The southern portion of New Zealand’s South Island is a productive area for mallards (Anas platyrhynchos) despite a notable lack of permanent or semi-permanent wetlands. Most broods are reared in pastures that may or may not be flooded with ephemeral water. In recent years, there has been an increased conversion from continuous to sporadic grazing that has resulted in a functional change in the...

The paradigm of Cloud computing introduces new approaches to manage IT services going beyond concepts originating in traditional IT service management. The main goal is to automate the whole management of services to reduce costs and to make management tasks less error-prone. Two different service management paradigms are used in practice: configuration management and model-driven Cloud managem...

BACKGROUND Spiritual needs are among an individual's essential needs in all places and times. With his physical and spiritual dimensions and the mutual effect of these two dimensions, human has spiritual needs as well. These needs are an intrinsic need throughout the life; therefore, they will remain as a major element of holistic nursing care. One of the greatest challenges for nurses is to sa...

Concept: An abstract idea or notion. Conceptual model: A group of interrelated concepts described to suggest relationships among them. Framework: A basic structure; the context in which theory is developed; the structure that permits theory to be understood. Grand theory: A theory that covers a broad area of the discipline’s concerns. Metaparadigm: Concepts that identify the domain of a discipl...

PURPOSE The purposes of this study were to describe the advice that expert holistic nurses gave to nursing students regarding the theory and practice of holistic nursing and to describe nursing students' experience and perceptions of their interaction with the experts. DESIGN This was a qualitative descriptive study. METHODS Nursing students who attended the 2008 and 2009 conferences of the...

Although the history of thought reveals a number of holistic thinkers — Aristotle, Marx, Husserl among them — it was only in the 1950s that any version of holistic thinking became institutionalized. The kind of holistic thinking which then came to the fore, and was the concern of a newly created organization, was that which makes explicit use of the concept of ‘system’, and today it is ‘systems...

Total quality management (TQM) is a holistic management philosophy focusing on the maintenance and continuous improvement of products, services, people, and processes at all levels and in all functions of the organization with the goal to meet or exceed customer expectations (Flynn et al. 1994; Goetsch and Davis 1994; Oakland 2003). TQM becomes critical for organization’s competitiveness, effec...

Technological advances and economic, social, and cultural conditions have created a climate of change in the health care arena. The re-emergence of the holistic health care paradigms has begun to induce a revolution in the health care system. New roles and approaches are developing in relation to the holistic health movement. Since holistic thinking is diverse, an introduction among eastern phi...

Background Objective structured clinical examinations (OSCEs) have been used for many years within healthcare programmes as a measure of students' and clinicians' clinical performance. OSCEs are a form of simulation and are often summative but may be formative. This educational approach requires robust design based on sound pedagogy to assure practice and assessment of holistic nursing care. As...

Filling and submission of electronic forms is a key issue for egovernment, since most electronic services offered in this context include some variant of electronic forms. Insofar, IT experts are placed in the centre of electronic forms services lifecycles, undertaking the analysis, design, implementation and maintenance phases. This practice, however, implies various impediments, such as the n...