Conference Delegates Research Articles

Survey reveals ‘progress’ and ‘challenges’

Two out of five modern matrons believe they are unsupported at work, according to conference delegates. A poll of 85 modern matrons and senior nurses attending the conference in London revealed that 34 felt they are not adequately supported.

Making a difference in practice

The Seventh European Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel (EPUAP) meeting, held in Finland last month, provided delegates with an opportunity to look back on their practice of the past few years and to discuss the best way forward. The theme was ‘Pressure ulcer prevention and management — have we made a difference?’ The consensus was that, while major improvements have been made in the provision of educational material and guidelines on pressure ulcer management, we need to be more proactive in ensuring they are applied to practice. An open debate between representatives of the EPUAP committee and trustees and conference delegates yielded ideas on how this can be achieved. These will be considered by EPUAP, and proposals for an agenda of action released.

The Yes Men

The Yes Men

Identifying cancer nursing research priorities using the Delphi technique.

Nursing research is an integral component of improving the care of people with cancer. However, for research to be successfully integrated and applied to practice, ownership and identification must come from those in practice. The need for local and national strategies for cancer nursing research and the importance of establishing priorities for cancer nursing research have been repeatedly acknowledged. The aim of the study was to facilitate a strategic approach to cancer nursing research by identifying the research priorities of cancer nurses. A three-round Delphi survey was administered to nurses (n = 112) attending a cancer nursing research conference in Northern Ireland. Participants were asked to identify five research questions that they considered a high priority for cancer nursing. A response rate of 54% (60 delegates) was obtained for round one and this generated 117 statements. These statements were content analysed. Two subsequent quantitative rounds followed this. The top priority areas identified were psychosocial issues, for example communication and information needs; professional issues relating to nurse burnout, stress and nurse-led care; and context of care issues including continuity of care. A potential limitation of the study is the use of conference delegates. However, it is argued that these are the people we wanted to target as they could be considered as experts who already had an interest and clinical background in both cancer research and practice. These priorities have helped to provide both direction and focus for the development of a cancer nursing research strategy for Northern Ireland. It is recommended that future research questions should be focused around the highest ranked priorities.

Cannabis condemned: the proscription of Indian hemp.

To find out how cannabis came to be subject to international narcotics legislation. Examination of the records of the 1925 League of Nations' Second Opium Conference, of the 1894 Report of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission and other contemporary documents. Although cannabis (Indian hemp) was not on the agenda of the Second Opium Conference, a claim by the Egyptian delegation that it was as dangerous as opium, and should therefore be subject to the same international controls, was supported by several other countries. No formal evidence was produced and conference delegates had not been briefed about cannabis. The only objections came from Britain and other colonial powers. They did not dispute the claim that cannabis was comparable to opium, but they did want to avoid a commitment to eliminating its use in their Asian and African territories.

Is education provision interactive enough?

As deputy editor of JWC, I am a regular conference delegate, browser of the health-care press and reader of educational literature. While preparing articles for publication, I make many assumptions: that articles should be a ‘good read’, that assertions must be backed up with evidence, and that the text should help readers to improve their understanding or their practice, or preferably both.

A Qualitative Gambit to Formulate a Foundation for the Appraisement of Service Quality in the U.K. Meetings Industry

ABSTRACT The U.K. meetings industry has grown dramatically over the last 10 years. Interest in the industry and competition is increasing, and the move toward using venues other than hotels for meetings is growing. The pattern of expansion experienced by the industry brings with it the question of the quality of provision, which is becoming increasingly important to customers when differentiating between venues. Therefore, the aim of the research is to determine whether gaps exist, first, between the attributes employed to assess the quality and desirability of a U.K. conference venue by conference organizers and conference delegates and, second, between their perceptions and the characteristics of the product provided. This paper presents a qualitative approach to the development of the research instrument. This paper was originally presented at the Ninth Annual CHME Hospitality Research Conference.

