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This review aims to identify healthcare providers' (HCPs) experiences with issues related to the quality use of medicines among culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) patients, the underlying factors, and the enablers of and barriers to providing culturally safe care to promote quality use of medicines. The searched databases were Scopus, Web of Science, Academic search complete, CINHAL-Plus, Google Scholar and PubMed/Medline. The initial search returned 643 articles, of which 14 papers were included. HCPs reported that CALD patients were more likely to face challenges in accessing treatment and sufficient information about treatment. According to the theoretical domains framework, determinants such as social influences due to cultural and religious factors, lack of appropriate resources about health information and cultural needs, lack of physical and psychological capabilities such as lack of knowledge and skills, and lack of motivation could impede HCPs' abilities to provide culturally safe care. Future interventions should deploy multilevel interventions, such as education, training, and organisation structural reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Within the quality use of medicines (QUM)—which entails timely access to, and the rational use of, medicines—medicine safety is a global health priority. In multicultural countries, such as Australia, national medicines policies are focused on achieving QUM, although this is more challenging among their Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) patients (i.e., those from ethnic minority groups). Aim: This review aimed to identify and explore the specific challenges to achieving QUM, as experienced by CALD patients living in Australia. Method: A systematic literature search was conducted using Web of Science, Scopus, Academic search complete, CINHAL, PubMed and Medline. Qualitative studies describing any aspects of QUM among CALD patients in Australia were included. Results: Major challenges in facilitating QUM among CALD patients in Australia were identified, particularly in relation to the following medicines management pathway steps: difficulties around participation in treatment decision-making alongside deficiencies in information provision about medicines. Furthermore, medication non-adherence was commonly observed and reported. When mapped against the bio-psycho-socio-systems model, the main contributors to the medicine management challenges identified related to "social" and "system" factors, reflecting the current health-system's lack of capacity and resourcing to respond to patients' low health literacy levels, communication and language barriers, and cultural and religious perceptions about medicines. Conclusion: QUM challenges were different among different ethnic groups. This review suggests a need to engage with CALD patients in co-designing culturally appropriate resources and/or interventions to enable the health-system to address the identified barriers to QUM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inflammatory bowel disease is a chronic gastrointestinal condition that necessitates life‐long healthcare engagement and management. Empowering patients with knowledge is fundamental to enhance health literacy, improve health outcomes and facilitate complex decision‐making regarding medication and potential surgery. A working group was formed to develop concise, comprehensive patient information sheets to meet this unmet need in the Australian setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a critical realist approach can add to our understanding of professional recognition of educators in a pre-school setting. Recognition is a function of personal achievement and social arrangement, and is understood through examining those subjective conditions and objective structures as observed in the field of practice or as articulated by the actors involved. Through in-depth interviews, we provoked early childhood educators to deliberate on their lived experiences of professional recognition vis-à-vis policy expectations and institutional practices. In doing so, we identified interactive forces that influence professional recognition in a pre-school context. We argue that a stratified view of reality and epistemic relativism espoused by critical realists offers valuable theoretical insights for exploring teacher professional recognition. Finally, drawing on our empirical data and latest literature, we outline four points of reflection regarding the analytical advantages of critical realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Growing evidence indicates that tree‐stem methane (CH4) emissions may be an important and unaccounted‐for component of local, regional and global carbon (C) budgets. Studies to date have focused on upland and freshwater swamp‐forests; however, no data on tree‐stem fluxes from estuarine species currently exist.Here we provide the first‐ever mangrove tree‐stem CH4 flux measurements from  >50 trees (n = 230 measurements), in both standing dead and living forest, from a region suffering a recent large‐scale climate‐driven dieback event (Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia).Average CH4 emissions from standing dead mangrove tree‐stems was 249.2 ± 41.0 μmol m−2 d−1 and was eight‐fold higher than from living mangrove tree‐stems (37.5 ± 5.8 μmol m−2 d−1). The average CH4 flux from tree‐stem bases (c. 10 cm aboveground) was 1071.1 ± 210.4 and 96.8 ± 27.7 μmol m−2 d−1 from dead and living stands respectively. Sediment CH4 fluxes and redox potentials did not differ significantly between living and dead stands. Our results suggest both dead and living tree‐stems act as CH4 conduits to the atmosphere, bypassing potential sedimentary oxidation processes.Although large uncertainties exist when upscaling data from small‐scale temporal measurements, we estimated that dead mangrove tree‐stem emissions may account for c. 26% of the net ecosystem CH4 flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Including the perspectives of scientists about the nature and process of science is important for an authentic and nuanced portrayal of science in science education. The small number of studies that have explored scientists’ worldviews about science has thus far generated contradictory findings, with recent studies claiming that scientists simultaneously hold contradictory sophisticated and naïve views. This article reports on an exploratory study that uses the framework of Bhaskar’s critical realism to elicit and separately analyse academic scientists’ ontological and epistemological views about science in semi-structured interviews. When the views of scientists are analysed through the lens of critical realism, it is clear that it is possible to hold a realist ontological commitment about what knowledge is of, simultaneously with a fallibilist epistemological commitment about knowledge itself. The apparent incongruence of scientists’ so-called naïve and sophisticated views about science is resolved when analysed using a critical realist framework. Critical realism offers a simple and coherent framework for science educators that avoids many of the problems of positivism and social constructivism by finding a middle ground between them. The three pillars of critical realism: ontological realism, epistemological fallibilism and judgmental rationality help to make sense of how socially constructed scientific knowledge can be anchored in an independent reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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PARLOUR R and MCCORMACK B. