Search

Introduction: Trainees underrepresented in medicine (URiM) face additional challenges seeking community in predominantly white academic spaces, as they juggle the effects of institutional, interpersonal, and internalized racism while undergoing medical training. To offer support and a space to share these unique experiences, mentorship for URiM trainees is essential. However, URiM trainees have limited access to mentorship from URiM faculty. To address this gap, we developed a national virtual mentoring program that paired URiM trainees interested in emergency medicine (EM) with experienced mentors.Methods: We describe the implementation of a virtual Diversity Mentoring Initiative (DMI) geared toward supporting URiM trainees interested in EM. The program development involved 1) partnering of national EM organizations to obtain funding; (2) identifying a comprehensive platform to facilitate participant communication, artificial intelligence-enabled matching, and ongoing data collection; 3) focusing on targeted recruitment of URiM trainees; and (4) fostering regular leadership meeting cadence to customize the platform and optimize the mentorship experience.Conclusion: We found that by using a virtual platform, the DMI enhanced the efficiency of mentor-mentee pairing, tailored matches based on participants’ interests and the bandwidth of mentors, and successfully established cross-institutional connections to support the mentorship needs of URiM trainees.

This article reports on the early stages of a community-based participatory action research project aimed at understanding how medical, educational and social service providers in our community partner with refugee families whose children have special health care needs, what challenges they face, and how we might collaboratively address identified needs through forming a community of practice and collaboratively conducting action research. In this manuscript, we detail the methods used to gather interdisciplinary professionals from our community in focus groups centered on how participants collaborated and supported refugee families of children with special health care needs and how we could join together to engage in action research to benefit their work. Findings reveal strengths, barriers, and needs related to interdisciplinary collaboration and ideas for community-engaged action research projects on which the community of practice could focus moving forward. An implication of this study is the importance of participatory processes for initiating action research projects within the community. We also offer guidance around potential areas for improved practice across school, medical and community settings when serving refugee families whose children have special health care needs.

Accurate interaction with the environment relies on the integration of external information about the spatial layout of potential actions and knowledge of their costs and benefits. Previous studies have shown that when given a choice between voluntary reaching movements, humans tend to prefer actions with lower biomechanical costs. However, these studies primarily focused on decisions made before the onset of movement ("decide-then-act" scenarios), and it is not known to what extent their conclusions generalize to many real-life situations, in which decisions occur during ongoing actions ("decide-while-acting"). For example, one recent study found that biomechanical costs did not influence decisions to switch from a continuous manual tracking movement to a point-to-point movement, suggesting that biomechanical costs may be disregarded in decide-while-acting scenarios. To better understand this surprising result, we designed an experiment in which participants were faced with the decision between continuing to track a target moving along a straight path or changing paths to track a new target that gradually moved along a direction that deviated from the initial one. We manipulated tracking direction, angular deviation rate, and side of deviation, allowing us to compare scenarios where biomechanical costs favored either continuing or changing the path. Crucially, here the choice was always between two continuous tracking actions. Our results show that in this situation decisions clearly took biomechanical costs into account. Thus we conclude that biomechanics are not disregarded during decide-while-acting scenarios but rather that cost comparisons can only be made between similar types of actions. NEW & NOTEWORTHY: In this study, we aim to shed light on how biomechanical factors influence decisions made during ongoing actions. Previous work suggested that decisions made during actions disregard biomechanical costs, in contrast to decisions made before movement. Our results challenge that proposal and suggest instead that the effect of biomechanical factors is dependent on the types of actions being compared (e.g., continuous tracking vs. point-to-point reaching). These findings contribute to our understanding of the dynamic interplay between biomechanical considerations and action choices during ongoing interactions with the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To examine plans for postpartum cannabis use among pregnant individuals who used cannabis during early pregnancy. Materials and Methods: Eighteen virtual focus groups were conducted from November 17, 2021, to December 17, 2021, with 23 Black and 30 White pregnant adults in Kaiser Permanente Northern California, who self-reported prenatal cannabis use during early pregnancy. Focus groups were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: The sample (N = 53) had a mean age of 30.3 years (standard deviation = 5.2) at recruitment; 70% reported daily, 25% weekly, and 6% ≤ monthly cannabis use at entrance to prenatal care. Some participants viewed cannabis as critical for coping with postpartum mental and physical health challenges, while others questioned whether cannabis use would fit with their parental lifestyle, and some planned to abstain altogether. Most planned to use cannabis postpartum, but with lower frequency than before pregnancy, and in ways consistent with harm reduction (e.g., smoking outside to avoid secondhand or thirdhand smoke exposure). Many were motivated to abstain from cannabis while breastfeeding, and some desired more data on the safety of cannabis and breastfeeding, or intended to "pump and dump," believing it would reduce potential transfer of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) to their infant. Responses from Black and White participants were generally similar, but White participants were more likely to report plans to use cannabis while breastfeeding and to want information about cannabis and breastfeeding. Conclusions: Pregnant individuals with prenatal cannabis use had varied plans for cannabis use postpartum. Many were motivated to abstain or use cannabis less frequently than pre-pregnancy, especially during lactation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of parenting stress and anger expression were examined for their ability to jointly predict child abuse potential in two samples (total N=123) of New Zealand parents. The study found a strong joint contribution of scores on the Parenting Stress Index and the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory in predicting results of the Child Abuse Potential Inventory. (DB)

Evidence-based interventions have continued to show positive effects on both reducing symptoms and helping children with elimination disorders achieve continence and manage troubling psychological distress. Despite this, there is a group of children who do not respond to standard treatments and are classified as having a complex elimination disorder. As a means of addressing the broader clinical challenge and implications of complex elimination disorders, a team of clinicians in Germany developed the Urinary and Faecal Incontinence Training Program for Children and Adolescents. A pilot investigation was undertaken to apply the Urinary and Faecal Incontinence Training Program for Children and Adolescents programme to children aged 6–12 years in an Australian context who met the complex elimination disorder diagnostic criteria, to determine if any subsequent change in the measures of life quality and general well-being was achieved. Findings suggest a reduction in the frequency of the child's symptoms and improvements in family quality of life measures. Qualitatively, children and parents perceived that their child's ability to now respond to stimuli and in so doing avert severe accidents was a major outcome of the programme and was able to increase a child's sense of acceptance of incontinence, improve levels of self-efficacy and increase self-awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Author(s): Dora E. Angelaki (corresponding author); Aasef G. Shaikh; Andrea M. Green; J. David Dickman A critical step in self-motion perception and spatial awareness is the integration of motion cues [...]

This study identified relevant content for standardized measures of organizational justice and evaluated the reliability, validity and context sensitivity of measures of procedural, interactional and distributive justice that assess the perceived fairness of organizational change programmes. Two organizations that were undergoing changes that differed in the severity and permanence of employee outcomes participated in the research. After refinement on the basis of test--retest reliability and factor analysis, the procedural and interactional justice measures demonstrated good reliability and validity, but the equity-based items that operationalized distributive justice performed poorly. The results offer some support for concerns over possible context-sensitivity of justice perceptions and emphasize the need for a comprehensive set of standardized measures that can be customized to assess and compare justice perceptions in different organizational contexts. Directions for further research and measurement development are discussed., Research linking employee fairness perceptions to positive individual and organizational outcomes has led to an upsurge of interest in organizational justice. The benefits of fairness perceptions have been demonstrated in [...]