Understanding the Scale and Nature of Parent/Guardian Telephone Calls to a Tertiary Children’s Cardiac Centre: A Service Evaluation

Heart defects are the second most common congenital anomaly in babies born in the UK and standards state families should have access to a children’s cardiac nurse specialist telephone advice service. However, there is little published information to describe the nature of calls and the workload associated with telephone support. We conducted a prospective service evaluation of telephone calls received at one UK specialist children’s cardiac surgical center from parents/carers (April–June 2019). All inpatient cardiac teams (cardiology secretaries, inpatient cardiac wards, outpatient department and Clinical Nurse Specialist team) were asked to record calls on a purpose-designed template. This included recording of call duration and reason (from pre-defined categories), with the aim to identify the volume and nature of phone calls. Actions and time taken to resolve issues were not recorded. Data was entered into Excel and analyzed using descriptive statistics. In a seven-week period, 204 telephone calls were received; 41% (n = 83) to the clinical nurse specialist team, 25% (n = 51) to medical secretaries, 20% (n = 42) to cardiac ward staff and 14% (n = 28) to the cardiac outpatient department. The mean length of calls was 6.08 mins (SD 5.07 mins). Across all groups phone call duration totaled 20.8 hours. Sixty-two calls (31% of all calls) reflected 70 concerns/queries about a current health issue. The most common reasons included respiratory (n = 13), heart rate or rhythm (n = 12) and chest pain/pallor (n = 11). Sixty-five calls (32% of all calls) related to issues surrounding medications, with 23% (n = 15) related to dose queries and 49% (n = 32) related to repeat prescription requests or challenges obtaining prescriptions. The results demonstrated a high telephone support need for current health issues or medication queries which required timely assessment and support from health care professionals working across cardiac services. Further research is required to identify the time implications of dealing with phone calls and interventions to support parent/guardian assessment and communication about their concerns and medication management

Accountability, scapegoating and encouraging rebellious joys: Teaching in England

This article suggests that the rise that we see in referrals for children seen as having specific educational needs in England is the inevitable outcome of a system with ever rising expectations and accountability. It suggests two key reasons for this. The first is that the increased pressures upon teachers lead to them needing a ‘scapegoat’ to point the finger at when they fail to meet those unreasonable expectations. The child being ‘unable to perform’ is the last get out clause available to them. The second is that the toxicity created by ever mounting pressures placed upon teachers is, inevitably, impacting significantly upon teacher wellbeing. Tired, fraught and harried teachers are not in a position to offer a safe and secure learning environment for the children that they teach. The optimal conditions for the successful performance of both teacher and child, those based upon potential, unconditional positive regard, and care, are totally eroded from the heart of education. Children are not failing, the system is failing them. In light of this, this article encourages all educators to rebelliously see the positive potential of all children that they work with, and to be strengthened by those ‘moments of light’ that can be celebrated in even the smallest steps taken towards positive development

Tactical behaviors in men’s and women’s middle-distance global championship track finals

Purpose: To analyze tactical behaviors associated with performance in track middle- distance global championship finals. Methods: Finalists’ season-best (SB), finishing race time (RT), 100m section times, and intermediate positions were obtained from 800-m and 1500-m men’s and women’s finals in two Olympic Games and five World Championships. Differences between medalists (M), fourth to eighth (T8), and ninth to 12th/13th (T12) ranked finalists in relative performance (relative to SB), RT and section times were determined. Pearson correlations between intermediate position and section speed with final position, and probability of winning a medal at each race point were calculated. Results: A very high correlation was found between intermediate and final position at first 100m in the women’s 800-m (r = 0.84;p = 0.008), which was maintained throughout the race. M were relatively faster than T8 in men’s and women’s 800-m finals (p = 0.006;d = 0.87, and p = 0.039;d = 0.59, respectively). Differences in relative performance between groups in 1500-m finals appeared at the end of the race, although they arose earlier in women’s races. Probability of winning a medal decreased with lower intermediate positions, especially in the latest race stages. Conclusions: A high intermediate position as well as the ability to run fast in the latest race stages seem critical to medaling in track middle-distance global championship finals. The abilities to adopt leading positions for the whole 800-m event, and to generate an endspurt, relatively faster than the rest of competitors, in the 1500-m event, are critical

Multi-level feature fusion networks for smoke recognition in remote sensing imagery

