkan Blomqvists bok Socialism på jiddisch: judiska Arbeter Bund i Sverige.