The Cape Town Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment : a Driving Force for International Asset-Based Financing

Friday 16 November 2001 – a day to be remembered in the annals of transnational commercial lawmaking when, at a Diplomatic Conference in the beautiful city of Cape Town, no fewer than 20 States (just under one-third of the total number represented at the Conference), followed subsequently by two others, signed the Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment (the Convention) and the Protocol on Matters specific to Aircraft Equipment (the Aircraft Equipment Protocol).1 There was a proposal to include the name of UNIDROIT in the title, as had been done with the 1988 Conventions on International Factoring and International Financial Leasing, but in a gracious gesture the Secretary-General of UNIDROIT, Professor Herbert KRONKE, expressed the wish that in tribute to the Conference host, the Government of South Africa, the Convention should become informally known as the Cape Town Convention. The tribute was well deserved. The South African Government organised a Conference that was truly superb in every way, from the courtesy and efficiency of all the arrangements and hard work of the staff to the warm and generous hospitality, all of which did so much to engender a feeling of mutual goodwill among the Conference delegates.

Vaba, Haiza, Kholera, Foklune or Cholera: in any language still the disease of seven pandemics.

1. SUMMARY Cholera is a disease which can strike in any community where sanitary conditions deteriorate or where it is possible for a few people to transport the organism from infected areas to new communities. The historical background of the seven major pandemics and the discovery of the causative organism are provided from 1800 to 1995. With the procedure of oral rehydration therapy few patients should succumb to the disease if clean water is available. The problem is that large-scale floods in many places often lead to a breakdown in clean water supplies and sewerage treatment so it will not pay to be complacent, cholera has not disappeared!.

NON-PHYSICIAN ASSISTED SUICIDE: THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE OF THE DEATHING COUNTERCULTURE

This article reports on the 2nd Self-Deliverance New Technology Conference (NuTech), held in November 1999, in Seattle,Washington. Right-to-die activists from six countries met to demonstrate a number of devices for non-medical assisted death and to share preliminary findings on their use. The author attended all sessions of the private conference and received confidential memoranda and papers. An overt observer-as-participant method was used. Five devices for non-medical assisted death were demonstrated. These included three systems for breathing inert gas, a customized plastic bag for asphyxiation called the Exit Bag, and a closed circuit breathing system called the Debreather. Seven deaths out of eight trials were reported for the Debreather and four deaths were reported using the Exit Bag. Additionally, a non-quantified number of deaths using inert gas delivery systems were described by various conference delegates. The systems demonstrated by the NuTech group are designed to induce death quickly and painlessly. In general, they leave negligible, if any, post-mortem evidence of their use.The compulsion to use technology to cause death, the "technological imperative," has emerged as part of underground care of dying persons. This imperative raises serious challenges to the health care professions, legislators, and policy makers, particularly because it has led to a sophisticated, expanding movement of non-medical death providers.

NON-PHYSICIAN ASSISTED SUICIDE: THE TECHNOLOGICAL IMPERATIVE OF THE DEATHING COUNTERCULTURE

This article reports on the 2nd Self-Deliverance New Technology Conference (NuTech), held in November 1999, in Seattle,Washington. Right-to-die activists from six countries met to demonstrate a number of devices for non-medical assisted death and to share preliminary findings on their use. The author attended all sessions of the private conference and received confidential memoranda and papers. An overt observer-as-participant method was used. Five devices for non-medical assisted death were demonstrated. These included three systems for breathing inert gas, a customized plastic bag for asphyxiation called the Exit Bag, and a closed circuit breathing system called the Debreather. Seven deaths out of eight trials were reported for the Debreather and four deaths were reported using the Exit Bag. Additionally, a non-quantified number of deaths using inert gas delivery systems were described by various conference delegates. The systems demonstrated by the NuTech group are designed to induce death quickly and painlessly. In general, they leave negligible, if any, post-mortem evidence of their use.The compulsion to use technology to cause death, the "technological imperative," has emerged as part of underground care of dying persons. This imperative raises serious challenges to the health care professions, legislators, and policy makers, particularly because it has led to a sophisticated, expanding movement of non-medical death providers.

Conference fast-tracking

The new IDdb3 database, launched by and available to Current Drugs subscribers, represents the most comprehensive internet-based scientific meeting report service. A team of designated writers and conference delegates contribute to the reporting of thousands of abstracts from over 400 worldwide meetings, with particular emphasis on those that highlight the discovery of novel drug targets or that follow compound development. The database also tracks the progress of such compounds through clinical evaluation and their eventual launch or discontinuation. With many meeting reports posted online overnight, and more extensive articles appearing within two weeks, the IDdb3 database boasts to be one of the fastest intelligence services currently available. DC

InterNoise '99

InterNoise '99 was held in fort Lauderdale, December 6–8 1999. A total of 34 Exhibitors presented the Conference Delegates with the latest in Instrumentation, Software and Noise Control Hardware.

