Posted: June 15th, 2015

Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise.” 1978 (poem)

Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise.” 1978 (poem)

Paper details:
Introduction: “My own answer to what the humanities are for is simple: They should help us to live. We should look to culture as a storehouse of useful ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues.” – Alain de Botton, author and educator (MindEdge, Inc., 2014) From your studies, you have seen how culture, belief systems, and exposure to the arts affect the way people view the world. Learning about these differences in perspective helps us to have a better understanding of what it means to be human. When we understand and value the humanistic point of view, we bring creative solutions and fresh new ideas to the challenges we face in our personal and professional lives. We are schooled in the fundamentals of close analysis, critical thinking, and teasing out the complexities of issues which have no simple right or wrong answer. In this task, you will write an analysis (suggested length of 3–5 pages) of one work of literature. Choose one work from the list below: Classical Period • Sophocles, Antigone, ca. 442 B.C.E. (drama) • Ovid, “The Transformation of Daphne into a Laurel,” an excerpt from Book 1 of The Metamorphoses, ca. 2 C.E. (poetry) Middle Ages • Chaucer, “The Pardoner’s Introduction,” “Prologue,” and “Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, ca. late 14th century (frame tale/poetry) • Marie de France, “The Lay of Sir Launfal,” ca. 1175 (lay/poetry) Renaissance • Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ca. 1601 (drama) • John Donne, “Batter My Heart,” ca. 1633 (sonnet) Baroque • Jean Baptiste Racine, Phaedre, 1677 (drama) • John Milton, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” 1645 (companion poems) Enlightenment • Phillis Wheatley, “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing his Works.” 1773 (poem) • Alexander Pope, “A Little Learning is a Dang’rous Thing” from An Essay on Criticism. 1711 (poem) Romanticism • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein. 1818 (novel) • John Keats, “Ode to Autumn” 1819 (poem) Realism • Edith Wharton, House of Mirth. 1905 (novel) • Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Tears, Idle Tears.” 1847 (poem) Modernism • Zora Neale Hurston, “Sweat.” 1926 (short story) • George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion. 1912 (drama) Postmodernism • Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise.” 1978 (poem) • Louise Erdrich, “The Plague of Doves.” 2008 (Chapter 1, from the novel, The Plague of Doves.) Once you have selected and read the work, you will create a paragraph of descriptive writing with your personal observations about the work. This paragraph must be written before you do research on the work, the author, and the period it comes from. You will need to be quite detailed in your description of the work. The next step will be to research the work, the life of the artist, and the period. You will then be ready to create your analysis. This process of analysis will require you to discuss the historical context of the work, pertinent aspects of the author’s biography, themes and/or stylistic characteristics of its historical period, and finally, the relevance of this work for audiences today. The final requirement of the task will be to reflect on this process of analysis and describe how your perception of the work changed. Requirements: A. Record your initial reaction to the work (suggested length of 1 paragraph or half a page) by doing the following: 1. Describe your initial thoughts and/or feelings about the work. 2. Describe in detail at least one aspect of the work that most interests you. B. Analyze the work (suggested length of 2–4 pages) by doing the following: 1. Describe the historical context of the period in which the work was written. 2. Discuss insights into the work that can be gained from the author’s biography. 3. Analyze how this work explores a particular theme and/or stylistic characteristic from its period. 4. Explain the relevance of this work for today’s audiences. C. Reflect on how the analysis affected your perception of the work (suggested length of 1 paragraph or half a page). 1. Discuss how the deeper knowledge you gained through your analysis has informed or altered your thoughts and/or feelings about the work. D. When you use sources to support ideas and elements in a paper or project, provide acknowledgement of source information for any content that is quoted, paraphrased or summarized. Acknowledgement of source information includes in-text citation noting specifically where in the submission the source is used and a corresponding reference, which includes: • Author • Date • Title • Location of information (e.g., publisher, journal, or website URL) Note: The use of APA citation style is encouraged but is not required for this task. Evaluators will offer feedback on the acknowledgement of source information but not with regard to conformity with APA or other citation style. For tips on using APA style, please refer to the APA Resources web link found under General Information/APA Guidelines in the left-hand panel in Taskstream. Note: No more than a combined total of 30% of a submission can be directly quoted or closely paraphrased from outside sources, even if cited correctly. Note: For definitions of terms commonly used in the rubric, see the Rubric Terms web link included in the Evaluation Procedures section. Reference List: Note: This reference list refers only to direct citations in the assessment above and may be different from those you need to complete the assessment. Consult your Course of Study for a list of suggested learning resources.

