What gets lost when doctors handover.

For anyone who has ever had to spend more than a few hours in hospital, this thesis has personal meaning:

Doctors' shift handovers in acute medical units  by Michelle Amondi Raduma-Tomás, 2012 at the University of Aberdeen. EThOS ID 558660

Raduma-Tomás looks to describe the ideal handover process when one shift of medical staff ends and another begins and looks at what actually happens in two Scottish Acute Medical Units. Unsurprisingly for anyone who has been an in-patient it seems a lot of information gets lost, mostly due to interruptions, patient workload and a lack of standardised procedures. 

Having had 2 children in the last 5 years, one of whom has had a few stays in hospital, I can attest that I've had to be on the ball when I know a handover is coming up: it puts staff out-of-action for at least half an hour and everything you've worked so hard to communicate for that last 12 hours is not passed on, more often than not. I have found that you have to actively manage your own healthcare and be proactive at every step: not so easy when you're laid up after an operation!

So it's good that this study has been done, and more besides in recent years (just search medical handover in EThOS) but the findings are very worrying, not least that there isn't a standarised procedure.

I am a big fan of the writings of Atul Gawande and his The Checklist Manifesto is a short, quick and fascinating read with practical and far-reaching implications. It puts the work of experts into checklists for the safety of everyone involved. One of Raduma-Tomás' conclusions is that "A simple, handover process checklist may ensure critical handover tasks have been achieved prior to any shift change" and that information transfer would then be less susceptible to interruption for instance. 

There is something for everyone in this book by Gawande, a polymath surgeon, give it a go.

Nifty wee video on EThOS

Find out how three researchers from the Universities of Manchester, Plymouth and Glasgow have used EThOS to help their research.

A nice, short film that highlights why access to UK PhD theses can greatly aid your research and that of your students.

Using EThOS - cos that's what it's for. FREE webinar Thursday 13th February 15.00 GMT

Webinar: find out about EThOS

EThOS is the national database for PhD theses, managed by the British Library. It’s a fantastic resource for researchers, with over 100,000 UK theses freely available to download and use for your own research, and another 200,000 available to search and scan on demand.

We ran a free webinar (online presentation) about EThOS late last year, and by popular demand we’re doing another on 13 February at 15.00.

Find out how to search for and download theses, and what to do if a thesis isn’t available. If you’re a PhD student, find out what will happen to your thesis once it’s completed. We’ll also explain how EThOS works with UK universities to support the whole research cycle, making the theses more visible and available for new researchers to use and build on.

Host: Sara Gould, Development Manager at the British Library, who manages the EThOS service, and Melissa Byrd, who deals with marketing for Higher Education.

Register now to attend the webinar

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5974661878725146370  

Over their dead bodies

Barkerville Cemetery, BC from Wkikmedia Commons

This is the one that made me want to start this blog:
Over their dead bodies: a study of leisure and spatiality in cemeteries by Annabel Deering PhD candidate at the University of Brighton.
It's a study of the leisure use of cemeteries and introduced me to the following terms I had never before encountered:

• heterotopia
• purple recreation
• dark tourism
• garbology

which I would encourage you to Google. I very much like her conclusion that "the cemetery engages the visitor in deep and meaningful ways that have previously been underestimated."

What a corker of a subject!

A very Aberdeen-y PhD .... how to get out of a crashed helicopter very quickly.

Continental platform, courtesy of Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, DeGolyer Library

Knowledge and skills retention in basic offshore safety and emergency training (B.O.S.E.T) a PhD by Mohamad Fahmi Bin Hussin. Considering the amount of offshore activity around Aberdeen I should think this was very well-received. 

Idiots, imbeciles, and the asylum in the early twentieth century : Bevan Lewis and the boys of Stanley Hall

A PhD thesis by Jean Denise Hoole, unfortunately no abstract is available on EThOS just now, but it looks absolutely fascinating. The thesis highlights the care of boys deemed "feeble-minded" in between 1901 and 1910 being treated as individuals, with the involvement of their families. Quite different to what was the norm of the time. Led me down a few interesting avenues:
West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum Wikipedia entry is a bit scant but has links.
Stanley Royd Hospital is a bit of a messy website but very interesting, lots of info on the care of the mentally ill in the Victorian and Edwardian era.
Then my favourite Urban Degeneration which is a series of photographs taken in 2011 showing a building in decay.
Having done my bachelor's degree in psychology in York, a stone's throw from the Tuke Centre and The Retreat, I was delighted to stumble on this part of the history of the treatment of the mentally ill.

Ghost towns

"The archaeology of abandonment: ghost towns of the American West".
This academic treatment of US ghost towns put me in mind of this guy's work: Noel Kern. And having visited a couple of ghost towns I was glad to see this thesis exploring the reasons for abandonment.

Archaeology - Star Trek: The Next Generation style?

3D quantitative interpretation of archaeomagnetic surveys : application of mathematical modelling to determine depths and physical characteristics of buried materials

Surely this brings us closer to non-invasive archaeology à la Picard? It's got to beat digging around in damp trenches looking for a series of small walls. Hopefully they'll develop this as an app for the tricorder.

Tarantulas and social spiders : a tale of sex and silk

That's just a really lovely title for a thesis!

Train overcrowding makes you miserable.

I can certainly agree with that very heavily paraphrased conclusion from Nor Diana Mohd Mahudin. I had to peek a bit further when I saw this thesis title:
"Quality of rail passenger experience: the direct and spillover effects of crowding on individual well-being and organisational behaviour."
This researcher looked at the perceptions of over-crowding among key stakeholder institutions in the Malaysian rail industry and found it to be considered a minor problem compared to "capacity, infrastructure, and serive quality issues." But what the author has done has developed an effective measure to determine passengers' experience of overcrowding; this shows that they find it stressful and that this stress has an impact on their life beyond the journey itself. Indeed when you have a look at the author's blog, Beyond Commuting, there are links to wider research that suggest people with a long commute are more likely to divorce!
This research caught my eye because I commuted for a year to study for my MA in Librarianship and the rail journey was utterly soul-destroying and exhausting:

• only getting a seat half the time meant I couldn't guarantee I could get any work done on the journey
• hanging around waiting for delayed trains, worrying about getting to lectures on time
• overcrowded trains just make everyone grumpy, rude and generally vile

My conclusion: I hope I never have to commute by train ever again. Good research here, of great value.

You know that dilemma when you're a professor of surgery but then are awarded a life peerage....how do I write my name?!

You don't? Well, neither do I, but I discovered today how you write your name....
Professor The Lord, as in:
Professor the Lord Darzi of Denham was there ever a more accomplished man? Or a better vindication of immigration?

Eh? You say, where's this coming from?

Well I'm working on EThOS and checking which theses are on there, so I'm working through hundreds of PhD theses from around the UK, a vast trawl through what so far amounts to well over a millennium of academic endeavour. On the way I encounter little things that please me. So I'll share them here.