Letter from Washington

message for the rest of the meeting. Politics was prominent in many sessions, not least including a triumphal announcement that the Veterans Administration had been obliged to withdraw its rules permitting prescribing by non-medical staff. Last year Tipper Gore charmed the con ference and this year Rosalynn Carter gave sincere support to community involvement in mental health problems. Violence in schools was a pervasive theme with many different experts prescribing entirely dif ferent solutions. Gay, lesbian and transgender pride was represented by a well attended pro gramme. Black Caucus, meetings of Caribbean, Cuban and other national groups seemed well supported. The North American Society of the Royal College of Psychiatrists which held its first meeting at the 131st meeting of the APA in Atlanta, Georgia in 1978 became a chapter and is now a group representing over 500 Fellows and Members of the College. The meeting on the Monday evening of each subsequent APA meet ing is intended to keep our North American colleagues up to date with College activities and to provide an opportunity for them to meet visitors from the rest of the world including the UK. Usually an Officer of the College attends and gives a brief account of the previous years activities. On a number of occasions it has been my pleasure to fulfil this function and for some years after I ceased to hold office I was briefed by officers to give the short address. At a time when large numbers of British psychiatrists were attending the meeting I did not expect to be called upon. However, I found myself the only UK-based psychiatrist attending and the ebulli ent Dr Michael deary, who, with his charming wife, has hosted this meeting for the past six years, asked me to perform. I desperately tried to dredge up my recollections of the years activities. We really do need to recognise that our North American colleagues are a valuable resource of the College and that we should be more active in supporting the group and in encouraging links with psychiatry on the other side! There were impressive technological develop ments in this year's meeting. The Housing Reservation Bureau, however, decided to ignore these and required overseas delegates to submit written applications for accommodation instead of the usual fax or e-mail. As a result I found myself in rural Maryland with such a lengthy daily journey that I had to forgo the stimulating 6.30 am meetings. In the Hall of Mammon pharmaceutical companies dispensed their un biased information with full use of the latest technologies. It was strangely gratifying to have a glamorous blonde clutch you to her bosom just to scan your membership barcode with her electronic wand. Thus extracting all of your registration data she could then ensure that once you returned home you would be visited at some inconvenient time by a company represen tative. This year the annual free gift race was more covert. The usual bulging goodie bags were not much in evidence and discussions of the best free gifts were not to be heard. It was still possible to identify conference delegates in the streets of Washington as they were the people carrying two umbrellas during the current drought. This year we were offered tickets, strictly on a first come first served basis, to the American Holocaust Museum. I was fortunate enough to secure a ticket and after the normal closing time was able to visit this unique museum in company with a large crowd of psychiatrists. This was an intense emotional experience and I would like to advocate that this visit is made compulsory for all Washingtonians and their visitors. Since it is impossible to attend all of the meetings of interest in this multi-ring circus I was grateful for the two CDs provided gratis which provide abstracts of all of the presentations. The many sessions achieved very different attendance rates. The special lectures obtained the largest audiences and the lecture by Bessel van der Kolk was especially well attended with many hundreds seated and perhaps another hundred sitting on the floor or hanging from whatever they could. Surprisingly, the lecture was disappointing, for instead of the promised review of the social and neurobiological aspects of trauma we heard a political plea for funding. The lecture by Frank Putman was equally well attended and gave an impressive account of his research on the sequelae of child sexual abuse.

