Rural Volunteer Community Transport Drivers: The Need for Greater Participation in the Policy Process
Volunteers form the backbone of rural community transport services. They deliver a range of services including driving transport-disadvantaged clients to essential health and social care appointments. While trips for social care are usually local, trips for health appointments often involve long distances, long days, and out of pocket expenses for the drivers. In these situations volunteers and their passengers are exposed to increased levels of risk. Governments at all levels consider volunteer involvement as civic participation or social capital, yet little is known about the experiences of rural volunteer community transport drivers or local policy that governs their work. This paper describes a study that conducted an analysis of policy documents related to volunteer activity in four community transport organisations in rural NSW. The study explored variations in policies, whether volunteer drivers had participated in their development or revision, and whether the government models of the service agency was related to volunteer policy. Key findings include: that operational policies lack consistency across the services; that the role of volunteer drivers varies across services located in the same region; that participation of volunteers in either developing or reviewing local policies that govern their work was evident in the policies of only one of the four services; and that governance models do not appear to be related to volunteer participation.
Critical thinking and disposition skills among nurse educators in Jordanian universities: Perception, description, achievement and experience
Critical thinking is an expected educational process and outcome of the Jordanian strategy to develop nursing education. This descriptive-explorative study examined the critical thinking experience of 100 nurse educators working in six Jordanian Universities purposively-selected to reflect a representative sample. A survey questionnaire consisting three parts was used in this study; the California Critical thinking Skill Test (CCTST), the California Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory (CCTDI), and the experience survey (ES). The CCTST measured critical thinking skills and the ES asked the participants to rate their practice of critical thinking. The ES included a qualitative component that invited nurse educators to describe a situation, which illustrated their experience of critical thinking in practice. The CCTDI measured disposition towards critical thinking. The overall response rate was 73% (n=73) and 25% (n=25) for the qualitative part. The results of this study demonstrated that nurse educators had a positive disposition towards applying critical thinking in their practice; yet, their scores were not high on the skill test. These results indicated that they might require further professional development to support their work in enhancing critical thinking. Furthermore, age, gender, degree and educational experience of educational concepts were found to affect the results on the three parts of the survey. For the qualitative part, thematic analysis was performed and five key themes were identified. These were analysis, logical reasoning, evaluation, inference and reflexivity. This study suggests that nurse educators have positive inclination towards and high perceived practices of critical thinking.