Fences too far? Prevention, Health Education and Promotion

On my community visits I see many horses out in the fields. There are 'horses' in information systems too:

What are "horses"?

“As an intentional nod to Clever Hans, a 'horse' is just a system that is not actually addressing the problem it appears to be solving.” (Sturm, 2014).

In healthcare we keep talking about the need for more emphasis on prevention, health education and promotion. So much of what we do is not futile, despite the growing^* debate on euthanasia, but as a 'system' that incorporates and enacts prevention, health education and health promoting principles (and literacies) we continue to fail. In short, the healthcare system is a horse as defined by Sturm.

I'm certain - even without evidence (intuition influenced by the quality^# media?) that public health AND public mental health have been going backwards. Or if you like, the politicians keep talking the talk but this is limited to the political domain (or paddock)? So many promises in the form of committees, consultations, green, white papers that could be betting slips. In fact the government seems to favour those betting slips or the associated behaviours that produce tax revenue as opposed to the 25 year cross-party plan that would really herald change. This level of change will take longer and would be realised in younger people. Perhaps there are signs of change as many young adults eschew drugs and alcohol (UK)..?

There are two ways in which Hodges' model is a horse; or not:

1. Firstly, there is (still) no information system based on Hodges' model that might appear to be solving a problem.
2. Secondly, Hodges' model has not really had the opportunity to address the health and social care problem. As such it cannot be judged in such equestrian terms.

In the meantime the horses remain in their respective paddocks. Some are racing about, others jumping, a group do dressage, while increasing others are out to pasture - they graze and neigh-say (everything is fine DO carry on)!

^*Whatever one's respective views this debate will grow - a consequence of demographics driven through the heart of the political divide.
^#A sticky wicket then?

B. L. Sturm, “A simple method to determine if a music information retrieval system is a 'horse',” IEEE Trans. Multimedia 16(6):1636–1644, 2014. Winner of the 2017 IEEE Transactions on Multimedia Prize Paper Award.

My source: B. L. Sturm email to: http://digitalhumanities.org/humanist

HORSE2017

On “Horses” in Applied Machine Learning

Research workshop, QMUL, London

Wednesday 20 September 2017, approx. 9h30-17h 

Location: Arts One Lecture Theatre, QMUL, London E1 4NS

http://c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/horse2017/

Children's Mental Health Policy 'Black Hole', Humanitarian 'Corridor' or 'Terrorist Tunnel' ...?

you decide...

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ---------------------------------------  mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

Additional link c/o @ShaunLintern (HSJ) via @MHNAUK

Department of Health to scrap nursing advisory team as part of cost cutting drive:
http://www.hsj.co.uk/topics/workforce/dh-to-scrap-nursing-advisory-team/7005507.fullarticle#.V1rhoPHnIg0.twitter

Drawing source: (Pinterest) Acknowledgement - Anish Kapoor

Axis of rotation: reflected images & imagination

individual
INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

group

imagine a mirror here → self image: REFLECTION	← place a mirror here REFLECTION: body image
what about here ...	and here?

'Holistic confrontation' Gadgil et al. - a useful construct for h2cm?

The possible explanatory utility of what I've termed holistic bandwidth is an ongoing prompt for me to study Hodges' model as a conceptual space, or series of spaces. In the literature recently I discovered Gadgil et al. who explain what they term holistic confrontation in their paper:

Chi (2008) has characterized three kinds of student misconceptions that increase in their representational complexity from false beliefs to flawed mental models to incorrect ontological categories. This framework suggests that different kinds of cognitive processes and instruction may be differentially effective in facilitating conceptual change for a given level of representational complexity. We hypothesize that as the representational complexity of the misconception increases, so does the amount of transformation needed to rectify it. Specifically, we hypothesize that conceptual change at the mental model level requires knowledge revision to the interrelations between the features of the prior knowledge, which is different from revising individual false beliefs or reassignment of a concept to an ontological category. Furthermore, we propose that instruction that focuses the learner on revising systems of relations of the misconception, what we call “holistic confrontation”, should be more effective in facilitating change of a flawed mental model than instruction that focuses on revising false beliefs or the type of ontological category. p.47.

One of the more specific applications for Hodges' model I see and in need of demonstration is case formulation, or case conceptualization. This could extend from a general counselling, long-term medical condition self-care management level through to collaborative case formulation in formal psychological therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and cognitive analytic therapy.

Gadgil et al. use a diagram test of the circulatory system with two instructional conditions for subjects: compare or explain-diagram. The introduction, method, design and six hypotheses in this paper comprise an interesting approach for due consideration here.

Gadgil, S., Nokes-Malach, T. J., & Chi, M. T. H. (2011). Effectiveness of holistic mental model confrontation in driving conceptual change. Learning and Instruction: 22, 1, 47–61.