Introduction: Telehealth has the potential to improve access to mental health care, especially for people living in rural and remote regions. Yet, telehealth accessibility remains a challenge in Australia, and there is a scarcity of appropriate, psychometrically sound tools for evaluating telehealth use by mental health service users. The aim of this study was to adapt and validate a scale for measuring factors associated with mental healthcare telehealth use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is growing evidence that the uptake and use of telehealth is influenced by the distinct specialty area or type of healthcare service provided, with mental health services presenting particular challenges. However, little is known about how telehealth use differs between different mental health professions, and no qualitative research has explored variations in telehealth use and perspectives at the profession level within Australian mental health services. To address this gap, we analyzed transcripts from 19 semi-structured interviews conducted with mental healthcare professionals in a local health district within New South Wales, Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Medical students from affluent and highly educated backgrounds remain overrepresented in Canadian medical schools despite widespread efforts to improve diversity. Little is known of the medical school experiences of students who are first in their family (FiF) to attend university. Drawing on Bourdieu and a critically reflexive lens, this study explored the experiences of FiF students in a Canadian medical school to better understand the ways in which the medical school environment can be exclusive and inequitable to underrepresented students.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndia's public health system aims to foster pluralism by integrating AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy) with mainstream biomedical care. This policy change provides an opportunity to explore the complexity of health system innovation, addressing the relationship between biomedicine and complementary or alternative medicine. Implementing health policy depends on local, societal, and political contexts that shape intervention in practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch on why people use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) shows clients value the CAM consultation, where they feel listened to and empowered to control their own health. Such 'empowerment' through CAM use is often theorised as reflecting wider neoliberal imperatives of self-responsibility. CAM users' perspectives are well studied, but there has been little sociological analysis of interactions within the CAM consultation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is increasing recognition of the salience of eHealth technologies in enhancing health service capacity. Yet social work remains "behind the curve" in progressing digital practices. As the demand for digital health care increases, particularly following COVID-19, it is becoming increasingly urgent to understand how social workers engage with eHealth technologies, and how technological engagement impacts on social work practice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Complementary Medicine (CM) is widely used internationally but there is limited understanding of the forms of knowledge CM practitioners use in their clinical practice and how they use this knowledge in interactions with patients. This review aims to synthesise the existing evidence on the forms of knowledge that are mobilised, and the role of this knowledge in the interactions between practitioners and patients during CM consultations. It considered a diverse range of CM practice areas to develop a classification of CM practitioners' knowledge use in consultations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHierarchies of power among healthcare professionals are well documented, nonetheless, power remains neglected, understudied and under-theorised in health systems analysis and policy discussions, especially in the domain of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (TCAM). Sociological and public health scholarship has documented the persistence of medical dominance in the health system, theorised as the limitation, subordination, exclusion and incorporation of other professions. This paper explores how interprofessional power dynamics shape the integration of TCAM into Indian primary healthcare centres, as part of a nationwide policy of TCAM integration and medical pluralism implemented since 2005.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The contemporary evidence-based practice model acknowledges the importance of patient preferences and clinician experience when applying evidence within a clinical setting. Knowledge mobilisation (KM) acknowledges the complexities of knowledge translation by recognising and respecting diversity in types of knowledge and how such diversity can influence health care and health care choices. While there has been considerable discussion on KM in health care, it has received little attention in the field of naturopathy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There has been much interest in the transitions along the medical education continuum. However, little is known about how students from non-traditional backgrounds experience both the move to, and through Medical School, and their ambitions post-graduation. This research sought to understand the transitional journey into, and through undergraduate medical education, and future career aspirations for first-in-family (FiF) medical students.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To identify communication patterns of Registered Nurses regarding patients' use of complementary therapies.
Methods: A cross-sectional online survey conducted in 2017 recruited Australian Registered Nurses working in any area of nursing.
Results: Responses of 614 Registered Nurses were analysed.
Aim: To explore Registered Nurses' attitudes and behaviour towards patients' use of complementary therapies.
