Offer Training Opportunities Research Articles

Characteristics of Work Placements Valued by Employers

ABSTRACT Research into the valued characteristics of work placements on Library and Information Studies (LIS) first degree courses in UK universities was carried out by the Centre for Information Research and Training at the University of Central England in Birmingham (UCE). Group Feedback Strategy (GFS) was used to generate and evaluate characteristics from employers, tutors, students and graduates. Results showed that placements were seen as important by all participating groups. A reasonably high level of satisfaction was also recorded for a majority of the valued characteristics, by all groups. This article outlines the research and examines the characteristics which achieved higher satisfaction scores from employers than from other groups. These were: offering teamwork experiences; assessing capabilities; offering training opportunities; giving hands on IT experience; and requiring business confidentiality. Reasons for these differences are proposed and discussed

Training Health Professionals to Use the Media-Reply

In Reply. —We appreciate Mr Hartman's comments, particularly his experience as a television journalist and his work in a health department that interacts extensively with the media. The points he makes concerning the need for good training on media interactions, understanding the motives of reporters and their bias toward negative news, and the need for advance preparation by public health professionals for media contact are useful and we concur. It would be unfortunate, however, if individual practitioners or institutions were left to address so important a training need without the benefits of national leadership, broad exchange of information, and coordination. As we noted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has focused on the importance of health communication in prevention activities, and we hope the CDC will offer training opportunities to state and local health officers and others in public health and medicine who are contacted frequently by the

The Role and Function of Residents’ Organizations in Psychiatry Education

Psychiatry residents' organizations have been poorly studied and variously portrayed as facilitative or regressive. A telephone survey of 19 residency programs of differing sizes in all major geographic regions revealed that 89% had some form of residents' organization. The groups are characterized by a wide range of structures, and they undertake a variety of tasks. The most common tasks are support, problem solving, and venting dissatisfaction. Problems frequently faced by such groups include changing resident constituencies, personality conflicts, authorization disputes, and representation and consensus problems. Strengths of such groups include their ability to help foster a sense of group identity; to provide a safe place to ventilate, work on problems, and fashion a consensus for the residents' input to the institution; and to offer training opportunities f or future psychiatric managers.