Collaborative Working Environment Research Articles

Models of generalist and specialist care in smaller hospitals in England: a mixed-methods study

BackgroundThe increasing number of older, complex patients who require emergency admission to hospital has prompted calls for better models of medical generalist care, especially for smaller hospitals, whose size constrains resources and staffing.ObjectiveTo investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the current models of medical generalism used in smaller hospitals from patient, professional and service perspectives.MethodsThe design was a mixed-methods study. Phase 1 was a scoping and mapping exercise to create a typology of models of care, which was then explored further through 11 case studies. Phase 2 created a classification using the Hospital Episode Statistics of acute medical ‘generalist’ and ‘specialist’ work and described differences in workload and explored the links between case mix, typology and length of stay and between case mix and skill mix. Phase 3 analysed the relationships between models of care and patient-level costs. Phase 4 examined the strengths and weaknesses of the models of care through focus groups, a discrete choice experiment and an exploration of the impact of typology on other outcomes.ResultsIn total, 50 models of care were explored through 48 interviews. A typology was constructed around generalist versus specialist patterns of consultant working. Twenty-five models were deployed by 48 hospitals, and no more than four hospitals used any one model of care. From the patient perspective, analysis of Hospital Episode Statistics data of 1.9 million care episodes found that the differences in case mix between hospitals were relatively small, with 65–70% of episodes accounted for by 20 case types. The skill mix of hospital staff varied widely; there were no relationships with case mix. Patients exhibited a preference for specialist care in the discrete choice experiment but indicated in focus groups that overall hospital quality was more important. From a service perspective, qualitative work found that models of care were contingent on complex constellations of factors, including staffing, the local hospital environment and policy imperatives. Neither the model of care nor the case mix accounted for variability in the length of stay (no associations were significant atp < 0.05). No significant differences were found in the costs of the models. Professionally, the preferences of doctors for specialist versus generalist work depended on their experiences of providing care and were associated with a healthy organisational culture and a co-operative approach to managing emergency work. Concepts of medical generalism were found to be complex and difficult to define, with theoretical models differing markedly from models in action.LimitationsSmaller hospitals in multisite trusts were excluded, potentially leading to sample bias. The rapidly changing nature of the models limited the analysis of typology against outcomes.ConclusionsThe case mix of smaller hospitals was dominated by patients with presentations amenable to generalist approaches to care; however, there was no evidence to support any particular pattern of consultant working. Matching hospital staff to better meet local need and the creation of more collaborative working environments appear more likely to improve care in smaller hospitals than changing models.Future workThe exploration of the relationships between workforce, measures of hospital culture, models of care, costs and outcomes in both smaller and larger hospitals is urgently required to underpin service reforms.Study registrationThis study is registered as Integrated Research Application System project ID 191393.FundingThis project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Services and Delivery Research programme and will be published in full inHealth Services and Delivery Research; Vol. 9, No. 4. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.

Integrating entrepreneurial working life skills with foreign language teaching – two cases from the University of Oulu

Abstract This activity report describes two cases of Language teaching for degree students in the University of Oulu with new pedagogical approaches aiming towards authentic working life skills. Co-creation, collaborative learning and cooperation across borders are the building blocks for these innovative language teaching projects. Case 1 describes Entrepreneurial Language Studies in English and Swedish courses, co-created with the Ministry of Culture and Education Key Projects, which aim for fostering entrepreneurial culture and creating entrepreneurial learning environments at universities. Case 2 is about Teaching English and Course Cooperation in English language between the students of Information Processing Science in Finland and Russia. In both of these cases, students have been challenging themselves with new ways to learn the language and at the same time acquire important skills for working life, virtual learning, presentations, communication, problem solving and business idea creation. What unites these cases is the emphasis on authentic language learning, creativity and self-efficacy. Because career paths today are increasingly complex, multidisciplinary and diverse, the ability to adapt, innovate and be flexible is vital in evolving and collaborative working environments.

