The story of Emily

This case study describes Bluewater Health’s quest to weave the philosophy and practice of patient and family-centered care from the boardroom to the bedside by introducing Emily. Emily’s image is a composite of photographs of staff, physicians, volunteers, patients and families exemplifying that each has a role in Emily’s care. Emily represents every patient and family of the past, present, and future. Emily’s journey started with the launch of Bluewater Health‘s 2013-2015 strategic plan and moved throughout the organization as patient councils were established and the organization embedded three foundational patient and family-centered RNAO Best Practice Guidelines into daily practice with the support of over 100 best practice champions. The successful implementation of RNAO’s best practice guidelines earned Bluewater Health designation as a Best Practice Spotlight Organization. The organization took a risk in introducing the notion of Emily knowing that Emily could become a cliché. No one was prepared for what has come to be known as “the Emily effect.” Emily’s effect is now being realized in increased patient satisfaction and improved employee engagement scores helping to deliver on our Mission, We create exemplary healthcare experiences for patients and families every time. Bluewater Health is a fully accredited, 326-bed community hospital that cares for the residents of Sarnia-Lambton, Ontario

Mitochondrial dynamics–fusion, fission, movement, and mitophagy–in neurodegenerative diseases

Neurons are metabolically active cells with high energy demands at locations distant from the cell body. As a result, these cells are particularly dependent on mitochondrial function, as reflected by the observation that diseases of mitochondrial dysfunction often have a neurodegenerative component. Recent discoveries have highlighted that neurons are reliant particularly on the dynamic properties of mitochondria. Mitochondria are dynamic organelles by several criteria. They engage in repeated cycles of fusion and fission, which serve to intermix the lipids and contents of a population of mitochondria. In addition, mitochondria are actively recruited to subcellular sites, such as the axonal and dendritic processes of neurons. Finally, the quality of a mitochondrial population is maintained through mitophagy, a form of autophagy in which defective mitochondria are selectively degraded. We review the general features of mitochondrial dynamics, incorporating recent findings on mitochondrial fusion, fission, transport and mitophagy. Defects in these key features are associated with neurodegenerative disease. Charcot-Marie-Tooth type 2A, a peripheral neuropathy, and dominant optic atrophy, an inherited optic neuropathy, result from a primary deficiency of mitochondrial fusion. Moreover, several major neurodegenerative diseases—including Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease—involve disruption of mitochondrial dynamics. Remarkably, in several disease models, the manipulation of mitochondrial fusion or fission can partially rescue disease phenotypes. We review how mitochondrial dynamics is altered in these neurodegenerative diseases and discuss the reciprocal interactions between mitochondrial fusion, fission, transport and mitophagy

On dynamical systems perturbed by a null-recurrent motion: the general case

We consider a perturbed ordinary differential equation where the perturbation is only significant when a one-dimensional null recurrent diffusion is close to zero. We investigate the first order correction to the unperturbed system and prove a central limit theorem type result, i.e., that the normalized deviation process converges in law in the space of continuous functions to a limit process which we identify. We show that this limit process has a component which only moves when the limit of the null-recurrent fast motion equals zero. The set of these times forms a zero-measure Cantor set and therefore the limiting process cannot be described by a standard SDE. We characterize this process by its infinitesimal generator (with appropriate boundary conditions) and we also characterize the process as the weak solution of an SDE that depends on the local time of the fast motion process. We also investigate the long time behavior of such a system when the unperturbed motion is trivial. In this case, we show that the long-time limit is constant on a set of full Lebesgue measure with probability 1, but it has nontrivial drift and diffusion components that move only when the fast motion equals zero.The authors are grateful to D. Dolgopyat for introducing them to the problem and to L. Koralov and D. Dolgopyat for their helpful suggestions during invaluable discussions and for reading the manuscript. We also thank P.E. Jabin for a discussion on Section 7. While working on the paper, Z. Pajor-Gyulai was partially supported by the NSF Grant Numbers 1309084 and DMS1101635. M. Salins was partially supported by the NSF Grant Number 1407615. The authors are also grateful for the anonymous referee for pointing out numerous typos and giving many suggestions, in particularly pointing us to several relevant papers that greatly improved the quality of the paper. (1309084 - NSF; DMS1101635 - NSF; 1407615 - NSF)Accepted manuscrip

Event extraction of bacteria biotopes: a knowledge-intensive NLP-based approach

International audienceBackground: Bacteria biotopes cover a wide range of diverse habitats including animal and plant hosts, natural, medical and industrial environments. The high volume of publications in the microbiology domain provides a rich source of up-to-date information on bacteria biotopes. This information, as found in scientific articles, is expressed in natural language and is rarely available in a structured format, such as a database. This information is of great importance for fundamental research and microbiology applications (e.g., medicine, agronomy, food, bioenergy). The automatic extraction of this information from texts will provide a great benefit to the field

NMR Study of Disordered Inclusions in the Quenched Solid Helium

Phase structure of rapidly quenched solid helium samples is studied by the NMR technique. The pulse NMR method is used for measurements of spin-lattice $T_1$ and spin-spin $T_2$ relaxation times and spin diffusion coefficient $D$ for all coexisting phases. It was found that quenched samples are two-phase systems consisting of the hcp matrix and some inclusions which are characterized by $D$ and $T_2$ values close to those in liquid phase. Such liquid-like inclusions undergo a spontaneous transition to a new state with anomalously short $T_2$ times. It is found that inclusions observed in both the states disappear on careful annealing near the melting curve. It is assumed that the liquid-like inclusions transform into a new state - a glass or a crystal with a large number of dislocations. These disordered inclusions may be responsible for the anomalous phenomena observed in supersolid region.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Three-dimensional stochastic modeling of radiation belts in adiabatic invariant coordinates

A 3-D model for solving the radiation belt diffusion equation in adiabatic invariant coordinates has been developed and tested. The model, named REM (for Radbelt Electron Model), obtains a probabilistic solution by solving a set of Itô stochastic differential equations that are mathematically equivalent to the diffusion equation. This method is capable of solving diffusion equations with a full 3-D diffusion tensor, including the radial-local cross diffusion components. The correct form of the boundary condition at equatorial pitch-angle α0 = 90° is also derived. The model is applied to a simulation of the October 2002 storm event. At α0 near 90°, our results are quantitatively consistent with GPS observations of phase-space density (PSD) increases, suggesting dominance of radial diffusion; at smaller α0, the observed PSD increases are overestimated by the model, possibly due to the α0-independent radial diffusion coefficients, or to insufficientelectron loss in the model, or both. Statistical analysis of the stochastic processes provides further insights into the diffusion processes, showing distinctive electron source distributions with and without local acceleration