Browsing by Author "Hunter, Paulette V."

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Open Access
A controlled investigation of continuing pain education for long-term care staff
(Hindawi, 2013) Ghandehari, Omeed, O; Hadjistavropoulos, Thomas; Williams, Jaime; Thorpe, Lilian; Alfano, Dennis P.; Dal Bello-Haas, Vanina; Malloy, David C.; Martin, Ronald, R.; Rahaman, Omar; Zwakhale, Sandra, M.G.; Carleton, R. Nicholas; Hunter, Paulette V.; Lix, Lisa M.
The underassessment and undertreatment of pain in residents of long-term care (LTC) facilities has been well documented. Gaps in staff knowledge and inaccurate beliefs have been identified as contributors.OBJECTIVES: To investigate the effectiveness of an expert-based continuing education program in pain assessment/management for LTC staff.METHODS: Participants included 131 LTC staff members who were randomly assigned to either an interactive pain education (PE) program, which addressed gaps in knowledge such as medication management, or an interactive control program consisting of general dementia education without a specific clinical focus. Participants attended three sessions, each lasting 3 h, and completed measures of pain-related knowledge and attitudes/beliefs before, immediately after and two weeks following the program. Focus groups were conducted with a subset of participants to gauge perception of the training program and barriers to implementing pain-related strategies.RESULTS: Analysis using ANOVA revealed that PE participants demonstrated larger gains compared with control participants with regard to pain knowledge and pain beliefs. Barriers to implementing pain-related strategies certainly exist. Nonetheless, qualitative analyses demonstrated that PE participants reported that they overcame many of these barriers and used pain management strategies four times more frequently than control participants.CONCLUSIONS: Contrary to previous research, the present study found that the interactive PE program was effective in changing pain beliefs and improving knowledge. Continuing PE in LTC has the potential to address knowledge gaps among front-line LTC providers.
Open Access
Proof of concept for a multi-method approach to evaluate the usability of websites with public health content: The case of Alzheimer association websites
(Canadian Psychological Association, 2022-10-06) Friedrich, Trista E.; Smith, Austen K.; Hunter, Paulette V.
Methods for assessing usability are advancing rapidly, and include think-aloud protocols, objective measures such as task timing, and ultra-sensitive measures such as eye tracking and page recording. In this study, we provide proof-of-concept for the new, combined use of these three types of measures within a quasi-experimental paradigm focused on a question relevant to public health. The quasi-experiment specifically involved assessing the usability of four English-language Alzheimer websites from around the world (USA, UK, Ireland, Canada), all of which contained information about cognitive health. Participants completed two tasks; one requiring them to identify strategies to prevent dementia and another requiring them to locate a definition of Alzheimer’s disease. We hypothesized that the websites would have superior usability for the former task and inferior usability for the latter task. We also hypothesized positive correlations among eye tracking measures, simpler performance measures (e.g., task completion time), and subjective usability measures. We found that the new quasi-experimental protocol facilitated comparison of tasks and websites. It also facilitated interpretation by permitting comparison across measures. Overall, this study provides proof of concept for the use of this multi-method approach to evaluate the usability of websites. It also provides information that could potentially be used to advance further pilot or experimental hypothesis testing on this topic.