Nursing students' perspectives on being work-ready with electronic medical records: Intersections of rurality and health workforce capacity.

AIM: To explore nursing students' views on being prepared for using electronic medical records during clinical placement. BACKGROUND: The need for an undergraduate nursing curriculum to include electronic medical record training has been internationally recognised, however successful implementation has been inconsistent worldwide and limited in Australia. Many nursing students are unprepared to effectively provide care during clinical placement using electronic medical records and are therefore not work-ready as registered nurses. DESIGN: Online survey. METHODS: Third-year nursing students from two multi-campus universities were invited to complete the survey. RESULTS: Most students believed that learning electronic medical records during simulations would be extremely or very useful. Student confidence levels correlate with the amount and type of exposure to electronic medical records prior to clinical placement. Four themes emerged from qualitative analysis: Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater; Prepare us for practice; Mistakes - hardly any; and Universities need to catch up and put out. CONCLUSION: Students receiving hospital-based education on eMR and eObs can improve student confidence in preparation for clinical practice. First-year optional eMR university education had a limited impact on students' perception of preparedness for clinical practice. Shared responsibility between both the universities and health services on eMR education would provide improved student confidence and preparedness for clinical practice. This study supports the international research that eMR education needs to be scaffolded over the three years of study with increasing complexity of real-life scenarios.

Continent-wide evidence that landscape context can mediate the effects of local habitats on in-field abundance of pests and natural enemies.

Landscape-scale factors known to influence in-field abundance of pest herbivores and their natural enemies, but little is known about effects that operate through the shorter-range influences exerted by habitats immediately adjacent to crop fields.This study first compared the abundance of brassica insect pests and their natural enemy arthropods in 24 spatially independent brassica vegetable fields across southern Australia. An 'edge effect' index was used to compare the abundance of each taxon in the field center with abundance in areas of the crop adjacent to differing habitats. Then, three landscape properties: landscape composition, edge density, and connectivity of diverse crop and non-crop habitats were analyzed at five scales up to 5 km from these focal field centers to assess longer-range influences on arthropod abundances in field centers and on the edge effects.Edge effect of adjacent woody vegetation promoted ladybirds and reduced diamondback moth and whiteflies. Conversely, the presence of crops and pastures immediately adjacent to focal crop fields reduced whiteflies and aphids but with no effect on natural enemies.Effect of landscape composition and connectivity on arthropod abundance at field center found promotion of aphids (cabbage aphid and green peach aphid) by woodland in the landscape.Effect of landscape properties on the edge effects of adjacent habitats was contrasting; strengthened (landscape composition and edge density on edge effect of crops, pasture and woody vegetation in reducing diamondback moth and whiteflies) as well as weakened (edge density and landscape connectivity on edge effect of crops, pasture and woody vegetation in reducing diamondback moth on diamondback moth, whiteflies and aphids, and promoting ladybirds). Synthesis and applications: Findings of this geographically extensive study help define the level of pest risk associated with sites as well as suggest potential interventions such as establishment or restorations of woody vegetation adjacent to crop fields that could reduce risk.

A Citizen Science Trial to Assess Perception of Wild Penguin Welfare.

Wild penguins are facing increased threats to their populations and their welfare as a consequence of human activities. Understanding the perception of animal welfare is essential to identify ethical concerns related to the negative impact of anthropogenic factors on wild species and to guide conservation efforts that reflect societal values. Since penguin conservation is of general interest, we examined the human dimension of welfare assessment across a range of interest groups concerned with penguins, seabird biology and wildlife conservation. We provided participants with a Penguin Welfare Assessment Tool (PWAT) based on the five domains model. The PWAT supports consideration of the impact of four physical aspects on welfare-relevant mental states. Bibliometric analysis of keywords from 347 scientific articles indicated that penguins around the world face five main types (themes) of anthropogenic factors and we then developed five hypothetical scenarios, each related to one theme. Seventy-five participants scored the overall impact of the events described in the scenarios on penguin welfare as negative using the PWAT. Participants rated short-duration, high-intensity events (i.e., being trapped in a ghost fishing net) as having a significantly more severe impact on penguin welfare than low-intensity, long-duration events (P < 0.0001). Scores provided by participants for each domain for each scenario were largely as expected and we found good correlation (all P < 0.0001) between the physical domains and "mental state" for all scenarios, indicating that the tool was facilitating the participants' assessment of welfare. No evidence was found that experience of working or studying penguins, or indeed any other demographic factor investigated, influenced the assessments of welfare. We found little agreement between participants in the scores provided (unalike scores mostly between 0.7 and 0.8), and agreement between participants with experience of working with penguins was no better than between participants without such experience. We discuss the possibility that low agreement within different interest groups may be improved by providing more scientific information to support the evaluation of penguin welfare. We conclude that scientific knowledge of penguin biological responses to anthropogenic factors is vital to support the evaluation of wild penguin welfare by the public and other stakeholders.

