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Aims This study aimed to compare the findings of the quality of nursing doctoral education survey across seven countries and discuss the strategic directions for improving quality. Background No comparative evaluation of global quality of nursing doctoral education has been reported to date despite the rapid increase in the number of nursing doctoral programmes. Design A descriptive, cross-country, comparative design was employed. Methods Data were collected from 2007-2010 from nursing schools in seven countries: Australia, Japan, Korea, South Africa, Thailand, UK and USA. An online questionnaire was used to evaluate quality of nursing doctoral education except for Japan, where a paper version was used. Korea and South Africa used e-mails quality of nursing doctoral education was evaluated using four domains: Programme, Faculty (referring to academic staff), Resource and Evaluation. Descriptive statistics, correlational and ordinal logistic regression were employed. Results A total of 105 deans/schools, 414 faculty and 1149 students/graduates participated. The perceptions of faculty and students/graduates about the quality of nursing doctoral education across the seven countries were mostly favourable on all four domains. The faculty domain score had the largest estimated coefficient for relative importance. As the overall quality level of doctoral education rose from fair to good, the resource domain showed an increased effect. Conclusions Both faculty and students/graduates groups rated the overall quality of nursing doctoral education favourably. The faculty domain had the greatest importance for quality, followed by the programme domain. However, the importance of the resource domain gained significance as the overall quality of nursing doctoral education increased, indicating the needs for more attention to resources if the quality of nursing doctoral education is to improve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim of the study: Many medicinal plants have been used for treatment of insomnia in Asia. However, scientific evidence and precise mechanism for their sedative-hypnotic activity have not been fully investigated. Thus, we investigated the binding activity of the oriental plant extracts (mainly from Korea and Japan) to the well-known molecular targets for sleep regulation, GABAA and 5-HT2C receptors. Following the binding assay, sedative-hypnotic effects of the extracts with high affinity were examined in an animal model of sleep. Materials and methods: Aqueous and ethanol extracts of 15 medicinal plants were tested for binding at the benzodiazepine site of GABAA receptor and 5-HT site of 5-HT2C receptor. The sedative-hypnotic effects of selected extracts were evaluated by measuring the sleep latency and sleep duration during pentobarbital-induced sleep in mice after oral administration of extracts. Results: In the GABAA assay, the ethanol extracts of licorice and danshen displayed concentration-dependent, high affinity binding, whereas in the 5-HT2C assay, the ethanol extracts of ginseng and silk tree showed high affinity. Among these extracts we tested previously uncharacterized licorice and silk tree for hypnotic effects. We found the ethanol extracts of licorice and silk tree significantly decreased sleep latency and increased sleep duration in pentobarbital-induced sleep. Conclusions: We demonstrate for the first time that licorice and silk tree have the sedative-hypnotic activity possibly by modulating GABAA and 5-HT2C receptors. We propose that licorice and silk tree might be effective candidates for treatment of insomnia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]