Preliminary Program Evaluation of Pocket PE 3-5™, A User-Friendly Digital Application for Teacher Skills Training and Physical Education Activities for Third- to Fifth-Grade Elementary Students.

BACKGROUND: In the United States, many classroom teachers also teach physical education (PE). However, there is a dearth of evidence- and standard-based PE programs designed to support classroom teachers to deliver PE effectively in schools. METHODS: The purpose of this study was to establish proof-of-concept for the Pocket PE 3-5 digital app in school settings with 10 third- to fifth-grade classroom teachers. We assessed fidelity of program implementation, measured via observations of PE quality. Students used wrist-worn heart rate monitors during Pocket PE 3-5 lessons to measure time spent in moderate to vigorous physical activity. Program feasibility was primarily assessed through teacher-reported surveys of usability, satisfaction, and acceptability and exit interviews. RESULTS: Mean PE observation scores were 18.6 (SD = 1.5) on a scale of 5 to 20. On average, students spent 56.7% (SD = 13.1%) of class time engaging in moderate to vigorous physical activity. Mean survey scores, reported on a 5-point scale, were 4.5 (SD = 0.6) for acceptability, 4.8 (SD = 0.4) for usability, and 4.7 (SD = 0.7) for satisfaction. Teachers liked how easy the app was to use but mentioned some technological challenges. CONCLUSIONS: This program evaluation study established the proof-of-concept for the Pocket PE 3-5 elementary school PE program.

Translating the Essentials for Correctional Nursing Practice and Professional Development.

This article reports the results of aligning the new Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing Education (American Association of Colleges of Nursing, 2021) with the continuing education needs of nurses who work in justice settings and with justice-involved populations. Much progress in considering the development of the "future" nurse is generated by and intended for academic institutions. Although the readiness of health care agencies (employers) is being discussed, continued professional development of currently employed nurses to help them transition smoothly to work with this "future" nurse has received less attention. To that end, during its latest review, the Nurse Advisory Council to the National Commission on Correctional Health Care aligned its educational plan for correctional nurses with the Essentials document. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2023;54(9):399-404.].

NPs caring for people who are incarcerated and negatively impacted by social determinants of health.

ABSTRACT: This article explores roles filled and care provided by NPs in diverse carceral settings along with the impact of health disparities experienced as a result of social determinants of health on the chronic disease burden of people who are incarcerated. Opportunities abound for NPs to positively influence this patient population's health, but specialized education is needed.

Program Evaluation of Healthy Moves™: A Community-Based Trainer in Residence Professional Development Program to Support Generalist Teachers With Physical Education Instruction.

BACKGROUND: Elementary school teachers are often responsible for teaching physical education to their students, with little formal training in that instruction. This study evaluates a trainer in residence professional development program designed to improve physical education instructional attitudes and practices in elementary school generalist teachers. METHODS: Participants were 139 teachers and 3577 first to fifth grade students at 11 public elementary schools in Oregon. Program evaluation measures included pre- and postteacher surveys on teacher attitudes and practices toward teaching physical education for fidelity, postprogram lesson observations for sustainability, and teacher-reported program barriers to and facilitators of feasibility. A multivariate repeated-measures analysis of covariance test assessed changes in teacher attitudes and practices related to physical education instruction. RESULTS: There were main effects of time observed for teacher encouragement and enthusiasm and physical education teaching practices (F2,127 = 9.68, P < .001, ηp2=.132). Postprogram observations indicated sustained use of activity components and an average of 86% of physical education class time spent with students engaged in moderate to vigorous levels of physical activity. CONCLUSIONS: The trainer in residence community-based approach shows promise as an appropriate professional development strategy for generalist teachers responsible for physical education instruction. However, a longer duration, randomized control trial is needed to determine the efficacy of these programs in promoting student physical education outcomes.

Correctional Nurses on the Front Lines of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Omaha System Guidelines Documentation Case Study.