A geographical analysis of speech-language pathology services to support multilingual children.

The speech-language pathology workforce strives to provide equitable, quality services to multilingual people. However, the extent to which this is being achieved is unknown. Participants in this study were 2849 members of Speech Pathology Australia and 4386 children in the Birth cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). Statistical and geospatial analyses were undertaken to identify the linguistic diversity and geographical distribution of Australian speech-language pathology services and Australian children. One fifth of services offered by Speech Pathology Australia members (20.2%) were available in a language other than English. Services were most commonly offered in Australian Sign Language (Auslan) (4.3%), French (3.1%), Italian (2.2%), Greek (1.6%), and Cantonese (1.5%). Among 4-5-year-old children in the nationally representative LSAC, 15.3% regularly spoke and/or understood a language other than English. The most common languages spoken by the children were Arabic (1.5%), Italian (1.2%), Greek (0.9%), Spanish (0.9%), and Vietnamese (0.9%). There was a mismatch between the location of and languages in which multilingual services were offered, and the location of and languages spoken by children. These findings highlight the need for SLPs to be culturally competent in providing equitable services to all clients, regardless of the languages they speak.

Demographic patterns of a widespread long-lived tree are associated with rainfall and disturbances along rainfall gradients in SE Australia.

Predicting species distributions with changing climate has often relied on climatic variables, but increasingly there is recognition that disturbance regimes should also be included in distribution models. We examined how changes in rainfall and disturbances along climatic gradients determined demographic patterns in a widespread and long-lived tree species, Callitris glaucophylla in SE Australia. We examined recruitment since 1950 in relation to annual (200-600 mm) and seasonal (summer, uniform, winter) rainfall gradients, edaphic factors (topography), and disturbance regimes (vertebrate grazing [tenure and species], fire). A switch from recruitment success to failure occurred at 405 mm mean annual rainfall, coincident with a change in grazing regime. Recruitment was lowest on farms with rabbits below 405 mm rainfall (mean = 0-0.89 cohorts) and highest on less-disturbed tenures with no rabbits above 405 mm rainfall (mean = 3.25 cohorts). Moderate levels of recruitment occurred where farms had no rabbits or less disturbed tenures had rabbits above and below 405 mm rainfall (mean = 1.71-1.77 cohorts). These results show that low annual rainfall and high levels of introduced grazing has led to aging, contracting populations, while higher annual rainfall with low levels of grazing has led to younger, expanding populations. This study demonstrates how demographic patterns vary with rainfall and spatial variations in disturbances, which are linked in complex ways to climatic gradients. Predicting changes in tree distribution with climate change requires knowledge of how rainfall and key disturbances (tenure, vertebrate grazing) will shift along climatic gradients.

The open access malaria box: a drug discovery catalyst for neglected diseases.

Historically, one of the key problems in neglected disease drug discovery has been identifying new and interesting chemotypes. Phenotypic screening of the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum has yielded almost 30,000 submicromolar hits in recent years. To make this collection more accessible, a collection of 400 chemotypes has been assembled, termed the Malaria Box. Half of these compounds were selected based on their drug-like properties and the others as molecular probes. These can now be requested as a pharmacological test set by malaria biologists, but importantly by groups working on related parasites, as part of a program to make both data and compounds readily available. In this paper, the analysis and selection methodology and characteristics of the compounds are described.

Integrating spatially referenced social and biophysical data to explore landholder responses to dryland salinity in Australia.

Researchers attempting to integrate socio-economic data in watershed planning often draw on nationally collected census data. However, there are critical limitations to the usefulness of this type of data for decision makers operating at the watershed scale. In this paper we demonstrate the relevance of spatially referenced socio-economic data collected using mail surveys to random selections of rural landholders. The issue explored was dryland salinity management in two large watersheds in the Murray-Darling Basin of south-eastern Australia. Contrary to the assumptions underlying public policy in Australia, but consistent with the literature on farmer knowledge, comparisons of expert maps and landholder identified salinity sites suggested that landholders in these watersheds had excellent knowledge of the current extent of salinity on their property. Our research also suggested that salinity education was a sound investment by governments. At the same time, the expert maps failed to predict half of the saline affected sites identified by landholders. Accurately mapping the extent of salinity would seem a first step in addressing this nationally significant land degradation issue.