Recognition of roles of various professionals by home-visiting specialists

The use of clinical practice to facilitate community engagement in the Faculty of Health Science

AIM

This article seeks to describe how clinical practice can be used to facilitate community engagement in the Faculty of Health Science.

DESIGN

The study followed a qualitative exploratory, descriptive and contextual design.

METHODS

The study was conducted in the Faculty of Health Science at a public university in Namibia, Southern Africa. A total of 19 academic staff were purposively selected to participate in the focus group interviews. Thereafter, Giorgi's method of phenomenological data analysis was used to analyse data. Lincoln and Guba's strategies were used to establish trustworthiness. The ethical considerations followed Dhai and McQuoid-Mason's four principles.

RESULTS

The three themes that emerged as findings were: facilitation of community engagement through home visits as part of clinical practice; facilitation of community engagement through clinical rural placements; and facilitation of community engagement through interprofessional education and practice.

CONCLUSIONS

It is concluded that health science students and academic staff should conduct home visits, students' placement should also include rural based facilities and allow inter-professional education and practice in clinical practice. However, there remains an overall need to explore for community engagement projects that may be conducted in rural settings. Additionally, a generic service-learning course for all undergraduate health science students may help facilitate community engagement through interprofessional education and practice.

Situated Precision Healthcare in the Smart Medical Home: Bringing NASA’s Research Strategy down to Earth

This special issue is ambitious in that it calls for strategic transformation in research on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and related dementias, including innovation in both research design and value delivery, through lifestyle interventions that implicitly relate to a much broader range of comorbidities and diseases of aging. One response to this challenge is to venture beyond the boundaries of research that supports the healthcare industry. Toward this end, we introduce opportunities for research translation and knowledge transfer from NASA to the healthcare industry. Our intent is to show how NASA’s approach to research can guide innovation for a smart medical home, most notably for AD and other diseases of aging. The article is organized in four major sections: (a) aggregating fragmented research communities; (b) lifestyle interventions in the medical home; (c) multiscale computational modeling and analysis; and (d) lifespan approach to precision brain health. We provide novel motivations and transformative paths to a diversity of specific lines of research, across communities, that would be difficult to discover in common methods of networking within research communities and even through sophisticated bibliographic methods. We thus reveal how knowledge transfer between the public and private sector can stimulate development of broader scientific communities and achieve a more coherent strategic approach to integration and development of a diversity of capabilities including but not limited to technology.