During a pandemic, basic public health precautions must be taken across settings and populations. However, confinement conditions change what can be done in correctional settings. Correctional nursing (CN) care, like all nursing care, needs to be named and encoded to be recognized and used to generate data that will advance the discipline and maintain standards of care. The Omaha System is a standardized interprofessional terminology that has been used since 1992 to guide and document care. In 2019, a collaboration between the newly formed American Correctional Nurses Association and the Omaha System Community of Practice began a joint effort with other stakeholders aimed at encoding evidence-based pandemic response interventions used in CN. The resulting guidelines are included and illustrated with examples from CN practice.

CareLink-Corrections Phase 1: A Feasibility Study Inside Prisons to Improve Self-Care Upon Release.

CareLink-Corrections is an evidence-informed self-care management (SCM) program designed to provide nursing and health services students an opportunity to serve a vulnerable justice-involved population while learning to provide clinical care service. Within this program, SCM of health is the clinical focus and is conceptualized as a competency where the individual acquires the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that facilitate health maintenance, health care management, and/or health promotion. Thirty undergraduate nursing students and 47 incarcerated persons participated in this first phase of the program. This article presents the first step in building the program-a feasibility study to test implementation of the program to persons in prison.

Nursing in the American Justice System.

Efforts to provide humane care for the mentally ill has led to growth of more suitable services in community-based settings, yet resources are insufficient to meet the needs of mentally ill who interface with the criminal justice system. The resulting collateral damage has created a pathway to prison for massive numbers of impaired individuals, and the inhumane warehousing of thousands of mentally ill people is reminiscent of a century ago. The criminal justice system was never intended to be a safety net for the public mental health system. While advances in expanding the role of the nurse in the healthcare system have shifted because of efforts by nursing's response to the 2010 Institute of Medicine report, the challenges for correctional/custody nursing have not been adequately articulated. This paper seeks to enhance awareness of Correctional Nursing through a discussion of challenges posed to nurses who work at the intersection of justice and public health in prisons, jails, detention centers and community supervision in this response to the Future of Nursing report.

Group and individual selection during evolutionary transitions in individuality: meanings and partitions.

The Price equation embodies the 'conditions approach' to evolution in which the Darwinian conditions of heritable variation in fitness are represented in equation form. The equation can be applied recursively, leading to a partition of selection at the group and individual levels. After reviewing the well-known issues with the Price partition, as well as issues with a partition based on contextual analysis, we summarize a partition of group and individual selection based on counterfactual fitness, the fitness that grouped cells would have were they solitary. To understand 'group selection' in multi-level selection models, we assume that only group selection can make cells suboptimal when they are removed from the group. Our analyses suggest that there are at least three kinds of selection that can be occurring at the same time: group-specific selection along with two kinds of individual selection, within-group selection and global individual selection. Analyses based on counterfactual fitness allow us to specify how close a group is to being a pseudo-group, and this can be a basis for quantifying progression through an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI). During an ETI, fitnesses at the two levels, group and individual, become decoupled, in the sense that fitness in a group may be quite high, even as counterfactual fitness goes to zero. This article is part of the theme issue 'Fifty years of the Price equation'.

A Concept Analysis of Transitions of Care for Population Health.

BACKGROUND: Compelling evidence indicates that gaps in quality, safety, and experiences occur when patients encounter transitions across the care continuum. Differences in the organization of healthcare services as well as disparities in health across the globe, may have a unique impact on processes associated with transitions of care for client populations. PURPOSE: Increased attention to the concept of transitions of care has resulted in disparate meanings and lack of clarity about its nature. Therefore, the purpose of this manuscript is to address this knowledge gap by analyzing the concept of transitions of care at the population level. METHODOLOGY: To address the knowledge gap of what constitutes transitions of care at the population level, a concept analysis was done guided by the methodology of Walker and Avant. A comprehensive search of the literature yielded a small but relevant number of publications. RESULTS: This analysis identified four defining attributes, together with antecedents and consequences of transitions of care at the macro-system level of healthcare. A synthesized definition of transitions of care was developed. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: This analysis provides conceptual clarity for the concept of transitions of care at the macro-system level of care. It can be used to guide the development of a middle-range theory to inform clinical practice and health policy.