Background: Despite high rates of use of complementary therapies by the general population, little is known of how nurses respond to patients' use of these therapies.
Design: A two-phase sequential exploratory mixed methods design.
Sociological studies of the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) occupations have documented the professionalisation strategies these groups use to establish boundaries between themselves and their competitors, including seeking educational accreditation and statutory regulation/licensure. Chiropractic has been particularly successful at professionalising and in Australia and the UK it is taught within public universities. Recent events have threatened chiropractic's university foothold, however, showing that professionalisation needs to be understood as an ongoing process of negotiation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The use of complementary therapies is becoming increasingly prevalent. This has important implications for nurses in terms of patient care and safety.
Objective: The aim of this meta-synthesis is to review critically, appraise and synthesize the existing qualitative research to develop a new, more substantial interpretation of nurses' attitudes regarding the, use of complementary therapies by patients.
There is increasing pressure on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to follow the evidence-based approach promoted in allied health and medicine, in which the randomised control trial represents the evidence gold standard. However, many CAM advocates see these methods as undermining the holism of CAM practice. This paper explores how such tensions are managed in CAM university departments - settings in which particular forms of knowledge and evidence are given 'official' imprimatur by CAM educators and researchers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Students from backgrounds of low socio-economic status (SES) or who are first in family to attend university (FiF) are under-represented in medicine. Research has focused on these students' pre-admission perceptions of medicine, rather than on their lived experience as medical students. Such research is necessary to monitor and understand the potential perpetuation of disadvantage within medical schools.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvid Based Complement Alternat Med
July 2016
High quality education programs are essential for preparing the next generation of Chinese medicine (CM) practitioners. Currently, training in CM occurs within differing health and education policy contexts. There has been little analysis of the factors influencing the form and status of CM education in different regions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper presents findings from an empirical study that explored the meaning of ethics in the everyday work of neuroscientists. Observation and interviews were carried out in one neuroscience research group that was involved in bench-to-bedside translational research. We focus here specifically on the scientists' perceptions of bioethics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article attends to the processes through which neuroscience and the neuro are enacted in a specific context: a translational neuroscience research group that was the setting of an ethnographic study. The article therefore provides a close-up perspective on the intersection of neuroscience and translational research. In the scientific setting we studied, the neuro was multiple and irreducible to any particular entity or set of practices across a laboratory and clinical divide.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ethical issues neuroscience raises are subject to increasing attention, exemplified in the emergence of the discipline neuroethics. While the moral implications of neurotechnological developments are often discussed, less is known about how ethics intersects with everyday work in neuroscience and how scientists themselves perceive the ethics of their research. Drawing on observation and interviews with members of one UK group conducting neuroscience research at both the laboratory bench and in the clinic, this article examines what ethics meant to these researchers and delineates four specific types of ethics that shaped their day-to-day work: regulatory, professional, personal and tangible.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Authentic early experience (AEE) describes experiences provided to new medical students to undertake 'human contact' to enhance learning. Although the concept of AEE is not new, and was commonplace prior to the Flexner Report of 1910, little is known about how or why meaning and knowledge are constructed through early student placements in medical, social and voluntary workplaces. Variance among settings means AEE is a collection of non-uniform, complex educational interventions which require students to make repeated transitions between different workplaces and their university institution.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper addresses the question 'what are the variables influencing social interactions and learning during Authentic Early Experience (AEE)?' AEE is a complex educational intervention for new medical students. Following critique of the existing literature, multiple qualitative methods were used to create a study framework conceptually orientated to a socio-cultural perspective. Study participants were recruited from three groups at one UK medical school: students, workplace supervisors, and medical school faculty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Theoretical integration is a necessary element of study design if clarification of experiential learning is to be achieved. There are few published examples demonstrating how this can be achieved.
Aims: This methodological article provides a worked example of research methodology that achieved clarification of authentic early experiences (AEEs) through a bi-directional approach to theory and data.