Examining the social construction of surveillance: a critical issue for health visitors and public health nurses working with mothers and children

Aims and objectives In this paper we will critically examine surveillance practices of health visitors (HV) in the UK and public health nurses (PHNs) in Canada. Background The practice and meaning of surveillance shifts and changes depending on the context and intent of relationships between mothers and HVs or PHNs. Design We present the context and practice of HVs in the UK and PHNs in Canada and provide a comprehensive literature review regarding surveillance of mothers within public health systems. We then present our critique of the meaning and practice of surveillance across different settings. Methods Concepts from Foucault and discourse analysis are used to critically examine and discuss the meaning of surveillance Results Surveillance is a complex concept that shifts meaning and is socially and institutionally constructed through relations of power Conclusions Health care providers need to understand the different meanings and practices associated with surveillance to effectively inform practice. Relevance to clinical practice Health care providers should be aware of how their positions of expert and privilege within health care systems affect relationships with mothers. A more comprehensive understanding of personal social and institutional aspects of surveillance will provide opportunities to reflect upon and change practices that are supportive of mothers and their families

Semi-supervised bayesian classification of materials with impact-echo signals

[EN] The detection and identification of internal defects in a material require the use of some technology that translates the hidden interior damages into observable signals with different signature-defect correspondences. We apply impact-echo techniques for this purpose. The materials are classified according to their defective status (homogeneous, one defect or multiple defects) and kind of defect (hole or crack, passing through or not). Every specimen is impacted by a hammer, and the spectrum of the propagated wave is recorded. This spectrum is the input data to a Bayesian classifier that is based on the modeling of the conditional probabilities with a mixture of Gaussians. The parameters of the Gaussian mixtures and the class probabilities are estimated using an extended expectation-maximization algorithm. The advantage of our proposal is that it is flexible, since it obtains good results for a wide range of models even under little supervision; e.g., it obtains a harmonic average of precision and recall value of 92.38% given only a 10% supervision ratio. We test the method with real specimens made of aluminum alloy. The results show that the algorithm works very well. This technique could be applied in many industrial problems, such as the optimization of the marble cutting process.This work has been supported by Generalitat Valenciana under Grants PROMETEO II/2014/032, ISIC/2012/006 and GV/2014/034.Igual García, J.; Salazar Afanador, A.; Safont Armero, G.; Vergara Domínguez, L. (2015). Semi-supervised bayesian classification of materials with impact-echo signals. Sensors. 15(5):11528-11550. https://doi.org/10.3390/s150511528S115281155015

Att lära sig samtala. Samtalsträning under professionsutbildning

Delaktighet och kommunikation är centrala ideal inom vård, omsorg och socialt arbete. Men vad innebär delaktighet i praktiken och hur kan teorier om delaktighet och professionella samtal förstås i olika praktiska sammanhang? Med utgångspunkt i svensk och internationell forskning ger den här boken en djupare inblick i villkor och möjligheter för professionella samtal.I ett tvärvetenskapligt perspektiv på kommunikation presenteras exempel från nya studier på vad delaktighet innebär inom en rad miljöer: nödsamtal, akut- och specialistsjukvård, äldreomsorg, biståndsbedömning, arbetsrelaterad rehabilitering och vårdutbildning. Boken passar väl för utbildningar till sjuksköterska, socionom, arbetsterapeut, sjukgymnast och läkare. I boken beskrivs även olika metoder för datainsamling och analys av data. Det innebär att boken med fördel kan knytas till metodundervisning och examensarbete på avancerad nivå.</p

Nurses' Work with Empowerment during Encounters with Families in Health Care

One goal of Swedish child healthcare work is to empower parents, and thereby reinforce them in their parental roles. It may, however, be difficult to put this ideology into practice because the concept of empowerment is abstract, and because it is unclear what this concept means in practice. The overall aim of this article is to examine critically and discuss empowerment in nurses' work, in their everyday encounters with families in child healthcare. An empirical study was conducted at three child health centres in medium-sized towns in Sweden. Data collection consisted of audiotapes of 44 visits by families to nurses at these centres. The tape-recorded conversations were transcribed verbatim and have been used as data. Data were analysed qualitatively by examining the advice-giving sequences, to see the extent to which the nurse tried to involve and encourage parents to participate actively in problem solving, and how frequently the nurse enquired about the parents' opinions and ideas. It was revealed that the nurses dominated advice giving in these visits to the extent that they took the initiative in the majority of the advisory sequences that occurred, and that they decided both when advice should be given and the nature of the advice. Furthermore, there were remarkably few examples that could be called empowering or have an empowering function in the advice giving. The nurse instead gave standard solutions and answers in response to various questions from the parents, reinforcing her own role as an expert.</p