Licensed Nurse/Certified Nurse Aide Collaboration in the Care of Nursing Home Residents

This mixed-method study explores how nursing team collaboration is perceived and experienced in four nursing homes (NHs) in the Western United States. Licensed nurse (LN) and certified nurse aide (CNA) participants completed two survey tools to assess their perception of collaboration and teamwork in their current work environment. The LNs and CNAs were paired and interviewed both individually and as a caregiving pair to explore the lived experience of collaboration in the care of NH residents. Quantitative survey results were analyzed using IBM® SPSS Version 25, and participants reported a collaborative working environment with equally strong ratings in the following categories: partnership, cooperation, and coordination; they agreed with statements reflective of teamwork including team structure, leadership, situation monitoring, mutual support, and communication. No significant difference was found between LN and CNA responses or between team members in any of the four participating facilities. Qualitative survey data were loaded in NVivo12 and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. The findings revealed five primary themes, including essential elements in successful team collaboration—perspective, coworker connection, communication, and mutual support—and ways teamwork and collaboration impact resident care.

A importância da comunicação não violenta (CNV) nas organizações públicas

A Comunicação é imprescindível em qualquer contexto da vida humana, ocupando papel estratégico nas organizações devido à influência que exerce nas relações trabalhistas e nas condições do ambiente de trabalho. A incapacidade de se comunicar bem, especificamente dentro das Organizações Públicas (OP), gera diversos problemas organizacionais como dificuldades de relacionamento interpessoal no trabalho, violência verbal, clima organizacional deteriorado, problemas de saúde etc., além de impactar na qualidade dos resultados finais dos serviços. Neste contexto, o presente estudo visa avaliar a importância da Comunicação Não Violenta (CNV) na mitigação de tais problemas e na construção de um ambiente de trabalho mais colaborativo, saudável e harmônico nas OPs. Para elaboração do estudo, fez-se uma revisão narrativa da literatura existente sobre o assunto. O uso da CNV, ferramenta desenvolvida com o intuito de melhorar as relações interpessoais, torna-se uma tática na busca pela redução de algumas características negativas presentes no serviço público, como ambientes autoritários, excessivamente burocráticos e centralizados. Diante do exposto na literatura, conclui-se que o uso da CNV nas OP pode contribuir para a melhoria do clima organizacional, da qualidade de vida dos servidores e dos serviços entregues à sociedade.

Challenges and Opportunities in Collaborative Vulnerability Research Workflows

Recently, cyber reasoning systems demonstrated near-human performance characteristics when they autonomously identified, proved, and mitigated vulnerabilities in software during a competitive event. New research seeks to augment human vulnerability research teams with cyber reasoning system teammates in collaborative work environments. However, the literature lacks a concrete understanding of vulnerability research workflows and practices, limiting designers’, engineers’, and researchers’ ability to successfully integrate these artificially intelligent entities into teams. This paper contributes a general workflow model of the vulnerability research process, and identifies specific collaboration challenges and opportunities anchored in this model. Contributions were derived from a qualitative field study of work habits, behaviors, and practices of human vulnerability research teams. These contributions will inform future work in the vulnerability research domain by establishing an empirically-driven workflow model that can be adapted to specific organizational and functional constraints placed on individual and teams.

Human-in-the-Loop Robot Control for Human-Robot Collaboration: Human Intention Estimation and Safe Trajectory Tracking Control for Collaborative Tasks

This article provides a perspective on estimation and control problems in cyberphysical human systems (CPHSs) that work at the intersection of cyberphysical systems and human systems. The article also discusses solutions to some of the problems in CPHSs. One example of a CPHS is a close-proximity human-robot collaboration (HRC) in a manufacturing setting. The issue of the joint operation's efficiency and human factors, such as safety, attention, mental states, and comfort, naturally arise in the HRC context. By considering human factors, robots' actions can be controlled to achieve objectives, including safe operations and human comfort. Alternately, questions arise when robot factors are considered. For example, can we provide direct inputs and information to humans about an environment and the robots in the area such that the objectives of safety, efficiency, and comfort can be satisfied by considering the robots' current capabilities? The article discusses specific problems involved in HRC related to controlling a robot's motion by taking the current actions of the human in the loop with the robot's control system. To this end, two main challenges are discussed: 1) inferring the intention behind human actions by analyzing a person's motion as observed through skeletal tracking and gaze data and 2) a controller design that keeps robot motion constrained to a boundary in a 3D space by using control barrier functions. The intention inference method fuses skeleton-joint tracking data obtained using the Microsoft Kinect sensor and human gaze data gathered from red-green-blue Kinect images. The direction of a human's hand-reaching motion and a goal-reaching point is estimated while performing a joint pick-and-place task. The trajectory of the hand is estimated forward in time based on the gaze and hand motion data at the current time instance. A barrier function method is applied to generate safe robot trajectories along with forecast hand movements to complete the collaborative displacement of an object by a person and a robot. An adaptive controller is then used to track the reference trajectories using the Baxter robot, which is tested in a Gazebo simulation environment.

