Presence Of Colleagues Research Articles

Changing Policy for Inclusion: Peer-to-Peer Physical Exam Practice in Medical School

Issue: Across the United States, the majority of medical schools teach physical examination using some form of peer physical examination (PPE). The process of being physically exposed in the presence of colleagues can be uncomfortable and cause students distress for myriad reasons ranging from religious and cultural practices to body dysmorphia and previous trauma experiences. This is especially problematic in educational systems which offer no other options, or make PPE a requirement of the curriculum. Evidence: Across all U.S. medical schools, trainees spent a median of 59 hours teaching physical examination skills. Of this time, 30% is dedicated to PPE practice. Despite this prevalence, there are data that show some students find this uncomfortable, especially women. Literature on best practices around PPE highlights voluntary participation, informed consent, and an available alternative to learning physical xamination skills. These are not uniformly available in all learning environments. There are little data around the impact of PPE on students who have experienced or are experiencing sexual trauma. Authors have drawn conclusions about the potential for harm given the prevalence of sexual mistreatment in US higher education. Implications: Our medical school policy required students to participate in PPE practice, undressing for the exams wearing only shorts (and a sports bra for women) an and a hospital gown. Students who could not participate in this practice for reasons ranging from mobility to religious beliefs had to seek individual formal accommodations to be exempt, putting the onus of change on potentially vulnerable individuals. We evaluated the policy around PPE, and concluded that the school’s requirements could be harmful and isolating, as they required students to disclose their personal vulnerabilities while seeking exemptions from being examined by peers. At our institution, a group of students instead advocated for the school to review the policy and create a PPE procedure that was safer and more inclusive while supporting student learning. Our experience emphasized the potential for students to advocate for change, while also highlighting the need for greater research in the field of trauma-informed curricular design for medical education.

Investigation of Preferences in Working Environment of Students for Maintaining Uniform Geographical Distribution of Radiological Technologists

This study was designed to assess working environment preferences of students in the Department of Radiological Technology using conjoint analysis for establishing an efficient medical system. We carried a questionnaire survey on working environment preferences for 196 students in the Department of Radiological Technology in Japan. We defined eight characteristics for virtual medical facilities as follows: presence of colleagues who can be consulted, employment status, number of night shift per month, academic meeting participation, number of hospital beds, possession of nuclear medicine imaging systems and radiation therapy systems, location of medical facilities, and change rate in annual income. A total of 18 virtual medical facilities were selected by an orthogonal array table using above-mentioned characteristics. The acquired data by the pairwise comparison method were analyzed by conjoint analysis. Marginal rates of substitution that represent students' preferences were also calculated. The factors that influenced their preferences were the following: placement of medical facilities in great city, presence of colleagues who can be consulted, employment status is not non-regular employment, set up of nuclear medicine imaging systems and radiation therapy systems, the number of night shift is twice per month, and attendances at academic meetings. In summary, students in the Department of Radiological Technology tend to prefer the facilities with regular employment, great city, presence of colleagues who can be consulted, and possession of nuclear medicine imaging systems and/or radiation therapy systems.

Feel free to fail once in a while: We all do! That's how we learn from life's lessons

Along the way I have learned a lesson or two. Some were the result of reaching too far and efforts that resulted in failure. Learning from failure is frequently not so pleasant, although you doubly fail if you do not learn from those failures. Yet other lessons resulted from wonderful collisions of opportunity and the presence of colleagues who, working in collaboration, would enable my contributions to make a difference.Download the PDF to read more...

Academic bullying among faculty personnel in Estonia and Finland

ABSTRACTThis comparative study focuses on the prevalence, nature, and manifestations of experienced bullying among faculty personnel, that is, both academic and management staff of universities in Estonia and Finland. A total of 1,191 respondents from Estonia (n = 864) and Finland (n = 327) responded to identical questionnaires. The results show that 27 per cent of respondents in Estonia and 18 per cent in Finland had experienced bullying within six months prior to the study. In Estonia bullying is most commonly straightforward and may include insulting an individual in the presence of colleagues, while in Finland people typically get indirectly slandered behind their back. In Estonia, work-related threats of blame, violence, humiliation and ridicule are typical, whereas it is more ordinary to make negative work-related remarks in Finland. The dissimilar factor models and the categories based on open-ended answers also confirm the presupposition of academic bullying as a culture-related phenomenon.