Case Study
South Carigcastle Health and Social Care Trust Background
South Carigcastle Health & Social Care Trust (SCHCT) provides community health care and social care services to a population of 100,000 people living in an inner city and suburban area of some 450 square miles in the United Kingdom. The Trust was formed five years ago from the merger of the up to then separate South Carigcastle Community Health Care Trust and Social Services Departments.
The Community Health Care Trust employed staff with medical training from a variety of disciplines such as District Nurses and Physiotherapists. They visit patients in their homes and provide care to them there.
The Social Services Department employed staff with non¬medical care skills also from a wide variety of disciplines such as Adult Carers and Child Protection Officers who also visit clients in their own homes and provide social care. The objective of both organisations was to enable people to go on living in their own homes for as long as possible, and thereby not to have to move into Care Homes run by the Trust.
This merger was a result of a new central government policy, which was being piloted in the region in which South Carigcastle falls. There are nine other Community Trusts within the region, none of which are so progressive in their thinking as South Carigcastle. The objectives of the government policy are to improve the care provided and reduce the overall cost of providing that care. The new combined Trust was given a large degree of organisational and financial autonomy within the framework of overall management by the local region, and an energetic, forward thinking Chief Executive, John Jones, previously the Director of Social Services, was appointed to lead the new combined Trust. John Jones immediately appointed the hard¬working Operations Director of the Community Health Care Trust, Dr. Southgate to the position of Business Development Director – effectively his deputy.
The Trust is headquartered in an old Victorian Mental Health Hospital with 50 other offices, clinics and care homes scattered over the geographical area served by the Trust. Very few of these offices have been purpose built.
The Trust now employs 3000 staff split into a relatively small Head Office team including Finance, Personnel and Business Development and the professional care staff who are divided into 3 Directorates as follows:
•    Adult Care
•    Mental Health Care
•    Child Care Services.
Each Directorate is in turn divided into 24 professional care disciplines such as District Nursing, Physiotherapy and Child Immunisation. Each professional care discipline is, in turn, divided into up to 5 teams spread over the area covered by South Carigcastle. There are in total 84 such teams each containing only specialists in the team’s particular discipline.

The care delivery process
The Trust is one of the 39 totally separate organisations, which deliver care to the geographic area of South Carigcastle. The other organisations are:
•    3 separate Hospital Trusts who each provide Accident & Emergency services, maternity services and a full range of clinical services to carry out operations on patients as required.
•    35 Doctor Practices (Clinics) containing a total of 60 doctors. These Practices are all contracted independently to the National Health Service and run effectively as individual small businesses that are paid by the National Health Service depending on how many patients are registered with them. The 35 Practices have formed themselves into a local group to meet regularly and discuss local problems, particularly the problems they have in dealing with South Carigcastle Trust and the three separate Hospital Trusts.
People in need of care are referred to the Trust from a range of sources, for example the doctors, the hospitals, police, schools, neighbours and           next-of¬kin. The referrals contain wide disparities in quality and quantity of information and are normally directed to a local Trust office, which may not house the professional care team who should deal with the particular problem so the referral is then referred on within the Trust finally reaching the correct team who take action. Referrals are received on a 7×24 hour basis and are actioned immediately if they appear to be very urgent.
The key actions following receipt of the referral are typically:
•    A visit to the referred person in need of care by a senior care professional from the apparently most relevant care team, who carries out an assessment of the patient and may generate referrals to other teams within the Trust for their follow¬up.
•    Creation of a hand¬written care plan. Some care plans are very complicated and some very simple. For example the Child Protection teams draw up very complex plans to solve the domestic problems leading to abuse of the child whereas the Podiatry teams are only concerned with scheduling visits to cut elderly patients’ toenails.
•    Sign¬off of the costs of delivering the care by the Team Manager, or adjustment if too expensive.
•    Delivery of the care services, which vary in duration from one hour to several years depending on the discipline and type of care.
•    Review of progress and revision of the care plan as necessary.
Each professional care discipline has developed its own styles of assessment form and care plan to record information about the patient, and each uses its own medical and care jargon to describe the same condition. Although a patient may receive care services from several teams in parallel, each of which is delivering its own speciality – for example district nurses dressing leg ulcers or occupational therapists modifying the home environment – no attempt is made to co¬ordinate the care delivery or exchange care plans between the teams so they may well turn up at the same patient’s house on the same day and at the same time and one will then have to re¬schedule their visit.
The teams are traditionally suspicious of sharing patient¬related information in case they make patient diagnosis mistakes, and the mental health and child protection teams are particularly concerned about security of information about their patients and clients.
The IT systems
The main IT software systems used in the Trust are not integrated with each other and comprise:
•    The legacy Social Care system, which is primarily concerned with providing a basis for analysing the type and source of referrals received by the individual social care teams and recording the type of care and cost of care delivered in response to the referral. No attempt is made to record the outcome of the care delivered and all notes made by the social workers are hand¬written and filed locally.
•    The legacy Health Care system which is primarily concerned with collecting details of the activities carried out by the health care workers so that mandatory statistical analyses can be forwarded to the Ministry of Health in central government.
•    An effective email system linking all of the offices together as well as to the outside NHS world via the systems operated by the Regional Office.
•    A financial management and payroll system.
The legacy systems are old and very user-unfriendly in look and feel, and staff activity data is entered by clerks located in the scattered offices and then used for statistical report generation by the central IT Department. None of the health and social care professionals ever make use of the information in these systems.