Familiarity with teammate's attitudes improves team performance in virtual reality.

Virtual reality (VR) is a potentially challenging social environment for effective communication and collaboration. Thus, we conducted a VR study to determine whether increased familiarity with a teammate would improve performance on a joint decision making task. Specifically, because attitude familiarity, or knowledge of another person’s attitudes, has been correlated with better relationship functioning in the past, we anticipated that team performance would improve when teammates were first asked to discuss their task-relevant attitudes with one another. We also hypothesized that increased familiarity would be particularly useful in immersive VR, where typical social and other nonverbal cues were lacking. Twenty pairs recruited from a workplace environment were randomly assigned to either the Familiar or Control condition before completing a joint decision making task both in VR and on desktop monitors. The manipulation of attitude familiarity was successful: pairs in the Familiar condition were significantly more aware of their partners’ unique task-relevant attitudes. Results found that in VR, Familiar pairs were more accurate at determining patterns to events. Additionally, for teams less experienced in VR, Familiar pairs were also more accurate at predicting future events. However, there was no meaningful statistical difference in pairs’ ability to identify information. Familiar teams also took more time to answer questions, and we found no difference in self-reported communication quality. Overall, this was the first successful manipulation of attitude familiarity and results indicate that such an intervention may prove useful in a collaborative work environment, as Familiar teams demonstrated greater accuracy, especially in VR.

Understanding the information needs and information-seeking behaviours of new-generation engineering designers for effective knowledge management

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the information needs and information-seeking behaviours of the new generation of engineering designers. A survey study is used to approach what their information needs are, how these needs change during an engineering design project and how their information-seeking behaviours have been influenced by the newly developed information technologies (ITs). Through an in-depth analysis of the survey results, the key functions have been identified for the next-generation management systems.Design/methodology/approachThe paper first proposed four hypotheses on the information needs and information-seeking behaviours of young engineers. Then, a survey study was undertaken to understand their information usage in terms of the information needs and information-seeking behaviours during a complete engineering design process. Through analysing the survey results, several findings were obtained and on this basis, further comparisons were made to discuss and evaluate the hypotheses.FindingsThe paper has revealed that the engineering designers' information needs will evolve throughout the engineering design project; thus, they should be assisted at several different levels. Although they intend to search information and knowledge on know-what and know-how, what they really require is the know-why knowledge in order to help them complete design tasks. Also, the paper has shown how the newly developed ITs and web-based applications have influenced the engineers' information-seeking practices.Research limitations/implicationsThe research subjects chosen in this study are engineering students in universities who, although not as experienced as engineers in companies, do go through a complete design process with the tasks similar to industrial scenarios. In addition, the focus of this study is to understand the information-seeking behaviours of a new generation of design engineers, so that the development of next-generation information and knowledge management systems can be well informed. In this sense, the results obtained do reveal some new knowledge about the information-seeking behaviours during a general design process.Practical implicationsThis paper first identifies the information needs and information-seeking behaviours of the new generation of engineering designers. On this basis, the varied ways to meet these needs and behaviours are discussed and elaborated. This intends to provide the key characteristics for the development of the next-generation knowledge management system for engineering design projects.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a novel means of exploring the future engineers' information needs and information-seeking behaviours in a collaborative working environment. It also characterises the key features and functions for the next generation of knowledge management systems for engineering design.

