This proposal seeks support for Peters and Ryan to partner with the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) and Scalpel (the UK's largest undergraduate surgical society) to translate their previous ESRC-funded research into a package of Women in Surgery (WIS) interventions designed to boost women's motivation to embark on and succeed in a surgical career. This intervention is both timely and essential for the long-term wellbeing of the UK public. First, by increasing women's surgical career motivation the interventions promise to redress the systematic underrepresentation of women in surgery. While women now dominate UK medical schools they are far less likely than male colleagues to pursue a career in surgery and even less likely to qualify as consultants. Second, by encouraging the women who increasingly dominate the undergraduate talent pool to pursue and succeed in a surgical career, the interventions will ensure the UK public has access to the surgical skills that it requires. The UK is currently experiencing a shortage of surgeons and the rapidly aging population will exacerbate this problem. Third, by increasing women's motivation the interventions will reduce NHS costs associated with the high turnover of capable female trainees. The WIS interventions are a direct application of Peters and Ryan's recent research which revealed that identity-based processes account for women's lower levels of career motivation in high status occupations. Specifically, the research demonstrates that women are likely to perceive that they do not fit in with the stereotypically masculine image that defines high status occupations like surgery. Importantly, this perceived lack of identity fit reduces women's motivation to pursue the occupation in the first place; and amongst those who have already embarked on this occupation, it reduces their motivation to succeed and increases their inclination to 'opt-out'. We seek to apply these findings in a package of interventions designed and run in collaboration with the RCS and Scalpel. The interventions seek to target women's surgical career motivation using a three-ponged approach that consists of (a) a seminar series, (b) a platform of multimedia resources and (c) a programme of intervention evaluation. The WIS Seminar Series will target medical students and surgical trainees at top UK conferences to disseminate knowledge about the role of identity-fit dynamics in the motivation of women. The Seminar Series will also directly bolster women's perception of identity fit by increasing the visibility of female surgical role models who challenge perceptions that surgeons are, or need to be, only a particular kind of person. The interventions will be reinforced by ensuring the conference is a gender-sensitive environment where key organisations are given the opportunity to communicate their commitment to diversity. One key seminar will be presented at a medical educators conference and will focus on the dissemination of knowledge so that those who are best placed to monitor and manage the surgical career pipeline understand the issues and are empowered to institute their own interventions. To ensure that the dissemination and intervention components of the Seminar Series can be directed towards a national audience on an ongoing basis, the series will be complemented by a platform of multimedia resources including a WIS Vodcast, WIS Seminar Series Website and a WIS Support Network. Finally, an evaluation programme will accompany the interventions to document their effectiveness at increasing the motivation of seminar attendees (versus non-attendees), both immediately and in the months following the intervention. Where possible indicative behavioural information will be gathered. This will inform future seminars, ensure that the RCS and Scalpel implement best practise to increase the presence of women in surgery and to inform future research.
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When Darwin was developing his theories of evolution he read avidly in popular natural history magazines and sought out information from an army of almost 2000 correspondents. Such engagement with a wide public in the construction of science became increasingly difficult with the development of professional, and highly specialised science, but the emergence of 'citizen science' projects has suggested a new way forward. With the creation of vast data sets in contemporary science, there is a need for a new army of volunteers to help classify and analyse the information. The Zooniverse platform, started in 2007 with 'Galaxy Zoo', now has over 800,000 participants who contribute to projects from astrophysics to climate science. Significant discoveries have already been made by these volunteers in the field of astronomy. Yet, the structures by which these volunteers might engage with professional science, and through which scientists themselves might draw upon their findings, are not clear, and researchers on the project have been turning to nineteenth-century models of communication to find ways of harnessing this huge popular interest in order to increase the rate of scientific progress. The information revolution in our own age has parallels in the nineteenth century which saw an explosion of print, and journal publishing; in 1800 there were only around 100 science periodicals, but by 1900 this had jumped to 10,000 worldwide. The project brings together historical and literary research in the nineteenth century with contemporary scientific practice, looking at the ways in which patterns of popular communication and engagement in nineteenth-century science can offer models for current practice. The research is timely since the digital revolution, and open-access publishing, are about to change forever the processes and forms of scientific communication and exchange. The project will be based at the Universities of Oxford and Leicester, in partnership with three of our most significant institutions: the Natural History Museum; the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society. Researchers will draw on their historic collections, uncovering the extraordinary range of largely forgotten science journals of the nineteenth century, from the Magazine of Natural History (one of Darwin's favourites), to Recreative Science, or Hardwicke's Science Gossip: an Illustrated Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature. They will also work with these institutions' science communities, addressing questions about the creation and circulation of knowledge in the digital age, and looking at innovative ways of breaking through the public/professional divide. The Zooniverse will extend the range of its work, creating four new citizen science projects which will both accelerate the rate of scientific growth in these areas, and add an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 to the dedicated ranks of citizen scientists. Drawing on the historical research, it will also develop new tools to enable better systems of exchange between professional science, and this growing army of volunteers. As part of the project there will be public symposia in the Natural History Museum, the Royal Society and the Royal College of Surgeons, as well as an exhibition in the Hunterian Museum, and a performance lecture by Professor Marcus du Sautoy. Science has suffered in the public mind from its seeming aloofness and impenetrability. This partnership between humanities and science researchers aims to break down some of those barriers, and to create a truly productive public engagement with science which will enhance the ongoing development of scientific practice.