Smoke is a critical indicator of forest fires, often detectable before flames ignite. Accurate smoke identification in remote sensing images is vital for effective forest fire monitoring within Internet of Things (IoT) systems. However, existing detection methods frequently falter in complex real-world scenarios, where variable smoke shapes and sizes, intricate backgrounds, and smoke-like phenomena (e.g., clouds and haze) lead to missed detections and false alarms. To address these challenges, we propose the Multi-level Feature Fusion Network (MFFNet), a novel framework grounded in contrastive learning. MFFNet begins by extracting multi-scale features from remote sensing images using a pre-trained ConvNeXt model, capturing information across different levels of granularity to accommodate variations in smoke appearance. The Attention Feature Enhancement Module further refines these multi-scale features, enhancing fine-grained, discriminative attributes relevant to smoke detection. Subsequently, the Bilinear Feature Fusion Module combines these enriched features, effectively reducing background interference and improving the model’s ability to distinguish smoke from visually similar phenomena. Finally, contrastive feature learning is employed to improve robustness against intra-class variations by focusing on unique regions within the smoke patterns. Evaluated on the benchmark dataset USTC_SmokeRS, MFFNet achieves an accuracy of 98.87%. Additionally, our model demonstrates a detection rate of 94.54% on the extended E_SmokeRS dataset, with a low false alarm rate of 3.30%. These results highlight the effectiveness of MFFNet in recognizing smoke in remote sensing images, surpassing existing methodologies. The code is accessible at https://github.com/WangYuPeng1/MFFNet

Exploring the secret garden of further education professional development: reflecting on the researcher’s honesties and opening the honesty box

This article engages in an examination of reflecting upon a researcher’s honesties within the context of conducting an Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The purpose of this article is to outline how a researcher’s reflexivity and awareness of emotions is central to IPA research which investigates Further Education practitioners’ lived experiences of the Advanced Teacher Status (ATS), and its potential impact upon practitioners’ professional identity and agency

Maddi, Aaron, Steve, Hollie - Autistic Joy: A&E Accessibility and Environment Podcast

Writer and producer Maddi Crease, Director Aaron Shrimpton, Sound designer Steve Pretty, and choreographer Hollie Dee, discuss their film Autistic Joy

Service Innovation Implementation in the Hospitality Industry

The pursuit of growth, productivity and competitive advantage have become a paramount concern for many hospitality companies. Companies choose different organic and inorganic strategies to expand their market share or remain competitive in a highly complex business environment. Innovation plays a crucial role in implementing growth strategy and achieving companies’ goals. Traditionally, approaches to innovation were focused on products, although the services sector has made a great contribution to global economic growth more recently. Despite this contribution, how service innovation is implemented in the services sector is captured in a limited way. This chapter discusses the concept of innovation, in particular in services companies, and suggests approaches to service innovation implementation for achieving expansion and competitiveness in the hospitality industry through the lens of service-dominant logic and value co-creation

Petra Kuppers - Crip/Mad Archive Dances: A&E Accessibility and Environment Podcast

Petra Kuppers talks about her film Crip/Mad Archive Dances which received a special mention in the first A&E Accessibility and Environment Film Festival

Comparative Analysis of Protein Extraction Protocols for Olive Leaf Proteomics: Insights into Differential Protein Abundance and Isoelectric Point Distribution

Plant proteomics studies face two major challenges: limited databases due to the need for sequenced genomes and the difficulty in obtaining high-quality protein extracts. Olive (Olea europaea), a key species in Mediterranean flora known for its rich biochemical content, presents additional complexity due to its lipidic structure and high levels of inhibitory compounds that hinder protein extraction. Consequently, various studies have focused on optimizing the protein extraction methods for olives. While different extraction protocols exist for leaf proteome analysis, their compatibility with LC–MS/MS has been scarcely studied. This work was carried out to compare three protein extraction protocols for LC–MS/MS analysis using olive (O. europaea L) leaf tissue. Denaturing SDS (Method A), physiological CHAPS (Method B), and phenolic TCA/acetone (Method C) were evaluated with LC–MS/MS data. The quantitative comparisons of the three extraction methods revealed that Protocol A gave the greatest yields. According to the results obtained, Protocol A uniquely identified 77 proteins, Protocol B identified 10 unique proteins, and Protocol C identified 19 unique proteins. Similarly, the peptide sequence analysis showed that Protocol A uniquely identified 208 peptide sequences, Protocol B identified 29, and Protocol C identified 36. Moreover, reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) results suggest that Method A may be more efficient in removing and retaining hydrophobic proteins. Overall, Protocol A demonstrated greater sensitivity, efficiency, and reproducibility in LC–MS/MS analysis