Publications by authors named "Downing C"

The COVID-19 pandemic presented opportunities for educational innovations and the development of intercultural learning experiences. A global health assignment guided by a collaborative online international learning pedagogy was assigned to doctoral nursing students from three different countries. Icebreaker activities, along with the Culturally You diagram, commenced the team-building process.

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Objectives: Effective facilitation is crucial to improve critical care outcomes in life-threatening conditions through improved teamwork, caring, decision-making, and problem-solving. The meaning of facilitation remains unprecise in a critical care context despite its frequent usage in nursing education and clinical practice. This study aimed to report a thorough concept analysis to clarify the meaning of facilitation in the critical care context by formulating attributes, antecedents, and consequences and providing model cases related to facilitation.

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Inclusive language has become a theoretical approach in attempts to ensure that language is not only clear but void of cultural nuances. Depending on the source or the discipline, the definition may vary, but the essence is similar. Inclusive language demonstrates a sense of respect and value for all people while simultaneously acknowledging the diverse culture in which we abide.

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Background:  The public health sector in South Africa provides care to more than 40 million people, with primary health care (PHC) clinics acting as most patients' first contact with healthcare services; 80% of patients are treated by primary care nurses. Primary care nurses' poor clinical judgment can result in poor patient care, complications and death. However, newly qualified primary care (NQPC) nurses' preparedness for making sound clinical judgements in practice has not been evaluated in Gauteng province, South Africa.

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Background: When radiation protection practices are suboptimal, it becomes necessary to take additional steps to optimise practices.

Aim: Therefore, this study aimed to develop a model to facilitate radiation protection among diagnostic radiographers.

Setting: The study was conducted in South Africa.

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Background: Professional nurses typically promote and advocate self-care practices to their patients to achieve better health outcomes, but rarely engage in these practices themselves.

Methods: A qualitative, descriptive phenomenological approach was used in this study. Ten professional nurses employed in different primary health care facilities were purposively sampled.

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Objective: To examine peer-reviewed literature involving undergraduate interprofessional education (IPE) focusing on musculoskeletal (MSK) healthcare professions.

Methods: Methodological searches were conducted on electronic databases PubMed, Scopus, ERIC, and ProQuest. No date restrictions were applied.

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Background: Work-life integration has been extensively researched in various contexts. Women dominate the nursing profession, but work-life integration is essential for men and women since both are expected to focus equally on their families and careers. The nursing faculty perceives nurse educators' work environment as undervalued, lacking support, and limited time to grow and carry the heavy workload.

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Background:  Clinical supervision is pivotal in supporting nurses in rendering quality, safe patient care. Therefore, it is essential to understand clinical supervision from operational nursing managers' context to define existing challenges and propose suitable recommendations.

Objectives:  This study aimed to explore and describe operational nursing managers' experiences of clinical supervision within the context of an academic hospital in Gauteng province and propose evidence-based practice recommendations to improve patient safety and the quality of clinical supervision.

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Holistic nursing should be a goal for all nurses. Patients that receive holistic nursing feel acknowledged, valued, and appreciated. Caring for patients holistically requires student nurses to possess and display attributes of mindfulness and Ubuntu.

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Introduction: Suboptimal radiation protection evidenced in literature necessitated the development of a theory to optimise radiation protection. To develop a theory, concept analysis of the central concept guiding the theory is required to provide explicit theoretical and operational definitions. This article presents the concept analysis of the central concept of 'facilitating a transformative radiation protection environment' used to develop a theory to optimise radiation protection.

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Introduction: Enhancing interprofessional education (IPE) fosters collaborative efforts among healthcare professionals specializing in musculoskeletal (MSK) care. This approach presents a valuable opportunity to address the pressing MSK disease burden in developing countries, with high prevalence rates and limited resources. While an abundance of literature on the various elements of IPE among healthcare students and professionals exists, shared contexts of practice of South African MSK disciplines are not currently developed through IPE at higher education level, establishing a need for South African formalised curricular IPE interventions with an explicit focus on undergraduate students of MSK healthcare professions.

