Jane Conway

• Head of Department at University of New England

Background: Older people living in Residential Aged Care (RAC) are at high risk of clinical deterioration. Telehealth has the potential to provide timely, patient-centred care where transfer to hospital can be a burden and avoided. The extent to which video telehealth is superior to other forms of telecommunication and its impact on management of...

Transfers to Emergency Departments and hospitalizations are common for older people living in residential aged care who experience acute deterioration. This paper shares reflections from 10 years of work across a region in New South Wales, Australia, to develop a new model of care in141 residential aged care homes. The model successfully reduced Em...

Background/objectives: Older people living in residential aged care facilities (RACFs) experience acute deterioration requiring assessment and decision making. We evaluated the impact of a large-scale regional Aged Care Emergency (ACE) program in reducing hospital admissions and emergency department (ED) transfers. Design: A stepped wedge nonran...

Introduction: Northern Thailand has a distinct culture and set of health beliefs. Nurses’ beliefs influence approaches to care affecting health care outcomes. This study explored the content, origin, and sociocultural influences on health beliefs of Northern Thai nurses and how they influence clinical practice and education. Method: Q-methodology w...

Aim The aim of this review is to describe current patterns of adolescent and adult sun-protective behaviours in Australia and overseas. Subjects and methods A systematic search of electronic databases was conducted in CINAHL, ProQuest, Medline, PubMed and Informit (Australian) for studies that included participants aged ≥12 years and reported prop...

Background There is a renewed focus on the role of primary healthcare within the health system due to an ageing population, increasing cost of acute healthcare services, and an emphasis on developing healthier communities. Associated with this focus is the need for an increase in primary healthcare workforce capacity. Despite this, primary healthca...

Background The origin, evolution and potential impact of personal ways of knowing, underpinned by health beliefs, are shaped by experience and sociocultural factors. These need to be explored if contemporary nurse educators and clinicians are to realize the goals of promoting healthy, positive outcomes for their clientele that are founded in other...

Abstract Background Older people who present to the Emergency Department (ED) experience high rates of prevalent and incident delirium. This study aimed to determine whether an assistant workforce in the ED could effectively conduct screening to inform assessment and care planning for older people as well as enhance supportive care activities for p...

Background: Patient safety is a core principle of health professional practice and as such requires significant attention within undergraduate curricula. However, patient safety practice is complex requiring a broad range of skills and behaviours including the application of sound clinical knowledge within a range of health care contexts and cultu...

Background: Clinical Leaders drive healthcare performance in the provision of safe high quality patient care by influencing others and augmenting change. Clinical leadership features strongly in Nurse Consultant (NC) roles and holds potential to strengthen the NC's place in healthcare teams, making their contribution as clinical leaders more recog...

Objective To compare annual costs of an intervention for acutely unwell older residents in residential age care facilities (RACFs) with usual care. The intervention, the Aged Care Emergency (ACE) program, includes telephone clinical support aimed to reduce avoidable emergency department (ED) presentations by RACF residents.Methods This costing of t...

An observational study was conducted to examine the use of sun protective hats, clothing, and sunglasses of people attending an outdoor entertainment event in an area of high-to-extreme ultraviolet radiation in New South Wales, Australia. Armidale is unique, as it is a highly-elevated area, almost 1000 m above sea level, and temperatures are often...

Turkey receives the largest number of Syrian refugees in the world. Some of these refugee women become mothers in Turkey. This paper reports on a qualitative, descriptive study that investigated the experience of seven Syrian women migrants who gave birth in Turkey, and explores their experiences of transition to motherhood in a foreign country. Th...

Background There is a direct link between job satisfaction, nurses’ job performance and improved patient outcomes. Understanding what job characteristics influence job satisfaction is vital if health organizations are to optimize individual employee satisfaction and performance. This is particularly necessary in the Nurse Consultant role, which is...

Aim: This study aimed to explore the work roles, major tasks and core activities of advanced practice dietitians in Australia to define the Competency Standards for advanced practice. Methods: A qualitative approach was used to review advanced dietetic practice in Australia involving experienced professionals, mostly dietitians. Four focus group...

