Proceedings of the Lifesaving Foundation’s 2010 Research Conference & Ireland Medal Ceremony

The Lifesaving Foundation Ltd (2010) These Proceedings are freely available in the public domain for distribution to anyone involved and interested in decreasing drowning deaths around the world. Please share this piece of information with your partners and associates giving credit to the authors

Public Provision and Protection of Natural Resources: Groundwater Irrigation in Rural India

This paper examines the trade-off between resource intensive development and preservation of natural resources in the context of groundwater. Use of public schemes that expand groundwater irrigation to mitigate poverty is challenged as being unsustainable, especially when water tables around the world are rapidly depleting. This paper evaluates the effects one such scheme on groundwater use in northern India with the intent to determine if these schemes accelerate water depletion. On the contrary, I find that the program decreased total use of groundwater. I propose a mechanism that explains these findings, and test it using village-level longitudinal census data on wells and aquifer depth. The model predicts that public provision has a heterogeneous impact on the aquifers and it leads to sustainable use, when the fixed costs for private well provision are high. Consistent with the predictions, I find that there is a significant jump in the water-saving effects of the scheme at the water table depth at which the fixed costs of water provision rise substantially due to the technological limitations of surface pumps.

Where Do People Drown? Encoding the Third Component of the 4W Model

When there is human activity in, above, or around an aquatic environment, a drowning incident may occur due to rescuer characteristics, casualty characteristics, location, and general circumstances (Avramidis, Butterly & Llewellyn, 2007). The aim of the current study was to identify locations where people drown. Qualitative content analysis was utilized to analyze drowning incident videos (n = 41), and semi-structured interviews were conducted of those involved in drowning incidents (n = 34). Drowning incidents may occur in any aquatic environment with a water depth that allows immersion or submersion, under a variety of environmental conditions where the ground in sloping, at any distance from safety, where anxiety is exists, in the absence or safety regulations, or when the law is breached

The Characterization of Effective Electromagnetic Fields on the Safety and Quality of Low-Moisture Foods (EFFS) - Prototype Device Development

Contamination of low-moisture foods including flour, wheat grain, baby formula, and more, have increasingly become a concern due to sanitizing challenges. While industrial food processors have long used RF heating to sanitize mass quantities, an equivalent consumer device is absent from the market today. The Characterization of Effective Electromagnetic Fields on the Safety and Quality of Low-Moisture Foods (EEFS) project is an interdisciplinary effort to develop an RF heating consumer device to sanitize low-moisture foods. A prototype device was designed to sanitize low-moisture food items using RF heating acceptable for commercial or consumer applications

Spartan Daily, May 12, 1937

Volume 25, Issue 132https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2616/thumbnail.jp

Purchasing in a complex humanitarian institution: the portuguese red cross

Choosing the purchasing strategy of an organization can be a complex process. Some organizations have rooted habits that are extremely difficult to change. The Portuguese Red Cross (PRC) is a highly diversified institution where each branch works independently. Currently, the PRC purchasing strategy is not well defined for delegations. After assessing the purchasing process, two different strategies were considered as possibilities for the future. However, it became clear that a full centralization would not be the ideal model due to many resistance factors. In the end, it seemed that the best purchasing approach for the PRC would be a hybird progressive partially centralized strategy

Modeling the workflow of one primary care physician-nurse team.

Primary care has been identified as a vital part of the healthcare system in the U.S., and one that operates in a challenging, unique environment. Primary care sees a wide variety of patients and is undergoing a series of major transformations simultaneously. As a result, primary care would greatly benefit from a systemic approach to the analysis of its workflows. Discrete-event simulation has been identified as a good tool to evaluate complex healthcare systems. The existing primary care DES models focus on the physician. Also, those models are limited in (a) their usefulness to produce generic models that can easily and quickly be customized and (b) the analysis of the specific tasks performed to treat a patient. Hence, a research idea was developed to address these limitations, which led to a progressive multi-part study developing the necessary components to model a primary clinic. The study was constructed to allow each progressive study to build on the previous. The first part of the study developed a new approach to address those limitations: modeling a primary care clinic from the viewpoint that the physician is the entity that moves through the system. This approach was implemented based on observational data and a standardized primary care physician task list using ARENA© simulation software. The completed model is evidence-based, with the simulation producing predictions and analysis associated with a given patient visit that has not happened by mimicking reality. The benefits of this type of flexible model are that it allows for analysis of any type of “cost” that can be quantified, and it can then be utilized for predicting and potentially subsequently reducing procedural errors and variation in order to increase operational efficiency. The second part of the study was to develop a standardized primary care nurse task list, which is needed given the current transformation of primary care from a doctor-based model to a team-based model. A comprehensive, validated list of tasks occurring during clinic visits was complied from a secondary data analysis. For this, primary care clinics in Wisconsin were selected from a pre-existing study based on 100% participation of the physician-nurse teams. The final task list had 18 major tasks and 174 second-level subtasks, with 103 additional third-level tasks. This task list, combined with the primary care physician task list, provides a tool set that facilitates clinics’ analysis of the workflow associated with a complete patient encounter. Finally, the third part of the study used observational data, the standardized primary care nurse task list, and a similar modeling methodology to the first part to develop a simulation model of the primary care nurse. The model was implemented using ARENA© simulation software. This model is flexible, resulting in an easily-customizable model, and robust in that it allows the analysis of any type of “cost” that can be quantified, such as time, physical or mental resources, money, et cetera. This can potentially be used to predict, and reduce, procedural errors and variation in response to changes to the workflows or environment; hence, the operational efficiency and medical accuracy can be more accurately evaluated