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As technology development drives the thickness of thin film depositions down into the nano regime, understanding and controlling the dewetting of thin films has become essential for many applications. The dewetting of ultra-thin Ag (9 nm) films with Ti (0.5 nm) adhesion and capping layers on glass substrates was investigated in this work.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to evaluate how reliably different radiology readers can classify and diagnose peripheral neuropathy using the NS-RADS scoring system after receiving limited training.* -
  • Thirty-two radiology readers with various experience levels participated and were assessed on their diagnostic accuracy and inter-reader agreement when applying the NS-RADS system to MRI cases.* -
  • Results showed that both trainees and experienced radiologists demonstrated similar levels of accuracy, indicating that the NS-RADS system can effectively be used by non-expert readers for diagnosing PN conditions.*
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Background:  Historically, the nursing profession focused on caring for patients, families and communities but neglected aspects of self-care. Self-care is essential for nurses, as it could impact the quality of care nurses render to patients.

Aim:  This article investigated professional nurses' self-care behaviours and practices in primary health care clinics.

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Next-generation heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) relies on fast, localized heating of the magnetic medium during the write process. Au plasmonic near-field transducers are an attractive solution to this challenge, but increased thermal stability of Au films is required to improve long-term reliability. This work compares the effect of nanoscale Al, AlO, and Ta capping films on Au thin films with Ti or Ta adhesion layers for use in HAMR and other high-temperature plasmonic applications.

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Objective: Newly qualified intensive care nurses (NQICNs) are expected to execute the shift-leading role immediately after graduation. Critical reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making, and evidence-based clinical judgment are thus essential skills for intensive care nursing graduates. This study aimed to explore and describe NQICNs' lived experiences of being shift leaders.

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Recent research suggests that handwriting comprises two separate subskills: legibility and fluency. It remains unclear, however, how these subskills differ in their relationship to other abilities associated with handwriting, including spelling, graphomotor, and selective attention skills. In this study, we sought to examine the extent and nature of concurrent relationships that may exist among these skills.

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Low-voltage scanning electron microscopy is a powerful tool for examining surface features and imaging beam-sensitive materials. Improving resolution during low-voltage imaging is then an important area of development. Decreasing the effect of chromatic aberration is one solution to improving the resolution and can be achieved by reducing the energy spread of the electron source.

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The mathematical objects employed in physical theories do not always behave well. Einstein's theory of space and time allows for spacetime singularities and Van Hove singularities arise in condensed matter physics, while intensity, phase and polarization singularities pervade wave physics. Within dissipative systems governed by matrices, singularities occur at the exceptional points in parameter space whereby some eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce simultaneously.

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Introduction: Critical thinking is a much-needed skill required by radiography students, across disciplines, when they graduate. The facilitation of critical thinking is a task that radiography educators are faced with in order to produce graduates who can apply these skills in the clinical setting, for the best care of the patient. The development of critical thinking skills is challenging, and currently there is no radiography-specific model which has been implemented and evaluated as a framework of reference for radiography educators.

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Background: All women have the right to the highest attainable standards of health, including the right to respectful maternity care (RMC). A qualitative body of knowledge describing midwives' and women's experiences of the value and importance of RMC exists. However, no qualitative synthesis exists about midwives' and women's views of respectful care.

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The design, validation, and application of a quantum-cascade-laser-absorption-spectroscopy diagnostic for measuring gas temperature, pressure, and nitric oxide (NO) in high-temperature air are presented. A distributed-feedback quantum-cascade laser (QCL) centered near 1976 was used to scan across two transitions of NO in its ground electronic state ( ). A measurement rate of 500 kHz was achieved using a single QCL by: (1) performing current modulation through a bias-tee, and (2) targeting closely spaced transitions with a large difference in lower-state energy.

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Worldwide, radiographers' radiation protection practices vary. In South Africa, evidence of diagnostic radiographers' suboptimal radiation protection practices has been reported, but the reasons for these practices and suggestions to improve practices were lacking. Therefore, this study explored radiation protection among South African diagnostic radiographers.

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