Background Despite the fact that young men are difficult to engage in counselling, there is a paucity of research that examines the factors that may influence their decision making to enter, remain in or exit from therapy. One area that has remained particularly unrepresented in the literature is the role that a sense of control plays in this proce...

Aims: This study aimed to establish the scale of alcohol-related injuries originating in the home. Background: Despite recent media and public attention on alcohol-related injuries occurring at licensed venues, many occur in other locations including the home. Design: A retrospective observational study. Methods: Emergency department surveil...

This conference poster showcases my PhD research project. The project explores the role of communication in the design and implementation of ’fit for purpose’ telehealth technology, as a tool to support older rural Australians to comfortably and confidently age in place.

Background Older people living in Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACF) are a vulnerable, frail and complex population. They are more likely than people who reside in the community to become acutely unwell, present to the Emergency Department (ED) and require admission to hospital. For many, hospitalisation carries with it risks. Importantly, evi...

Introduction Alcohol abuse has significant personal and social impacts. Recent public health campaigns and media attention have drawn attention to the impact of excessive drinking and subsequent injury in public places. This overlooks that a significant proportion of alcohol-related injuries occur in or near the home. Aim The aim of this integrativ...

Purpose: To adopt an evidence-based approach to evaluation of learning experiences reliant on simulated clinical practices in an under-graduate nursing program and to determine whether the learning events are structured in ways that elicit and make explicit critical thinking and other behaviours related to intended learning outcomes. Methods: i) A...

Competency standards document the knowledge, skills, and attitudes required for competent performance. This study develops competency standards for dietitians in order to substantiate an approach to competency standard development. Focus groups explored the current and emerging purpose, role, and function of the profession, which were used to draft...

This case study describes a multi-organisation aged care emergency (ACE) service. The service was designed to enable point-of-care assessment and management for older people in residential aged care facilities (RACFs). Design of the ACE service involved consultation and engagement of multiple key stakeholders. The ACE service was implemented in a l...

SuperSIM: Making Use of Simulation to Enhance Clinical Supervision Practices of Rural and Remote Health Professionals Tony Smith1, Kelly Thurlow1, Rebecca Marley1, Jane Conway2, Jackie Lea2 1The University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia 2The University of New England, NSW, Australia Introduction/Background With growing demand for student placement...

Aims and objectivesTo establish validity of a clinical leadership framework for aged care middle managers (The Aged care Clinical Leadership Qualities Framework). Background Middle managers in aged care have responsibility not only for organisational governance also and operational management but also quality service delivery. There is a need to be...

Objective The purpose of this paper is to describe the Practice‑Based Simulation Model (PBSM) as a pedagogical framework that enables the integration of simulation in a way that ensures critical thinking skills are explicitly taught as part of the processes and outcomes of students’ learning. Setting The PBSM is an innovative pedagogical strategy t...

This paper discusses the congruence between problem-based learning (PBL) and competencybased assessment and describes how competency based assessment has been implementedin a professional construction management programme. The design andunderlying principles of assessment approaches used to determine students' professionalcompetence through use of...

Globally, there has been attention given to addressing the workforce shortage in nursing. One strategy to respond to this has resulted in renewed emphasis on the development of career and education pathways for students in the final years of high school. An evaluation of the School Based New Apprenticeship (SBNA) initiative in nursing in a regional...

It is claimed that an interprofessional approach to health care aims to provide optimal client care, reduce duplication of services, address gaps in service delivery and prevent adverse consequences to patients. Hence there is widespread international interest in interprofessional education in undergraduate programs. However, after employment in th...

Clinical practice provides the stimulus for students and practitioners alike to recognise best practice and, if necessary, enhance and modify existing practice. Increasingly, literature related to health service delivery and health workforce planning focuses on the need for collaborative interprofessional work practices. Associated with this, there...

The hospital-based clinical nurse educator is pivotal to the integration of formal learning and clinical practice. Clinical nurse educators are generally considered to be expert nurses within a particular clinical environment; however, many of those who are expert clinicians suffer some loss of identity when assuming clinical teaching roles. It is...