Measurement in Correctional Health Research: Unique Challenges and Strategies for Enhanced Rigor.

It is essential to identify valid and reliable measurement strategies to enhance accurate, comprehensive, and meaningful health assessment and evaluation to improve health outcomes among justice-involved and incarcerated populations. This article identifies and describes three primary challenges related to measurement in correctional health care and makes four recommendations for enhanced measurement rigor from a social justice perspective. First, incorporate incarcerated persons into the measurement research process; second, enhance psychometric investigation in correctional health settings; third, increase the collection of individual-level, health-related data from incarcerated populations; and fourth, create and maintain centralized databases and comprehensive codebooks to promote data sharing.

Generation time and fitness tradeoffs during the evolution of multicellularity.

The evolution of multicellular organisms from their unicellular ancestors is an example of an evolutionary transition in individuality (ETI), i.e. a change in the units of selection and adaptation. The theory of ETIs poses particular challenges because, by definition, key theoretical constructs such as fitness are shifting during an ETI. Past work emphasized the importance of life history tradeoffs during ETIs in which lower level units form groups and become individuals at a higher level. In particular, it has been hypothesized that the convexity of the lower-level tradeoff between viability and fecundity changes with group size and determines the optimality of lower-level specialization in the fitness components of the group. This is important because lower-level specialization is a key indicator of higher-level individuality. Here we show that increasing generation time can increase the convexity of the lower-level viability-fecundity tradeoff. This effect is a novel hypothesis for the positive association between cell-group size and cellular specialization in a major model system for ETIs, the volvocine algae. The pattern in this clade is thought to be an example of a more general size-complexity rule. Our hypothesis is that larger groups have longer generation times and longer generation times lead to more convex lower-level viability-fecundity tradeoffs, which could account for specialization being optimal only in larger cell groups (colonies). We discuss the robustness of this effect to various changes in the assumptions of our model. Our work is important for the study of ETIs in general because viability and fecundity are fundamental components of fitness in all systems and because generation time is expected to be changing during many ETIs.

Models of cell division initiation in Chlamydomonas: A challenge to the consensus view.

We develop and compare two models for division initiation in cells of the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a topic that has remained controversial in spite of years of empirical work. Achieving a better understanding of C. reinhardtii cell cycle regulation is important because this species is used in studies of fundamental eukaryotic cell features and in studies of the evolution of multicellularity. C. reinhardtii proliferates asexually by multiple fission, interspersing rapid rounds of symmetric division with prolonged periods of growth. Our Model 1 reflects major elements of the current consensus view on C. reinhardtii division initiation, with cells first growing to a specific size, then waiting for a particular time prior to division initiation. In Model 2, our proposed alternative, growing cells divide when they have reached a growth-rate-dependent target size. The two models imply a number of different empirical patterns. We highlight these differences alongside published data, which currently fall short of unequivocally distinguishing these differences in predicted cell behavior. Nevertheless, several lines of evidence are suggestive of more Model 2-like behavior than Model 1-like behavior. Our specification of these models adds rigor to issues that have too often been worked out in relation to loose, verbal models and is directly relevant to future development of informative experiments.