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 308-321 Blending critical realist and emancipatory practice development methodologies: making critical realism work in nursing research This paper examines the efficacy of facilitation as a practice development intervention in changing practice within an Older Person setting and in implementing evidence into practice. It outlines the influences exerted by the critical realist paradigm in guiding emancipatory practice development activities and, in particular, how the former may be employed within an emancipatory practice development study to elucidate and increase understanding pertinent to causation and outcomes. The methodology is based upon an emancipatory practice development approach set within a realistic evaluation framework. This allows for systematic analysis of the social and contextual elements that influence the explication of outcomes associated with facilitation. The study is concentrated upon five practice development cycles, within which a sequence of iterative processes is integrated. The authors assert that combining critical realist and emancipatory processes offers a robust and practical method for translating evidence and implementing changes in practice, as the former affirms or falsifies the influence that emancipatory processes exert on attaining culture shift, and enabling transformation towards effective clinical practice. A new framework for practice development is proposed that establishes methodological coherency between emancipatory practice development and realistic evaluation. This augments the existing theoretical bases for both these approaches by contributing new theoretical and methodological understandings of causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Inter-agency collaboration is seen as an effective way to support children and families with multiple and complex needs. Children in out-of-home care, especially those exhibiting challenging and disruptive behaviour, often require the services of multiple agencies. Ninety-two South Australian stakeholders experienced in supporting children in out-of-home care were interviewed about their experience of collaborative practice, using the specific example of supporting children with extremely challenging behaviour. Participants were teachers, foster parents, child welfare workers, child mental health professionals and residential care workers. Thematic analysis revealed several tensions inherent in such collaboration. Results are discussed in terms of their unique implications for managing challenging behaviour, and suggestions are made for improving collaborative approaches to behaviour and multi-agency practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approaches to religious education which are influenced by Jerome W. Berryman's Godly Play are becoming commonplace in many Catholic primary schools in various Dioceses and Archdiocese around Australia. Given this growing trend, this article articulates Berryman's understanding of the purpose of religious education by following four lines of inquiry which emanate from his many writings. In the light of this articulated purpose, some recommendations are posited for Catholic primary schools which draw on the Berryman's pedagogical approach to religious education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A research program around the idea that information systems represent real-world systems was started almost twenty years ago. The program started by Wand and Weber is still going strong with a significant amount of research inspired by them and is one of the few instances incremental foundational research in Information Systems. Much of this research is being undertaken in Australia, and its influence has spread far and wide. Wand and Weber have used ontology, a discipline with roots in two thousand years of philosophy, to drive empirical work into how well information systems represent reality. In this paper the inspiration and progress of the program of research followed over the past two decades is described. The research program has recently progressed from its roots examining information systems development to examine enterprise systems and other package solutions. Further, it is beginning now to more fully use the depth of ontological theory available. However, there are challenges in how Bunge's ontology has been used and opportunities for using complementary ontologies and for different conceptualisations of information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prerequisite for meaningful environmental legislation is that it he based upon an adequate scientific understanding of the natural system to which It is applied. In 2003, the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland State governments introduced a Reef Water Quality Protection Plan. which aimed to "improve" water quality in river catchments adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef (GRR) and in nearby coastal waters. The Plan was introduced in the absence of any substantive evidence for regional degradation of GRR water quality. This paper reviews the available data regarding nutrient contents En the Tully River, north Queensland, which is cited as the best (available) evidence for human-related changes in nutrient export from (GBR) catchment [1]. It is shown that the claim of human-related nutrient enrichment in the Tully River, and regionally, is without substance. No detectable trends in GBR water quality have occurred since systematic measurements were first started in the 1980s. Environmental policies that are based on mischievous claims of chimerical damage to the Great Barrier Reef damage the reputation of science as a tool for disinterested analysis, and provoke widespread cynicism in the community regarding the integrity of contemporary environmental politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]