Background: Nurses and nursing students experienced an emotional burden while working during the COVID-19 outbreak. During the COVID-19 outbreak three questions for nurses working under these extreme circumstances were formulated: 1. What today’s events do you remember? 2. How do you feel (physically and mentally)? 3. Do you have enough support? The purpose of this study was to obtain insight into whether nurses and nursing students perceive that the use of the three-questions-method contributes to effective coping with the emotional burden during the COVID-19 outbreak. Methods: Focus group interviews were held with hospital nurses (n = 11) and nursing students with internships in mental health care (n = 2), hospital (n = 9), and homecare/nursing home care (n = 3) in September 2020 followed by twenty semi-structured interviews one year later. Results: Almost all nurses and nursing students named factors that contributed to the emotional burden: fear, powerlessness, frustration, lack of knowledge about COVID-19, and pressure to pass the internship. Participants indicated that using the three-questions-method can help to effectively cope with the emotional burden during and after the COVID-19 outbreak. Conclusions: Using the three-questions-method offers added value in coping with emotional burden and can be used in education as well as in practice.
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Positioning paper bij de inauguratie van Vincent Voet als lector Circular Plastics.
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This study analyze data from three national contexts in which teachers worked with the same teaching materials and inquiry classroom activities, investigating teachers’ use of strategies to promote interaction and scaffolding when participating in a professional development program. The data material is collected from three case studies from the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, respectively. Each case is from a teaching unit about green plants and seed sprouting. In one lesson in this unit, students were involved in planning an experiment with sprouting seeds, and this (similar) lesson was videotaped in three national settings. The main research question is, as follows: How do primary teachers use questions to scaffold conceptual understanding and language use in inquiry science activities? The data analysis shows that teachers ask different kind of questions such as open, closed, influencing and orienting questions. The open, orienting questions induce students to generate their own ideas, while closed orienting and influencing questions often scaffold language and content-specific meaning-making. However, both open, closed, orienting and influencing questions can scaffold student language and conceptual understanding. Often, teacher questions scaffold both language content-specific meaning-making at the same time. The study shows the subtle mechanisms through which teachers can use questions to scaffold student science literacy and thereby including them in classroom interaction.
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By transitioning from a fossil-based economy to a circular and bio-based economy, the industry has an opportunity to reduce its overall CO2 emission. Necessary conditions for effective and significant reductions of CO2-emissions are that effective processing routes are developed that make the available carbon in the renewable sources accessible at an acceptable price and in process chains that produce valuable products that may replace fossil based products. To match the growing industrial carbon demand with sufficient carbon sources, all available circular, and renewable feedstock sources must be considered. A major challenge for greening chemistry is to find suitable sustainable carbon that is not fossil (petroleum, natural gas, coal), but also does not compete with the food or feed demand. Therefore, in this proposal, we omit the use of first generation substrates such as sugary crops (sugar beets), or starch-containing biomasses (maize, cereals).
About 35-40 kton used mattresses available yearly for the recycling only in the Netherlands. Mattresses that are offered at recycling companies, municipal yards and retailers often find their way to incinerators. However, several fraction components of used mattresses can be reused/resale in a useful manner. One of the mattress fractions is textile cover with residue of Polyurethane (PU) foam. Effective removal of PU foam would enable further reuse of textile materials. Use of harsh chemicals/ thermo-, photo-, oxidative, processes including hydrolysis, aminolysis, phosphorolysis, glycolysis etc [1,2] for PU foam degradation is not a good solution, since it will cause non-specific damage to textiles and other parts, making recycle/ reuse difficult. Therefore, Mattress Recycling Europe BV (MRE) is looking for an eco-friendly mild process for selective degradation of PU foam component. PU is a mixed polymer; therefore, it is important to establish the physio-chemical nature of PU before identifying suitable and sustainable degradation route. The proposed solution is selective degradation of PU polymer using biotechnology. Enzymatic bio-catalysis enables a targeted, specific reaction at mild process conditions (pH, temperature) without harming other components in the process. Primarily hydrolase class of enzymes is assumed to be among the most effective options for the proposed degradation of PU foam residue [3,4]. From previous research, adding mechanical shear provides a synergistic effect for enzyme catalysed reaction [5-7]. Therefore, within the scope of this exploratory practice-oriented project, technical feasibility of bio-catalyst and shear (including well established PU degradation techniques) towards the selective degradation of PU foam residue attached to textile part from used mattresses will be explored together with cost estimation of the overall process and re-usability of enzymes using suitable immobilisation technique, addressing an urgent industrial need in the field of green chemistry.