How the Economic Evaluation of Time Affects Who We Socialize With Off the Job

We examine how pay practices, such as hourly payment, that promote an economic evaluation of time affect people’s choices about with whom to socialize off the job. Using multiple waves of the American Time Use Survey, Study 1a found people paid by the hour spent more time and a greater percentage of their total socializing outside of work in the presence of colleagues, with these effects occurring primarily for high earners for whom time was the most economically valuable. Study 1b eliminated some alternative explanations for this finding by showing that people reported experiencing less happiness while socializing with colleagues than when socializing with family or friends, with no differences observed in experienced happiness as a function of either the economic value of time or whether people were paid by the hour. In a large representative online sample, Study 2 conceptually replicated the findings of Study 1a. Hourly respondents and non-hourly participants experimentally prompted to economically evaluate their time by calculating their approximate hourly wage exhibited highly similar patterns in their intentions to socialize with colleagues outside of work. In addition to offering causal evidence for economic evaluation, mediation analyses indicated that it was through emphasizing professional usefulness over enjoyment in socializing decisions that explained these differences in intentions. The findings show how organizational practices promoting economic evaluation can affect people’s choice of with whom to spend time off the job, with potential implications for both happiness and career trajectories.

Sorting and agglomeration economies in French economics departments

Are agglomeration and peer effects at stake in academic research? To tackle this question, we study how departments’ characteristics affect the quantity and quality of academics’ publications in economics in France, controlling for individual time-varying characteristics and individual fixed effects. Department characteristics have an explanatory power at least equal to a quarter of that of individual characteristics and possibly as high as theirs. The quantity and quality of an academic’s publications in a field increase with the presence of other academics specialised in that field and with the share of the department’s publications output in that field. In contrast, department size, proximity to other large departments, homogeneity in terms of publication performance, presence of colleagues with connections abroad, and composition in terms of positions and age matter for some publication measures but only if not controlling for individual fixed effects.

Un progetto di educazione alla salute sul fumo di tabacco in un campione di donne in ambiente di lavoro. Un cross sectional study

The aim of the study is to analyze the smoking attitudes of women in their working envi-ronment before and after a prevention campaign on the damage of smoking. 831 question-naires were administered, before and after the educational intervention, with special attention to smoking habits and to the behaviours typical of the working circle. 26% of the interviewees is an active smoker, 14% is a former smoker, 56% started smoking around the age of 15-20, 42% of the women smokes at the presence of their children. 81% is conscious of the damage caused by smoke on the foetus, only 9% declared smoking during the pregnancy. Only 7% of the interviewees smoked during lactation. 44% of smokers do not consider preventing from smoking in the presence of non-smoking colleagues, 36% usually smokes in working hours, 21% do not ask for permission when smoking in the presence of colleagues. 48% claims that passive smoking can reason minor effects and 21% of smokers claims never tried to stop smoking. 96% of the women declared the necessity of prevention with public campaigns.

Investigation of Preferences in Working Environment of Radiological Technologists Using Conjoint Analysis.

The purpose of this study is to assess working environment preferences of radiological technologists using conjoint analysis. We carried a questionnaire survey on working environment preferences for 200 radiological technologists working in medical facilities in Japan. We defined eight characteristics for virtual medical facilities as follows: presence of colleagues who can be consulted, employment status, number of overtime work per month, academic meeting participation, number of hospital beds, presence of nuclear medicine imaging systems and radiation therapy systems, location of medical facilities, and change rate in annual income. A total of 18 virtual medical facilities were selected by an orthogonal array table using above-mentioned characteristics. The acquired data by the pairwise comparison method were analyzed by conjoint analysis. Marginal rates of substitution between income and non-pecuniary characteristics, which represent radiological technologists' preferences, were also calculated. The factors influenced on their preferences were the following: employment status is not part-time, medical facility is smaller in scale, nuclear medicine imaging systems and radiation therapy systems are set up, and the number of overtime work is less. It was suggested that radiological technologists have a tendency to avoid increase of workloads and select his/her working place with emphasis on own experiences.