Group task allocation approach for heterogeneous software crowdsourcing tasks

It is more common for multiple users to collaborate to develop a software application in a P2P collaborative working environment. In collaborative software development, the rational allocation of software development tasks is of great significance. However, heterogeneous of software development tasks, such as the value of the task, the skill required, the effort required and difficulty, increase the complexity of task allocation. This paper proposes an allocation approach of crowd intelligence software development task in which multiple individuals collaborate to complete software development tasks. The heterogeneous task allocation problem in the crowd intelligence software development system is formulated as an optimization problem. Then, the process of task allocation is modelled using the hidden Markov model. In our study, due to the insufficiency of data characteristics, we propose to construct a generator using Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) to solve this problem. Then, the Baum-Welch algorithm is used for detailed analysis and calculation of model parameters. And on this basis, effective task allocation strategies for maximizing the total value of tasks obtained by the workers are explored through the Viterbi algorithm. Based on the Agile Manager (AM) dataset, which contains a large scale real human task allocation strategy, the model learns from human decision-making strategies that have achieved good outcomes. Based on the Agile Manager dataset, this approach is evaluated experimentally. The results show that it outperforms the artificial intelligence (AI) player in the AM game platform.

CO-WORKING SPACE DAN GALERI DI KOTA PONTIANAK

Co-working is a working style that involves creative activities in a collaborative working environment and allows anyone to work, share, socialize, and discuss even if they are not in the same organization or company. The existence of co-working spaces in Pontianak City is arguably still rare, the facilities and atmosphere presented are not like co-working spaces in big cities in Indonesia and abroad. Apart from accommodating start-ups, co-working spaces in Pontianak City also need to accommodate communities in fields related to co-working space users. The provision of galleries can be a place to bring the work of users and the community to life as well as to support collaboration. The application of the concept of space that can stimulate unser behavior is expected to solve common workiplace problems.Recently, the 'creative industry' has been talked about and echoed a lot. There are four very potential subsectors, namely visual communication design, music, video animation, and architecture, most of which are young people. Today's young people tend to want to work according to their wishes without any pressure from anyone. Freelancers and young entrepreneurs are part of creative industry players who are just starting / pioneering their careers and most of them are young people.

One-Shot kinesthetic programming by demonstration for soft collaborative robots

Robots have long been part of production lines and, since they are widely used in a variety of applications, they have become a mass product. Yet, their integration into production is costly due to the necessity of skilled engineers programming them. The goal of this article is to reduce these costs via a programming by demonstration approach, allowing unskilled workers to complete the task of said engineers. Rather than just working next to a robot, this enables a collaborative work environment where humans use manipulators as tools for various tasks.This work aims at automatically generating a trajectory by a single kinesthetic demonstration, which is performed by a non-expert user. The proposed approach adapts and extends the trajectory generator of a previous work and develops a method that gives guarantees on the deviation between the demonstrated path and the generated path. In contrast to the previous work, an expert user is not required. Furthermore, instead of teaching a series of points the whole trajectory is recorded in a single demonstration. To ensure real-time compatibility on the target hardware, one focus of this paper is on the complexity of the algorithm. The method is validated using a soft quasi continuum manipulator as an example for a collaborative robot.

Organizational Characteristics Associated With ICU Liberation (ABCDEF) Bundle Implementation by Adult ICUs in Michigan.

We surveyed ICU physician and nurse leaders, assessing their safety culture, ICU team collaboration, and work environment. Using logistic and linear regression models, we compared these organizational characteristics to bundle element implementation, and also compared physician and nurse leaders' perceptions about organizational characteristics and bundle implementation. All (n = 72) acute care hospitals with adult ICUs in Michigan. ICU physician and nurse leader pairs from each hospital's main ICU. We developed, pilot-tested, and deployed an electronic survey to all subjects over a 3 month period in 2016. Results from 73 surveys (28 physicians, 45 nurses, 60% hospital response rate) demonstrated significant variation in hospital and ICU size and type, organizational characteristics, and physician/nurse perceptions of ICU organization and bundle implementation. We found that a robust safety culture and collaborative work environment that uses checklists to facilitate team communication are strongly associated with bundle implementation. There is also a significant dose-response effect between safety culture, a collaborative work environment, and overall bundle implementation. We identified several specific ICU practices that can facilitate ABCDEF Bundle implementation. Our results can be used to develop effective bundle implementation strategies that leverage safety culture, interprofessional collaboration, and routine checklist use in ICUs to improve bundle implementation and performance.