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ExISE addresses Key Area 3 of the AHRC Antimicrobial Resistance Call, 'Creative, Collaborative and Disruptive Innovation, Experiments and Design in Indoor/Built Environments'. Its overarching Aim is to eliminate airborne acquired Surgical Site Infections (SSI) in operating theatres OTs, traditionally countered with antibiotics. Our microbiologist colleagues emphasise that any antibiotic use, suboptimal or optimal, creates AMR and so avoidance of antibiotic use, in this case post-operative, is paramount. ExISE proposes to achieve this aim through the evidence-based reinvention of the actual physical environment in which surgery is practised, the Operating Theatre OT. Eliminating airborne SSI will reduce the number of infections and the reactive use of antibiotics in recovery and recuperation and in some cases repeat surgery and renewed risk. Airborne transmission of infection has long been feared, the post war custom and practice position on its mechanisms has dominated OT design. SSI is not eliminated in contemporary OTs. The position is not wholly substantiated. Surgeons do not question OT design. Is there another way? ExISE will search for alternative approaches: its historians of science, art and architecture will research a history of Operating Theatre design, of making 'safe', appropriate environments for surgery within their designers' and patrons' theories and beliefs over some 150 years. The search will extend to exhuming still and moving images of surgery in action within its set environments. The Royal College of Surgeons believes this is an as yet unwritten history. The team will be searching for accompanying evidence for environmental intent to enable meaningful reconstructions of their theatres and environments against the original criteria for success. What did they think a healthy environment with healthy air looked like? ExISE scientists will assemble laboratory models and environments from the historical reconstructions of OTs alongside a contemporary 'Ultraclean' OT, the familiar 'cooker hood' issuing truly prodigious flows of cool air through the OT over all the occupants and contents, up to 40 air changes/hr, making a bizarre and not wholly welcome working environment for surgical teams. In parallel, ExISE will achieve greater understanding of the physical and psychological experience of being in/working in a contemporary OT for surgical teams and support staff by visiting teams and interviewing them in situ and at the Royal College. We hope to translate these insights into a meaningful critique from which design and redesign leads can be drawn, leading to a radical step change in fundamental approaches to the design of OTs. Approaches which appeal to our stakeholders and partners will be interrogated and tested physically with both analogue and theoretical models to enable wide dissemination of research outputs with real confidence and thence make significant impacts on the aspirations for and expectations of environments for surgery. Pursuing the international success of our earlier Robust Hospitals project film, we will make a 4-5minute animation out of our drawn reconstructions of OTs, our ideas for redesigning the OT superimposing the fluid flow modelling and calculated environmental performance. Our partners will post the film for their constituencies as will Cambridge University on its streaming media site and YouTube Much detailed and painstaking work will be required subsequently to implement such radically new OTs in practice but ExISE should achieve the 'great leap forward' that breaks more than 60 years of standard practice.
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Health, quality of life and wellbeing have become the number one priority areas for individuals, communities and governments worldwide and directly impact policy making across much of the developed world. A significant body of evidence and numerous policy directives acknowledge the important role culture and access to heritage plays in active citizenship, community engagement, improving wellbeing and life satisfaction. The heritage sector has the opportunity to more closely engage with this broad agenda and in return benefit from its strength as a priority with funders and partners. Museums and galleries already have an effect on wellbeing through their learning, access and outreach programmes and have done throughout much of their history. The challenge, as with learning, is measuring the distinctive but potentially significant contribution museums and galleries make to individual and community wellbeing, and articulately advocating for further work to potential partners and funders. It is therefore vital we establish a robust, repeatable, measure for assessing the value to health and wellbeing that this interaction affords. Furthermore, such engagement requires strong theoretical and empirical evidence, and a conceptual language, in order to clearly articulate the value of the heritage sector's contribution to health and wellbeing. Previous AHRC-funded research has demonstrated that heritage-focused activities in hospitals and other healthcare settings have shown significant improvements in wellbeing as measured by scales commonly used in clinical practice. Analysis of interviews showed that patients are distracted from their clinical surroundings and feel happier and healthier as a result of heritage-focused activities such as handling and discussing museum objects. The effects of arts-focused interventions in healthcare contexts are also well-documented and reviewed. Studies have found that arts-focused activities can lead to reduced drug consumption, decreased hospital stay, improvements in mental wellbeing and social inclusion, and increased empathy in healthcare professionals with mental health patients. There are many other examples of good practice from UK museums and galleries whose community access programmes have revealed a significant impact on enhancing social wellbeing; a few highlights include the Dulwich Picture Gallery's 'Good Times - Prescription for Art' programme, the Museum of East Anglian Life's social inclusion programme, Colchester and Ipswich Museum's work with mental health service users and the arts-for-health programme run across Manchester Museums. To date the above 'wellbeing' programmes and others like them have used a range of techniques to assess the value and impact of their work, including 'social return on investment' models, mental health wellbeing scales and quality of life measures. The sector however, lacks a defined approach for assessing the impact of its work on health and wellbeing. In the last ten years, many museums and galleries have used a set of measures called the Generic Learning Outcomes (GLOs) to assess the impact of their work on learning. Subsequently, the Generic Social Outcomes (GSOs) were devised to measure the social benefits resulting from a museum or heritage visit such as the level of interaction between visitors as a result of engagement with an object or historic site. The goal of this project is to move beyond the GLOs and GSOs to develop a heritage focused wellbeing measure and create a new conceptual and methodological framework (or Generic Wellbeing Outcome, GWO), for evaluating the heritage sectors contribution to health and wellbeing. Through testing and validating the GWO across a variety of museums and galleries, the project will assess and promote the benefits to health, wellbeing and quality of life of heritage-focused activities.
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