Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA): Students' Views of What Works in a Specialist Setting.

"Emotionally based school avoidance" (EBSA) is a term used to describe young people who have difficulty attending school due to emotional needs. In comparison to previously favoured terms such as "school refuser", EBSA highlights the impact of unmet emotional needs over school non-attendance, which then informs the intervention offered for students struggling to attend school. This paper presents an exploratory single-case study undertaken at a specialist GCSE setting (School X) for students experiencing EBSA.

Subjective assessment underestimates surgical risk: On the potential benefits of cardiopulmonary exercise testing for open thoracoabdominal repair.

Background: Initial clinical evaluation (ICE) is traditionally considered a useful screening tool to identify frail patients during the preoperative assessment. However, emerging evidence supports the more objective assessment of cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) via cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) to improve surgical risk stratification. Herein, we compared both subjective and objective assessment approaches to highlight the interpretive idiosyncrasies.

A pilot study of the mental workload of objective structured clinical examination examiners.

Context: Mental workload is a concept used in many industries to investigate operator performance, but it has only recently been used in the educational setting. It has been suggested that excessive mental workload in assessors may impair the validity of objective structured clinical examination (OSCE)-type assessments.

Objectives: This study aimed to establish the feasibility of measuring the mental workload of examiners during an OSCE assessment and to establish methodologies and baseline values to guide future study design.