BIM tool development enhancing collaborative scheduling for pre-construction

Construction projects often suffer from backlashes in relation to poor plans and schedules. Especially pre-construction planning has been challenging due to a high complexity, an extensive amount of information, and a lack of site managers time to make the schedule. To solve these issues for pre-construction planning; new planning processes, methods and tools have been developed over the last decade. However, due to a disregard of the current planning processes these tools have been difficult to adopt in practice. In addition, these developed tools and methods are seldom developed from the user’s point of view. A promising development is the introduction of integrated planning as a concept in construction companies. It involves the use of BIM models in concert with a planning approach where the subcontractors engage in the planning. However, currently available tools are more geared towards experienced users such as expert planners and does not allow for a fully collaborative and integrated planning approach. While many current tools would tick many of the requirements identified, they still fail to address the base requirements from the collaborative work environment literature. This paper contributes with a user-centric design and development of a collaborative planning application showing the integration of the existing collaborative planning process. By adopting a socio-technical approach, the paper focuses on combining technology and processes supporting the users and their way of working in order to enable adoption of the solution. A design science research approach has been used to gather requirements and develop and evaluate the Visual Project Planner (VPP) application. The VPP application applies a collaborative, visual approach supporting interdisciplinary knowledge sharing between all parties involved where the subcontractors actively can contribute to schedule. The VPP application has potential to reduce time for pre-construction planning regardless of the planning approach used.

Prototyping

Reflecting upon the constructionist model "learning-bymaking," prototyping (prototype making) as a product design and research approach is well recognised for assured development of innovative concepts in individual or collaborative working environments. A prototype is typically used as a tool to support experiments or interventions and to evaluate research goals. It also facilitates participatory design and user-centred design. However, it carries both coded and tacit knowledge that we, design educators and practitioners, find problematic to explain and instruct, particularly to non-designers. This paper amalgamates and argues the characteristics of prototyping including types, formats, and principles through literature review. Reflecting upon the designer’s intentions and the dual coding cognitive learning process, the author proposes a descriptive model that illustrates the dual actions experienced by the designer which can enable study on the improvement of the prototyping process.

UX Fundamentals for Non-UX Professionals: User Experience Principles for Managers, Writers, Designers, and Developers: Edward Stull [Book Review

In the modern workplace, technical roles often have overlapping responsibilities. Therefore, it is essential for professional communicators to familiarize themselves with these roles to facilitate a collaborative and cooperative work environment. Stull’s UX Fundamentals for Non-UX Professionals: User Experience Principles for Managers, Writers, Designers, and Developers is a beneficial book for professionals, students, and anyone interested in user-experience (UX) design and research. The book’s purpose is to teach beginners the fundamentals of UX by making the content accessible, although the effort sometimes fails in the denser chapters.

Behavior and Performance of BIM Users in a Collaborative Work Environment

Collaborative work in Building Information Modeling (BIM) projects is frequently understood as the interaction of modelers in an asynchronous way through modification requests or via e-mail/telephone. However, alternative work methodologies based on creating a common and synchronous environment allow solving issues instantaneously during the design process. This study aimed to analyze the behavior and performance of BIM users with different specialties who were subjected to an experimental exercise in a collaborative environment. For this purpose, a process was devised to collect, sort, and select the data from the log files generated by the BIM software. A timeline of the experiment was populated with data on the intensity and types of commands used by each specialist, which allowed determining behavioral patterns, preferred commands, indicators of their experience, further training needs, and possible strategies for improving the team’s performance. In the experiment, the mechanical designer’s performance was 49% and the rest approximately 64%, with respect to that of the architect. An average rate of 1.66 necessary or auxiliary commands for each contributory command was detected. The average performance was 200–400 commands per hour, which intensified by the end of the experiment. Further training needs were detected for the plumbing designer to reduce the use of backwards commands. Conversely, the electrical designer showed a positive evolution regarding this aspect during the experiment. The analysis methods here described become useful for the aforementioned purposes. Nevertheless, combinations with methods from existing research might improve the outcomes and therefore the specificity of recommendations.

