Issue 9 (PDF 1.26 mb) - Bournemouth University

Introducing
the new Beacon
magazine
It is with pleasure that I welcome you to the new-look
Beacon, an important publication for the Institute of Health
and Community Studies (IHCS) at Bournemouth University,
as it helps to share our work with partners across a range of
organisations in health and social care.
Dr B. Gail Thomas
Dean
IHCS
This is an exciting time for BU, with the
corporate plan now being embedded into
Schools and Professional Services as we
take forward the vision of a scholarly and
internationally renowned university.
The appointment of a new Vice-Chancellor,
Professor Paul Curran, in 2005 along with
two new Pro-Vice-Chancellors, Professors
Nick Curran and Rosemary Pope in 2006,
has provided an opportunity to re-evaluate
our contribution and re-focus our energies.
I joined IHCS in September 2006 and this
is the first edition of The Beacon that I
have been involved in. We have made
some changes and would be very pleased
to receive feedback on it from our readers
(please see the back cover for
contact details).
At a graduation I attended some years ago
at Brunel University, the Chancellor of the
day said that the purpose of a university
is the ‘generation, preservation and
dissemination of knowledge’. This seems
to encapsulate our aims well. Academics
in universities generate knowledge through
research and in supporting practice
development; we help to build new ideas
and test them out to ensure we extend into
new frontiers and have a solid evidence
base. We preserve this knowledge in
our libraries, which house dissertations,
theses and a variety of written works. We
disseminate what we have learned in our
teaching, through knowledge transfer,
conference presentations, books, journal
articles and publications like this one.
If you have read The Beacon before, you
will see some differences in this edition.
As in the past, we want to use it as a
method of communicating with external
partners, sharing the breadth of our
activities and achievements. In addition,
we would like to start to disseminate some
of our scholarly work so there is now a
section presenting articles, for those who
are interested in more specific insight into
our research and practice developments.
The Beacon has become a tool for
embodying the three purposes of our
university as we move forward with a new
strategy; we hope you find it interesting,
stimulating and informative.
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