The network linking all of the offices together is the responsibility of the IT Team in the Regional Office. They have wider and deeper IT infrastructure skills than the Trust.
The project
Having merged the administration of the two Community Health and Social Care organisations into one central team, John Jones has decided that he now wants to make advances in the provision of more effective care to his client base.
He has enthusiastically led the Trust in active participation in several EU organised pan¬European matched¬funded R & D projects exploring the benefits of multi¬disciplinary care teams based on patient¬centred IT systems with composite care plans.
He now wishes to implement this strategy right across the Trust and has motivated many staff within the Trust with his vision of the future comprising teams of staff drawn from several disciplines developing an integrated care plan round the needs of their patient/client and working in an information sharing environment to achieve better co-ordination of care delivery and thereby hopefully faster recovery of the patient or at least a more comfortable supported existence at home. As always in healthcare, all staff within the Trust are already working to the limits of their available time. This project involves further changes to the organisation, ways of working and the provision of a comprehensive integrated IT system.
In one of the European projects, some good R & D work was done on a pilot project within the Trust by a successful, but small, niche software company, XYZ MediTech Ltd. who specialise in Mental Healthcare IT systems. They are very keen to develop a software package for a much wider health and social care market and see this leading edge project to be an excellent opportunity to bypass existing Healthcare and Social Care software suppliers and establish a market lead.
Against the advice of the Regional Office’s IT Officer, John Jones has succeeded in obtaining approval from the Minister of Health in the Government to bypass normal procurement procedures and to create a fixed price contract containing stiff penalty clauses for late delivery with XYZ MediTech Ltd., who tendered against a well-structured but high level (bullet¬point style) Requirements Specification written jointly by staff from the Trust and the Regional Office. The Regional IT Officer was concerned about the financial capacity of XYZ MediTech Ltd. to develop such a large software package.
The Trust’s team involved in the Requirements Specification comprised the Trust’s IT Manager and IT Systems Manager and four managers seconded from the District Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Child Protection and Mental Social Work teams respectively who were chosen on the basis of their reputation for being innovative in their thinking and supportive of the overall multi¬disciplinary team concept. The Requirements Specification Team Leader was a senior Systems Consultant, James Saunders, who was seconded from the Regional IT team for the purpose. The Requirements Specification comprised an overall vision of the future written by John Jones and up to two pages of bullet¬points for each Care Discipline identifying their particular process and information needs. An extract from the Requirements Specification is provided in the Appendix.
All of the Trust’s Directors are in agreement with John Jones’ vision of the future but have targets to meet in the short¬term and huge organisations to run. No plans currently exist of how the care staff will be re¬organised into the multi¬disciplinary teams.
If the project is successful the Region intends to implement the same re-¬organisation everywhere and the Minister of Health will take the same approach right across the country. Both the Region and the Ministry want to monitor progress.
Dr. Southgate has been made responsible for driving the whole project and has recruited you as Project Manager reporting to her, to take day¬-to¬day responsibility. The goals have been set by John Jones, the Regional Director and the Minister of Health of a full live pilot implementation starting in 2 years with completion of the whole project within 5 years. No detailed plans exist for how these goals might be achieved.

Appendix: Example page from the South Carigcastle Requirements Specification
Ref    Function Name    Criteria
3    Production of Treatment/Care Plans
3.1    Access to Assessment information    The software will provide easy access to Assessment information and Assessment summaries both for individual staff members and, where appropriate, other members of the team.
3.2    Access to history    The software will provide access to historic Assessments and Treatment/Care Plans.
3.3    Access to all records    The software will provide seamless access to all the required records on the software irrespective of the discipline.
3.4    Links to Episode of Care    The software will automatically link the
Treatment/Care Plan to the appropriate Episode of Care.
3.5    Development of Uni and Multi disciplinary plans    The software will support the development of both ‘Uni’ and ‘Multi’ disciplinary Treatment/Care Plans.
3.6    Record goals and objectives    The software will record goals and objectives and allow for time scales and anticipated outcomes in coded form for subsequent analysis.
3.7    Review date assignment    The software will assist the User assigning review dates.
3.8    Highlight reviews    The software will automatically highlight imminent or late reviews.
3.9    Record of unsatisfied demand    The software will facilitate the recording of the reasons for unsatisfied demand.
3.10    Record reason for Care/Service    The software will record the primary reason for Care/Service delivery.
3.11    Library of standardised plans    The software will contain a library of standardised Treatment/Care/Service Plans which can be tailored to individual needs.
3.12    Updating plans    The software will allow the facility to update or add to Treatment/Care Plans and enable staff to record manually the date of any changes made.
The software will facilitate the production of updated Treatment/Care Plan based on earlier versions.
3.13    Correction of content    It will be possible to ‘correct’ the content of a Treatment/Care Plan.

QUESTIONS

The case study indicates that you have been appointed to be the project manager for this project, reporting to Dr Southgate.
1.    What do you believe to be the main management issues associated with the various aspects of this project? Who would you expect to be represented on the Project Board and how would you organize your management team?
(30 marks)
2.    Identify and analyse the main risks associated with the project. What actions would you take to avoid or mitigate the effect of the risks?
(40 marks)

3.    Devise and implement a project management plan to include the following:
•    Stakeholder Analysis Communication Strategy            (20 marks)