This paper reports on research which used a multiple-case study approach to investigate the responses of aged care nurses to changes in Australian health care policy following the introduction of the Aged Care Act 1997. Significant fiscal, social and environmental issues for Residential Aged Care (RAC) are the: need to respond to policy changes emp...

Effective promotion of nursing as a career to high school students can potentially have a positive impact on the shortage of nurses. This study identified the perceptions of high school careers advisers of the Bachelor of Nursing program as a career choice, their perceptions of the attributes and characteristics necessary for nurses, and their perc...

Health care systems have seen the introduction of the unregulated worker into patient care areas to assist Registered Nurses (RNs) in the provision of health care. A study was undertaken to identify the perceptions of both nurses and unregulated workers of the unregulated worker role in direct patient care in a regional hospital in New South Wales,...

The purpose of this research was to replicate a study undertaken with different cohorts of clients and their caregivers in both Australia and the United States of America (USA). The researcher wanted to establish better local information, through the use of a survey, about the needs of informal caregivers who provide physical and emotional care, re...

This article presents a case study that examined the work practice of nurses in a cardiac step-down unit (CSDU). The action research included interviews, participant observation, and a self-reporting questionnaire. Nurses in the unit used a conceptual framework that was inconsistent with the rehabilitation-oriented nursing necessary to enhance pati...

Frequently, the nursing care of patients who undergo bone marrow transplantation (BMT) is focused on acute, curative care. However, given that recurrent disease following BMT has a poor prognosis, a focus on acute care alone appears inappropriate for those clients who experience relapse. Care for this group of patients should be more inclusive of p...

The term ‘workforce development’ is increasingly popular in the health-care field. It appears to encompass a range of human and organizational development activity. However, there has been limited explication of the concept of workforce development in Australian health care at area health service levels. It is timely to develop a framework for work...

When aligned to participants' needs, evaluation may be used to enhance practice developers' work. Process evaluation enables practice developers to evaluate as they develop; making evaluation an integral part of practice development rather than an 'add on task'. It is contended that beginning practice developers can discharge their need to evaluate...

This paper reports on the conduct of study that investigated the experience of nurses working in a Cardiac Step Down Unit (CSDU). The study was undertaken in order to identify factors that inhibit the smooth running of the unit and impact upon patient care. Case study design was used to explore practices in the CSDU. Data collection strategies incl...

Practice nurses have been identified as key personnel in management of patients either in the prevention of hospitalisation or follow-up post-discharge from acute settings. There is an increase in numbers of practice nurses (PNs) in Australia, but the role of nurses who work in general practice is poorly understood. There is considerable variation...

The Faculty of Nursing, University of Newcastle, Australia, has been keen to initiate strategies that enhance student learning and nursing practice. Two strategies are problem based learning (PBL) and clinical practice. The Faculty has maintained a comparatively high proportion of the undergraduate hours in the clinical setting in times when financ...

Using the "real-life" situation of delivering an Australian nursing curriculum in the Maldives, this paper argues that successful offshore delivery requires far more than simply implementing an existing programme on a different site. In health education, cultural and contextual circumstances necessitate a critical appraisal of the needs of the comm...

An 8-month pilot study conducted in urban, rural and remote areas of Australia sought to identify barriers to nurse-consumer partnerships, as well as strategies to overcome these barriers. One hundred and ninety-nine Registered Nurses (RNs) and 36 consumers participated across 14 workshops to collect data for the pilot study. Analysis of these data...

This article presents findings of a study conducted in an Australian Intensive Care Unit (ICU). The authors were invited by staff of the unit to provide education to them to improve their experience of the workplace. Attempts to determine what staff would see as useful professional development activity, however, revealed an inability to specify the...

Recurring themes in PBL literature are the need for paradigm shifts in teaching and learning. These suggest the teacher becomes a facilitator and students become increasingly self-directed learners. However, there is an associated need for a paradigm shift in curriculum development. The authors argue that failure to achieve this paradigm shift perp...