Conference delegates, recorders, and observers

Conference delegates, recorders, and observers

Reflections on the 20th Anniversary of CMJ

At Symbolic Sound, we have a copy of every issue of Computer Music Journal from the very first (thanks to Kurt Hebel who started subscribing when he was still in high school), and, as far as I can tell, Computer Music Journal's first issue came out in 1977. I suppose this is the 20th anniversary year for the same reason that we call this the 20th century (for the next five years anyway ... ). I didn't discover Computer Music Journal until 1978, but it had an immediate and profound impact. Through it, I discovered, for the first time, that I wasn't alone, that there were others who had similarly hybridized interests, and that they took this kind of hybrid work seriously enough to give it a name and publish a journal about it. Computer Music Journal gave a name to what I had been trying to do all along, and the name was It didn't matter to me that much of that first issue was beyond my technical grasp at the time; in fact, I took it as a challenge that I would do whatever it took to be able to read and understand everything in there. Thus, it was because of Computer Music Journal that I took my first programming class, my first logic design course, and found my way to the University of Illinois. I remember working on my first FORTRAN program and having a friend of mine glance at what I was doing and tell me I was wasting my time learning to program; her father had told her not to bother, because in one, maybe two, years, all computers would be programmed using spoken, natural language. Alice, wherever you are, I hope you are not still waiting. In 1979 at the University of Illinois, studying computer music meant punched cards, Music 4BF on Control Data Corp. Cyber mainframes, 9-track tapes that held 3 min of sound at 20 kHz, and once-a-week conversions at the astronomy building in the evening with a computer operator who wore orange ear protectors as an aesthetic statement about our music. Despite the primitive conditions, those were exciting times. Computer music was still something unusual, and only people with special characteristics (primarily blind stubbornness and mulelike perseverance) could stand to do it. In those days, there were still some computer scientists and engineers interested in working with composers on computer music research which, at that time, was still synonymous with experimental music. MIDI changed all that. The engineers and computer scientists (with a few, highly cherished, exceptions) lost their tolerance for the composers. Why should they put up with experimental music any more when they could afford their own computers and their own synthesizers and program them to play all the Bach they desired? Some of the professors who had previously been heavily involved in developing innovative software and hardware allowed themselves to be lulled into thinking that they no longer had to get their hands dirty (with solder or line-printer ink), because the commercial music industry would take care of all that low-level stuff for them-kind of like Alice waiting for the naturalspeech interface to computers. The impact on computer music research was to push it outside the university and into private industry. There are still a few institutions where first-class computer music research has been continuously supported, but it can no longer be said that academia is the only environment where one can do innovative and original work in computer music. One has simply to look at the number of early International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) delegates and see how many of them now attend only the Audio Engineering Society conferences. That first taste of computer music left me feeling as though it were, in many ways, a step backward from the analog electronic studio. I couldn't understand why the software synthesis languages were based on a paradigm of instruments playing muComputer Music Journal, 20:3, pp. 31-35, Fall 1996 ? 1996 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Planning for sustainable tourism development in the Med

The Human Settlements Committee of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe held its 18th Meeting of Experts on Human Settlements Problems in Southern Europe in Nicosia, Cyprus, 6–8 June 1994. The key theme of discussion concerned the problems and prospects of planning for sustainable tourism in Mediterranean countries. Conference delegates were primarily national government officials concerned with the planning and management of natural and human habitats in their respective countries.

A Message to the Moscow Conference Delegates

I shall be thinking of you during the XIIth World Congress of the International Federation for Theatre Research. I am honoured by your invitation to attend, but regret that reasons of health prevent me from doing so. After almost twenty years of political darkness in the former Czechoslovakia, which prevented me from attending meetings organized by the Federation, finally, when I would have been able to go other complications (which I hope will be temporary) have made it impossible. I ask, therefore, that you accept my sincere apologies for my absence at what for me is such a significant moment. I greatly appreciate the honour which you have conferred upon me, although I am not sure whether I deserve it. Even though my period of office with the Federation was short, I have always been convinced of the importance of co-operation among theatre researchers from around the world, in order to develop their subject and its methodologies and for the mutual exchange of research findings.

Labour Market Statistics: A Progress Report

This brief report includes the background document prepared for conference delegates. It then lists the current labour market statistics produced by Statistics New Zealand outlines proposals for developments in labour market statistics, considers what the department can definitely do, and then what it might possibly do.

International Convention Centre, Birmingham, England

The International Convention Centre, opened to the public in April 1991, comprises eleven halls on a site adjacent to the city centre. One of the eleven halls is a major new Symphony Hall for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra which is also used for conferences and which enlivens the convention centre through usage by the public as well as conference delegates. While many smaller halls are rectangular, the larger halls are typically non-orthogonal in plan. The principal exhibition hall is octagonal, and the ends of the Symphony Hall are curved. The siting is ideal in that the building complex forms the closing end to a major new square built to celebrate the centenary of Birmingham. However, the site imposed major engineering and building problems due to adjacent road traffic and a main line railway tunnel underneath.