Flinders University

About: Flinders University is a education organization based out in Adelaide, South Australia, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Health care. The organization has 12033 authors who have published 32831 publications receiving 973172 citations. The organization is also known as: Flinders University of South Australia.

Epidemiology of participation: an Australian community study

Abstract: STUDY OBJECTIVE To determine the levels of participation in social and civic community life in a metropolitan region, and to assess differential levels of participation according to demographic, socioeonomic and health status. To contribute to policy debates on community participation, social capital and health using these empirical data. DESIGN Cross sectional, postal, self completed survey on health and participation. SETTING Random sample of the population from the western suburbs of Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, a population of approximately 210 000. PARTICIPANTS 2542 respondents from a sample of 4000 people aged 18 years and over who were registered on the electoral roll. MAIN RESULTS The response rate to the survey was 63.6% (n=2542). Six indices of participation, on range of social and civic activities, with a number of items in each, were created. Levels of participation were highest in the informal social activities index (46.7–83.7% for individual items), and lowest in the index of civic activities of a collective nature (2.4–5.9% for individual items). Low levels of involvement in social and civic activities were reported more frequently by people of low income and low education levels. CONCLUSIONS Levels of participation in social and civic community life in an urban setting are significantly influenced by individual socioeconomic status, health and other demographic characteristics. An understanding of the pattern of participation is important to inform social and health policy making. Increasing levels of participation will reduce social exclusion and is likely to improve the overall quality of community life.

The parallel rural community curriculum: an integrated clinical curriculum based in rural general practice.

Abstract: Introduction In an attempt to address the rural medical workforce maldistribution and the concurrent inappropriate caseload at the urban tertiary teaching hospitals, Flinders University and the Riverland Division of General Practice decided to pilot, in 1997, an entire year of undergraduate clinical curriculum in Australian rural general practice. This program is called the Parallel Rural Community Curriculum (PRCC). This paper is a discussion of the aims of the programme; student selection; practice recruitment; curriculum structure, and academic content, together with lessons learnt from the evaluation of the first cohort of students’ experience of the course. Methods Independent external evaluators undertook a thematic analysis of a series of structured interviews of students and faculty involved in both the PRCC and the traditional curriculum. The mean examination results were determined and a rank order comparison of student academic performance was undertaken. Results The eight selected volunteer students reported greater access to patients and clinical learning opportunities than their mainstream counterparts and learned clinical decision making in the context of the whole patient, their family, and the available community resources. They identified patients with ‘core’ clinical conditions and had a longitudinal exposure to common diseases, whereas hospital-based peers had a cross-sectional exposure to highly filtered illness. The PRCC students’ academic performance improved in comparison with that of their tertiary hospital peers’ and in comparison to their own results in previous years. Conclusion The PRCC curriculum has cut across the traditional clinical discipline boundaries by teaching in an integrated way in rural general practice. It has affirmed the potential role of true generalist physicians in undergraduate medical education.

Compact operators in Banach lattices

Abstract: Disjoint sequence methods from the theory of Riesz spaces are used to study compact operators on Banach lattices. A principal new result of the paper is that each positive map from a Banach latticeE to a Banach latticeF with compact majorant is itself compact provided the norms onE′ andF are order continuous.