The Impact of Digital Storytelling on Social Agency: Early Experience at an Online University

ABSTRACT ‘Digital Storytelling’ is a term often used to refer to a number of different types of digital narrative including web-based stories, hypertexts, videoblogs and computer games. This emergent form of creative work has found an outlet in a wide variety of different domains ranging from community social history, to cookbooks, to the classroom. It is the latter domain that provides the focus for this paper, specifically the online classroom at the tertiary level. The first step in the experiment was to train faculty in the art of digital story creation. After sharing these stories with students as part of the standard “Introduce Yourself” discussion board activity, the next step was to encourage students to reciprocate by producing their own stories. The third and final step in the experiment was to use digital storytelling as the vehicle for the submission of team assignments. Early feedback from students suggests that listening to and telling ‘true stories’ was a compelling and emotionally-engaging experience, providing an opportunity for ‘transformative reflection’ (Lambert 2000). By including multimedia, learners were able to build upon the fundamentals, presenting content in an easy-to-absorb and compelling way. In terms of team assignments students learned to become more effective actors in collaborative work environments. The authors conclude that as—in the majority of societies from earliest recorded times —people are ‘hard wired’ both to tell and to listen to stories from a very young age and, significantly, to remember stories, the scope for deep learning using this particular pedagogical tool is considerable.

Users' Intention to Share Knowledge Using Wiki in Virtual Learning Community

Many educational organizations are using Wikis to enhance virtual learning to encourage knowledge sharing inside between students and instructors. Wiki is an ideal tool for the online knowledge sharing at educational organizations which help to achieve more collaborative work environment between students and instructors. However, educational organizations sometimes fail of building successful virtual community and users abound Wikis for several reasons. This research explored the use of Wikis to share knowledge in virtual learning community. A proposed conceptual framework was developed examining the UTAUT model in new context by using it to test the behavior intention to share knowledge through the Wiki technology in virtual community. A survey to postgraduate students shows that social influence, performance, and effort expectancy have impact on students' attitude to share knowledge through Wikis.

Theoretical and Methodological Elements of an Inclusive Approach to Education

The educative experience of people with disability leads the inter­na­tio­nal debate towards the value of inclusive learning contexts. Nonetheless, the theoretical and methodological principles of an inclusive education approach have to be outlined. Data collected using explorative questionnaires during a five-years survey in an Italian region's schools show a slow evolution of the scholastic context. From the perspective of Special Pedagogy, the qualitative investigation on three macro-dimensions (the diversity perception, the didactic and methodological means, the wellbeing of pupils) reveals an emerging development of solid awareness among teachers. Findings confirm that the inclusion processes at school are attainable only throughout a series of clear methodological elements: 1) a valorising attitude towards diversity; 2) an orienting learning process; 3) a plural and flexible use of both methodologies and strategies; 4) a collaborative work environment; 5) a continuous training process; 6) a deontological approach. These are the principles that allow teachers to support each student in the manifold itineraries of identity fulfilment, encouraging pupils to express their needs and to develop their abilities in a welcoming and participative context.

Learning to be interprofessional advocates in the public sector.

Engaging in advocacy is an ethical responsibility for behavioral health professionals, as reflected in professional competencies across disciplines and in personal accounts of wanting to affect change at various levels of patients'/clients' and communities' ecologies. However, the literature is replete with examples of barriers to routine advocacy engagement, including lack of an organized structure into which efforts can be embedded. There exists the desire among behavioral health professionals to engage in more advocacy work, yet a shared sense of not knowing how to incorporate this work into existing professional roles. One way to address these barriers is to establish more collaborative advocacy work environments within the public sector settings that employ behavioral health professionals. This article offers the first descriptive account of developing, implementing, and maintaining such a collaborative interprofessional advocacy workgroup. To that end, this case study is one example of such a group, the Atlanta Behavioral Health Advocates, based within the Emory University School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and situated also within Grady Health System, a public health care system. This paper details our experiences forming and engaging in this group, which we believe can serve as a model for others developing similar advocacy workgroups in public sector settings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).