Obituary: John Glad (1941-2015)

John Glad, who died on 4th December 2015 in Washington, DC, produced a series of seminal works in the field of Russian studies. Glad even acted as an interpreter for both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. However, he also sat on the editorial board of the Mankind Quarterly and produced two significant books on the subject of eugenics.Glad became interested in this controversial topic in 1975. He attended a reception for genetics researchers the University of Iowa to find out more about it and was astonished that the assembled scholars seemed ignorant of it or least feigned ignorance of it, when speaking in the presence of colleagues. In 1979, by then the University of Maryland, Glad was summoned to his Dean's office for an inquisition about his views on race. It was irrelevant, Glad recalled, that he was part of a scheme that took African-American children around museums. Word had simply 'got round' despite his never having published on the subject. As Glad put it, 'An ideological coup d'etat had taken place both in popular culture and in academia since my undergraduate days, and the new rulers were ferreting out even potential dissenters. In effect, ideology was dictating the resolution of scientific questions' (Glad, 2011).Consequently, Glad resolved to research the topic of eugenics himself. The first product of this research, Future Human Evolution (2006), argues that civilization has severely relaxed natural selection meaning that the future of humanity will not be the descendants of those who have survived the rigors of natural selection. It will be those whose ancestors had the most children. And they had them in a context in which there is almost no selection against genetic illness and in which, because large families tend to be by accident, fertility is predicted by low intelligence. Glad argued that the welfare state only augmented this problem but, to his credit, he did not oppose social welfare. He rather suggested that at the very least, it would behoove us to increase family-planning services to the poor (p. 56). Situating eugenics as part of a broader environmental movement, Glad prosecuted his case in an extremely readable style, noting that the elite are in denial about the true meaning of Darwin's theory: that humans are animals. They accept that other organisms can evolve in a few generations, but not humans. Other organisms have genetic sub-species, but not humans.Glad's book carefully dealt with thorny philosophical questions: What kind of society do we want? Do we want one that is intelligent, altruistic, law-abiding and healthy? If we do, he argued, we have to artificially create it through medical and government intervention, the assumption being that a society can only be as good as the people who create it. The book looked the history of eugenics, discussed the ethical and philosophical issues involved, argued that the Nazis were primarily racialists who were not interested in universal eugenics, and suggested that eventually we should move beyond humanity to a 'machine brain.' Future Human Evolution has been translated into 12 languages the time of writing, including Urdu and Hebrew. Glad's related book, Jewish Eugenics (2011), which was dedicated to victims of the Holocaust, arose from his observation of the high status of Jews in Washington, DC. The book analyzes the significant Jewish participation in the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. It also takes note of the eugenic aspects of Jewish customs throughout history and examines their consequences in terms of the heights of Jewish achievement in much of recent history.Though fascinated by Jewish and Russian culture, John Glad was actually neither of these. Glad was born in Gary, Indiana (a steel mill town and birthplace of the Jackson 5) on 31st December 1941. His family were immigrants from Croatia where the word 'glad' means 'hunger.' As such, he would later introduce himself to Russian colleagues as 'Ivan Hunger. …

