Awareness about Workplace Harassment among Female Nursing Students and Nursing Staff of a Teaching Hospital in Lahore

Background: Harassment of working women is a common social and human rights problem and healthcare settings are no exception. This unacceptable situation has many avoidable determinants that need preventive measures to ensure, safe and secure working environment for nurses. Objectives: To assess the knowledge and understanding among female nursing students and nursing staff about workplace harassment in a tertiary healthcare facility. Methods: It was a cross-sectional study conducted at Tertiary care hospital Lahore from July to September 2018. Convenient sampling technique was used to collect data. Verbal informed consent of voluntary participants was taken. Anonymity and confidentiality was assured. SPSS version 21 was used for data analysis. The participants (n=80) comprised of senior female nurses students (62.5%) and senior nursing staff (37.5%), aged 18 to 46 years. Results: Awareness about common harassment forms was adequate (81.3%). Adverse effects included mental health problems (83.8%) and low self-esteem (72.5%). A large percentage of nurses (62.5%) intended to report such personal incident to institutional head and 72.5% were willing to accompany victims for such reporting. 77.5% desired arranging informative sessions and holding counseling for victims (78.8%) at workplace. Only 22.5% had vague idea about official protective legal frameworks. Conclusions: Workplace harassment of female workers is quite prevalent but under-reported phenomena in Pakistan. All organizations and institutions must have a harassment policy to protect the females.  

Pedagogical Strategies Used by El Teachers in Developing Reading Skills: A Comparative Study of Private and Public Middle School Systems in Skardu City

No one can deny the importance of reading skills especially for the students. There is a strong link between students’ performance and the pedagogical strategies of EL Teachers. Research claims that different pedagogical strategies used by teachers help students in developing their reading skills. This study aimed to identify and compare the pedagogical strategies used by ELTs of both public and private schools at Middle level (VI- VIII) for developing students’ ‘reading skills’ in Skardu City. For this purpose, a cross-sectional survey design (descriptive) was employed to collect data from all middle level schools (n=69 out of 72) of Skardu City. The sample of 100 teachers from both public (n=50) and private schools (n=50) teachers were observed through Observation Scale for Reading Lesson (OSRL) where a maximum of three teachers from each school participated. The results show that more than 50% of the ELTs use some pedagogical strategies for developing reading skills. Specifically, three strategies were used by more than 80% of the teachers. The results illustrate that most of the teachers mainly focus on oral fluency, explanation of the text, model and feedback during classroom tasks besides few comprehension and assessment strategies for developing reading skills. While majority of the teachers do not use some important strategies of comprehension, prediction, inferring the vocabulary from the text, silent reading and connection of reading with written strategies. This study further reveals that participant teachers of both public and private schools use more or less similar pedagogical strategies with some variation for developing the reading skills. However, private school teachers have shown better performance as compared to their public counterparts particularly in using six strategies where significant differences were also found. To sum up this study highlighted that there is a dearth of using relevant pedagogical strategies to achieve the standards, benchmarks and SLOs of NCEL (2006). It is strongly recommended that purposeful training programmes with proper follow up should be organized for altering the beliefs and polishing teachers’ professional competency for developing reading skills of the students.