Relationships of illness representation, diabetes knowledge, and self-care behaviour to glycemic control in incarcerated persons with diabetes.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships of self-care behavior, illness representation and diabetes knowledge with A1C (level of glycemic control) in 124 incarcerated persons. Design/methodology/approach Using a cross-sectional design, summary scores and items from the self-care inventory revised, brief illness perception questionnaire and the spoken knowledge for low literacy in diabetes were evaluated using linear regression to assess their relationship to A1C. Findings Metabolic control was suboptimal for the majority of inmates with diabetes. The final regression model was statistically significant ( F (3, 120)=9.51, p=0.001, R(2)=19.2 percent). Higher log10 HbA1C (A1C) was associated with lower personal control beliefs ( B=-0.007, t (122)=-2.42, p=<0.02), higher self-report of diabetes understanding ( B=0.009, t (122)=3.12, p=0.00) and using insulin ( B=0.062, t (122)=2.45, p=0.02). Research limitations/implications Similar to findings with community dwelling participants, enhancing diabetes personal control beliefs among inmates may lead to lower A1C. Social implications Highly structured environments with limited options for self-care, personal choices and readily available health care may give some incarcerated persons with diabetes no motivation to improve diabetes control even if they have an understanding of what to do. Originality/value While there is abundant research in the community describing how these factors influence A1C levels, research of this nature with incarcerated persons with diabetes is limited. Findings will inform diabetes programming during incarceration to better prepare inmates for reentry.

A Call to Action: A Blueprint for Academic Health Sciences in the Era of Mass Incarceration.

Over 100 million Americans have criminal records, and the U.S. incarcerates seven times more citizens than most developed countries. The burden of incarceration disproportionately affects people of color and ethnic minorities, and those living in poverty. While 95% of incarcerated people return to society, recidivism rates are high with nearly 75% arrested again within five years of release. Criminal records impede access to employment and other social services such as shelter and health care. Justice-involved people have higher rates of substance, mental health, and some chronic medical disorders than the general population; furthermore, the incarcerated population is rapidly aging. Only a minority of academic health science centers are engaged in health services research, workforce training, or correctional health care. This commentary provides rationale and a blueprint for engagement of academic health science institutions to harness their capabilities to tackle one of the country's most vexing public health crises.

Correctional Nursing Interventions for Incarcerated Persons with Mental Disorders: An Integrative Review.

The authors explore the current state-of-the art of correctional nursing by summarizing the types of interventions employed by nurses, across studies, designed to assist this challenging group of patients. This examination of evidence-based interventions implemented and tested by correctional nurses provides a better understanding of their role and function. Correctional health is a nurse driven system, yet a minimal amount is known about the nurses who practice in these environments or about their contributions to the practice of mental health nursing in correctional environments. An integrative review utilizing PRISMA guidelines examined five databases (Medline/PubMed, PsycInfo, PsychArticles, Sage Criminology, and Academic Search) for peer-reviewed articles that fit selected criteria. Of 324 references identified, 16 studies met criteria. Following assessment of strength of evidence, only eight studies offered scientific proof of the effectiveness of nursing interventions. Nursing interventions implemented in correctional settings targeted incarcerated persons with behavioral and psychological symptoms. Interventions included psycho-education, environmental adaptations, and behavior therapies. The centrality of nurses in correctional health care emphasizes the significance of understanding their role and function in this setting. This integrative review revealed that correctional nurses are actively engaged in providing therapeutic, evidence-based interventions in the health care of incarcerated persons. Of interest, seven of the eight studies focused on incarcerated persons with mental health or substance use issues. Nurse led interventions such as CBT, labyrinth walking, and yoga aim to improve coping and adaptation of incarcerated persons.

Promoting a Sustainable Academic-Correctional Health Partnership: Lessons for Systemic Action Research.

In the United States, the phenomenon of mass incarceration has created a public health crisis. One strategy for addressing this crisis involves developing a correctional agency - academic institution partnership tasked with augmenting the quality and quantity of evidence-based healthcare delivered in state prisons and attracting a greater number of health professionals to the field of correctional health research. Using a Connecticut correctional agency - academic institution partnership as a case example, the present paper examines some of the key challenges encountered over the course of a 3-year capacity-building initiative. Particular attention is given to agency and institution characteristics both at the structural level and in terms of divergent stakeholder perspectives. The authors find that future partnership development work in this area will likely benefit from close attention to predictable sources of temporal variation in agency capability to advance project-related aims.