jbsh

When you write a journal article you are trying to do a number of things. You are;

1. Disseminating the information you have gathered
2. Keeping the literature up to date
3. Telling your story and defending your position
4. Putting your head above the parapet

Having written your article and had it accepted you feel very pleased with yourself. Even though you have written it for all the above reasons you never really think that anybody is going to read it and take you seriously. But then two things happen:

1. Someone emails you and asks you for a copy of your article
2. You get an email from the journal saying that someone has written to them about your article and asking if you would like to respond

The first feels like flattery, and sometimes leads to conversations and the development of new projects. The second feels like an attack. As such I find it best to read the letter and then sleep on it. Any response that you write needs to be as carefully written as the original article. As with most academic writing it should be reporting of the facts, a justification of the methodology, and a defense of your interpretation of the findings.

Having written your response and sent it back to the journal you still have to wait to see if the editor will accept it for publication and then go through the whole proof reading process.

This is our (jbsh) current position following the publication of: The Ameliorating Effects of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBO2) on Quality Of Life in Patients with Maxillofacial Soft Tissue- and Osteo-Radionecrosis.

What happens next? We wait to see if further letters follow, or if future publications support or refute our position. Academia is not a quiet pond of thought and introspection, it is a tempest of investigation driven by desire.

What makes successful companies different? What a great research question, and one that the University of Strathclyde posited a couple years back. They followed up with 37 companies, in 8 EU countries and gathered over 1,000 stories (interview descriptions of processes and activities).

Catherine Maguire from Strathclyde was presenting their findings. They began with the CIM-OSA model of business processes (one I’m very familiar with as it formed a good chunk of my research career). Turns out my supervisor was on the advisory panel for this work also, small world!

Basically, CIM-OSA identified three key processes that all businesses do: Manage, Operate, and Support. The research focus has been around Operate (and to a lesser extent Support). The research group I was with in Plymouth did most of the early work developing a reference model for the Operate Process. Catherine was looking at the Manage process.

Being a very industry orientated researcher (probably why I wasn’t very good as an academic) I always suspected that the actually process maps were less interesting that the activities and practices they represented. In my own research I concentrated more on these activities and the social systems around them, than the formal modelling (drawing boxes & arrows).

Catherine’s group has now confirmed what we all ‘knew’ but hadn’t ‘proved’. The actual processes in successful companies are the same as for less successful companies. Successful companies are a bit more integrated; the big difference is in the “how”.

Hugh MacLeod from The Hughtrain

Or as the song goes, “It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it”…

There are a hundred+1 jobs to do when you’re running a business, and they’re all important. Fulfilling Orders and Getting Orders (to use process speak) are probably the most important, but I was talking to a HR exec a couple nights ago that insisted that hiring the best people was the most important because they’d then make the business work (might have been a vested interest there).

So where do you start?

The more successful companies were generally more mature in all their Manage activities but Strathclyde did find that there were around 15 activities that seemed to differentiate more successful from less successful companies.

What Catherine’s research has found is that given equal resources, and for their 37 companies, higher maturity in these 15 activities was a reliable indicator of a successful company. Catherine flashed the activities up on screen and they were largely around communication (as I’d expect) but I didn’t get a chance to write them down, hopefully I’ll be able to update this post shortly with that list.

I did ask if they’d looked at how the Manage Processes that these activities represented subsequently interacted with the Operate Processes. From a business change perspective you’re generally presented with a whole load of symptoms operationally and have to analyse your way back to root causes. This research could really help by making explicit some of the implicit links that are learned from practice.

I’m following up with Catherine to see if I can reproduce that list of Activities here together with links to the online tool they’ve developed to help companies self-rate themselves.

Personally I can’t hold 15 things in my head simultaneously; what 5 activities are embedded in your organisation that differenciate you from the competition?

I have had the pleasure of working at the ‘Diving Diseases Research Centre’ for more than 9 years.

One of the things that I have been involved in numerous times over that period is staffing the stand at the national dive shows. DDRC’s introduction to the world reads ‘DDRC - Is a charity providing support and education for divers and research into the effects of altered pressure environments on humans. It is one of the UK’s busiest recompression facility, and has seen over fifty diving casualties in the past 12 months. DDRC is able to offer internationally recognised training from diving first aid and oxygen administration to hyperbaric medicine and recompression chamber operation. We will have a team (including me) of helpful and informative staff onsite at the dive show to answer any questions you may have about training, research or the work we do.’

On the day we will have some interesting bits of research for you to get involved in.  Graham Samson will be introducing some of his research, which is going towards a PhD.

I’ll be asking people to judge wither they think a number of factors might cause decompression illness.  It is a simple card sorting task with no hard and fast right or wrong responses just subjective judgements.  If you have the chance to visit us at the NEC that would be great.  If you can’t make it then I know all the researchers at DDRC would love your input, and I know I would appreciate you completing my online survey.

See you on the 1st or 2nd of November at the NEC

or please complete my online survey!

(Opens new window and takes you to SurveyGizmo)

Image by Sarge-Jack

Sometimes you can be working on projects for years and you can feel that no substantial outputs are ever going to come from them. Then all of a sudden stuff happens! Sometimes the stuff is further funding, sometimes it is conference abstracts, posters or oral presentations and sometimes you get publications. That is the case here; projects I have been involved with since 2001 have finally got to the point that academic peer review journals are accepting articles for publication.

I have had the good fortune to have four articles accepted so far this year. I have written about the first three and the abstracts can be read in earlier blogs (1 - QoL & Maxillofacial Cancer Patients: 2 - Educational Impact of Pulmonary Rehabilitation: 3 - Personality as a predisposing factor for DCI) on this site and references found on the research page.

The latest article (No. 4) has been accepted for publication in the ‘Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation and Prevention’ is and entitled:

The prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder in patients undergoing pulmonary rehabilitation and changes in PTSD symptoms following rehabilitation

Authors: Jones, RCM., Harding, SA., Chung, M., & Campbell, J.

Abstract: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a common serious condition which, although treatable, is often undetected. We aimed to investigate the prevalence of PTSD in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) referred to pulmonary rehabilitation and the impact of rehabilitation on PTSD symptoms. Design: cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys. Participants: Patients with COPD attending pulmonary rehabilitation programmes in South West England. Outcome measures:The Posttraumatic Diagnostic Scale (PDS), Impact of Events scale (IES-R), the incremental shuttle walking test, Medical Outcomes Short Form 12 (SF-12), Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HADS) and Chronic Respiratory Questionnaire (CRQ-SR). Questionnaires were completed at face to face interviews with participants one week prior to commencing pulmonary rehabilitation and at the end of the programme. 100 participants took part, mean age 68yrs; 65 male. 70% completed the pulmonary rehabilitation programme. Seventy four out of one hundred participants reported traumatic experiences, 37 of which were related to their lung disease. Eight out of 100 participants met diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Participants with PTSD reported worse health status than those without PTSD. After pulmonary rehabilitation, exercise capacity and quality of life scores improved significantly, but PTSD symptom severity did not change. PTSD was present in 8% of COPD patients referred for pulmonary rehabilitation. After rehabilitation, participants with PTSD improved more in respect of anxiety and disease specific health status than those without PTSD. PTSD symptoms did not improve following rehabilitation, despite its positive effects on HADS scores, exercise and health status in this cohort.

Once again I hope you find this of interest and as always please get in touch if you want to discuss or comment about anything in the article.