Jane Dixon

With more new graduate primary care nurse practitioners (NPs) practicing in remote locales than ever before, their preparation for performing emergency procedural skills (EPSs) is critical for safe and effective care. Emergency procedural skills are not uniformly taught in primary care academic programs but are easily imparted via additional training and practice. The purpose of this project was to develop and pilot an expert panel–validated training program specifically for NPs bound for remote practice and to evaluate how the participants rated their self-efficacy in performing specific EPSs before and after completing the training, called the Remote Advanced Skills Training for NPs (RAST-NP). A diverse expert panel rated EPSs to determine skills to be included in a pilot training program. After achieving consensus on skills to be taught, a hybrid online-in-person curriculum was developed using standards from the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning. This training was conducted for more than 2 days and delivered to a class of 15 primary care NP students in their final year of education. All participants completed a pre- and postparticipation survey to assess their self-efficacy using a validated questionnaire, modified to address the EPSs taught. The participants reported higher confidence following training on all EPSs taught, as indicated by an increase in difference in mean scores from 1 to 6.15 on an 11-point scale. For each EPS, the difference was statistically significant by both a paired t test and a Whitney–Mann U test with probability of 0.01 or less. Results indicate that the methods utilized (i.e., psychomotor practice) increased confidence in NP students, and they also suggest that the amount of time spent practicing skills is associated with interval increases in confidence. A combination of didactic and psychomotor methods was uniformly effective at increasing confidence, and thereby self-efficacy, and higher success is associated with more time practicing the kinesthetic skills in situ.

For four decades, theories of job demand-control have proposed that higher occupational status groups have lower health risks due to the stress accompanying jobs featuring high demands but high control. This research examines whether Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs) can improve the health prospects of a range of workers by giving greater control over work time arrangements. Our setting is Australia, where FWAs were introduced in 2009. In line with these early studies alongside studies of work-life balance, we expected to observe that workers with access to control over daily work times could better control the activities outside of work that influence chronic disease. Using a practice sociology approach, we compared the accounts of twenty-eight workers in blue and white collar industries with differing degrees of work time flexibility. The findings do not contradict early theories describing occupational differences of job demand-control dynamics and their relationship to health risks. However, this study suggests that a) time demands and strains have increased for a broad sweep of workers since the 1980s, b) the greater control of higher occupational status groups has been eroded by the high performance movement, which has attracted less scrutiny than FWAs, and c) more workers are forced to adapt their daily lives, including their approach to health, to accommodate their job demands. Job insecurity further impedes preventative health practices adoption. What might appear to be worker-controlled flexibility can—under the pressures of job insecurity and performance expectations without time limits—transform into health-eroding unpredictability. The answer however is not greater flexibility in the absence of limits on the well-documented precursors of work stress: long hours, job insecurity and intensity-related exhaustion. While there have been welcome developments in job demand-control-health conceptualizations, they typically ignore the out-of-work temporal demands that workers face and which compound on-the-job demands. Redesign of the temporalities of working life within worksites need to be accompanied by society-level policies which address caring responsibilities, gender equality as well as broad labour market conditions.

The European honeybee is one of the most critical of all insect pollinators, with much of the world's crops dependent on their pollination contributing to dietary diversity. However, in Australia, resisting the implications of connected landscapes implicit in ecology, conservationists consider the European honeybee to be an exotic pest, contesting commercial beekeepers’ rights to access resources from forests and national parks. This chapter asks: What should be done when invasive species provide valuable ecosystem services and potentially threaten native species? Greater than one third of the world's crops depend on animal ...

Objective: To investigate trends in five key aspects of Australian food practice which have been implicated in diet-related health risks, specifically energy intake. They are: the replacement of home-prepared foods by commercially prepared foods; consumer reliance on ultra-processed foods; de-structured dining; increased pace of eating; and a decline in commensal eating.Design: Data were from repeated cross-sections from the national Household Expenditure and Time Use Surveys. Trends in food practice aspects were examined using indicators of food expenditure across different food groups and time spent eating and cooking, including where, when and with whom eating activities took place.Setting: Australia, 1989–2010.Subjects: Nationally representative samples of Australian households.Results: The share of the total food budget spent on food away from home rose steadily from 22·8 % in 1989 to 26·5 % in 2010, while spending on ultra-processed foods increased. The basic patterning of meals and the pace of eating changed little, although people spent more time eating alone and at restaurants. Cooking time declined considerably, particularly for women.Conclusions: These changes have occurred over the same time that obesity and diet-related, non-communicable diseases have increased rapidly in Australia. Some aspects are implicated more than others: particularly the shift from domestic cooking to use of pre-prepared and ultra-processed foods, a reduction in time spent in food preparation and cooking, as well as an upsurge in time and money devoted to eating away from home. These are all likely to operate through the higher energy content of commercially prepared, compared with unprocessed or lightly processed, foods.

(2016). Critical nutrition studies within critical agrarian studies: a review and analysis. The Journal of Peasant Studies: Vol. 43, No. 5, pp. 1112-1120.

Food sovereignty is a trans-national movement that asserts the right of people to govern their own food system as an alternative to neoliberal food policies. In 2005, the Japanese government introduced the Basic Law of Shokuiku (food and nutrition education) to promote national food self-sufficiency, improve public health, and preserve local culinary culture through domestic food consumption. This paper argues that the campaign attempts to advance both governmental and public interests in food sovereignty by constructing common images of Japanese diets and nostalgia for rural agriculture; along the way it attempts to increase a sense of solidarity between urban consumers and rural producers. Nevertheless, the campaign focuses on consumer's food literacy, thus framing food sovereignty as responsibilities of people, and diverts public attention from structural issues embedded within the nation's food system, including national dependence on other countries for food security, as well as the marginal economic status of rural agriculture. Simultaneously, the feeling of nostalgia for rural agriculture remains, expanding an imaginary of food sovereignty among some urban consumers. Drawing on an investigation of policy discourses and in-depth interviews with young adult consumers in urban Japan, this paper examines how the notion of food sovereignty and Japanese diets have been constructed and advanced through the nationwide Shokuiku campaign. The decade-long campaign has evolved to become an agent of social control of urban consumer food consumption rather than helping consumers to play a role in establishing a system underpinned by food sovereignty as an alternative to the industrial present.

This chapter explores the struggle for pedagogic authority between supermarkets, reflexive citizen-consumers and household food provisioners regarding food and the role it should play in social life. It presents a study to understand how differently positioned consumers in a rural, food-producing region make sense of the supermarket in their food provisioning practices and in community life, and tells about the authority of the supermarket's in Shepparton, Australia. The communities encompass powerful social relationships between individuals, households and families which are based on shared values, practices, aspirations. The chapter uncovers a state of pedagogical transition underway in rural Australia, repositioning the links between local food and rural community well-being. The community ideal of supporting locally owned businesses, farming, produce and civic conventions was however elusive, and consumers resented the supermarkets for not making it easier to support local people and products.