The European Way of Teaching Ophthalmic Surgery

'An ophthalmic surgeon must have certain physical and psychic qualities; he must have excellent vision, a very steady hand, a lot of patience, a passion for the minute and extraordinary precision in following all general and special regulations. In general surgery, inaccurate sterilization, incomplete anaesthesia or even minimal defects in instrumentation or lighting are considered simple difficulties, problems which are easily solved ... in ophthalmic surgery, they can mean the failure of the functional aim of the operation and sometimes eye loss'. This is how, in 1948, B. Leonardi gave the general introduction to his subject 'Chirurgia dell'Apparato Oculare' (Surgery of the Ocular Apparatus) [1], which has since become a kind of bible for Italian ophthalmic surgeons. Almost half a century later, it can be seen from debates and editorials of consultation sections [2] that ophthalmic microsurgery is still considered an art form [2], or a profession where capable dexterity is an unavoidable condition for good results. The basic principle is to minimize trauma. As a result, control, dexterity and precision, normal requisites for general surgery, become keywords. Superficiality, clumsiness, imprecision and inattention should be avoided at all costs. An operation of ophthalmic microsurgery must be perfect and work, otherwise problems or complications will arise sooner or later; half measures, possible compromise, the 'good enough' have very narrow margins. Quoting Leonardi once again ' ... the good ophthalmic operator must possess special skills, some of which are inborn and some which are acquired, that is to say they can result from effort, study and practice. A typical inherited gift is, for example, perfect vision ... another one is a steady hand; ... even a very slight degree of tremor can seriously jeopardize the capacity of the oculist. Naturally what I refer to is a constant tremor, not the unintentional one which can affect the novice during his first operations or which strikes some surgeons who have to operate in the presence of colleagues or away from home. Another inherited gift is a psychic one and is the natural inclination towards minute detail and

The "New" Social History in the Context of American Historical Writing

Historians are subdivided in more complex ways than members of most other academic disciplines-quadruply, by nation or region of globe, by time period, by thematic category (social, political, intellectual, and so on), and by cognitive predilection, sometimes but not always tied to a political outlook (e.g., Marxist, Freudian, or-perhaps still commonest of all-a naively antitheoretical empiricism). It is a mildly shocking thought that of these four kinds of division, time period-our supposed reason for being-may actually strike many of us as least important. For about a decade, from mid-1960s to mid-1970s, cleavage that seemed to matter most was between leftists and nonleftists. And this shock wave has not yet died out. The presence of colleagues who are vigorous Marxists may still set afire deepest passions in us, greater, for instance, than those triggered by ritualized snobberies of Europeanists toward Americanists. This is so because more orthodox historians suspect that Marxists, as also indeed some Freudians, are not cognitively open in same way as they are. Of course in making this assessment non-Marxists often exaggerate their own openness, confusing it with collective heterogeneity of choices they have made in terms of various kinds of intense specialization. And, on political plane, non-Marxists too easily forget that liberalism, defined as faith in beneficent power of federal government to bring about social justice, is itself now only predisposition of a shrinking minority of Americans, though they frequently seek to present it as the trend of to their students, just as Marxists do in regard to their own agenda. There are signs, however, that Marxist shock wave has been increasingly assimilated. It has lost some force by internal splintering. In last few years varying conceptions of it among its practitioners have made label seem almost meaningless. Eugene D. Genovese threw out economic determinism; Immanuel Wallerstein soft-pedals once fundamental distinction between industrial and preindustrial capitalism, so as to invoke a continuous history of exploitation by core nations of Third World.1 What is left, beyond a strong emotional identification with oppressed? In part, this decline of

Navigation and the Aircraft Industry

I remember that on V-J Day in 1945 a heroic band of Common-wealth delegates, greatly reinforced by the cooperative presence of colleagues from the United States, decided that they would not rise in celebration of victory but would continue their work, which included an estimate of the probable air-traffic density at the world's great airports in or about this year 1950. We made the best estimate we could of the numbers in which aircraft would in this present year be likely to be moving in and out of Heathrow (as it was then called), of Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. Looking back through the mist of five years I detect a band of enthusiastic and starry-eyed optimists.In this year of 1950 the British aircraft industry has an absolute and undisputed lead in the design and manufacture of civil turbo-jet and turbo-propeller aircraft. This time again I look forward, but I warn myself that we are another group of starry-eyed optimists if we think that another five years hence Britain will hold that undisputed lead, or will be comfortably established in a position of monopoly in the sale of jet-propelled civil aircraft.