220 research outputs found

    Do national resources have to be centrally managed? Vested interests and institutional reform in Norwegian fisheries governance

    Get PDF
    Corporatism -with its privileged access, restricted participation and centralized structures - has a long history in Norwegian fisheries governance. Co-management – understood as a decentralized, bottom-up and more inclusive form of fisheries governance - has not been considered a relevant alternative.. Why does corporatism still prevail in a context where stakeholder status in fisheries governance globally – both in principle and practice - has been awarded environmental organizations, municipal authorities and even consumer advocacy groups? Why then have alternatives to the corporatist system of centralized consultation and state governance never been seriously considered in Norway, in spite of the growing emphasis on fish as a public resource and fisheries management as human intervention in geographically confined and complex ecosystems? We suggest that thismay have to do with the fundamental assumptions behind Norwegian fisheries governance that since fish is a national resource, it must be centrally managed. We argue that this is an assumption that may be contested

    Tactile massage and hypnosis as a health promotion for nurses in emergency care-a qualitative study

    Get PDF
    <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This study explores nursing personnel's experiences and perceptions of receiving tactile massage and hypnosis during a personnel health promotion project. Nursing in a short term emergency ward environment can be emotionally and physically exhausting due to the stressful work environment and the high dependency patient care. A health promotion project integrating tactile massage and hypnosis with conventional physical activities was therefore introduced for nursing personnel working in this setting at a large university hospital in Sweden.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Four semi-structured focus group discussions were conducted with volunteer nursing personnel participants after the health promotion project had been completed. There were 16 participants in the focus groups and there were 57 in the health promotion intervention. The discussions were transcribed verbatim and analysed with qualitative content analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The findings indicated that tactile massage and hypnosis may contribute to reduced levels of stress and pain and increase work ability for some nursing personnel. The sense of well-being obtained in relation to health promotion intervention with tactile massage and hypnosis seemed to have positive implications for both work and leisure. Self-awareness, contentment and self-control may be contributing factors related to engaging in tactile massage and hypnosis that might help nursing personnel understand their patients and colleagues and helped them deal with difficult situations that occurred during their working hours.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The findings indicate that the integration of tactile massage and hypnosis in personnel health promotion may be valuable stress management options in addition to conventional physical activities.</p

    Social meanings and understandings in patient-nurse interaction in the community practice setting: a grounded theory study

    Get PDF
    Provisional: Background: The patient-nurse relationship is a traditional concern of healthcare research. However, patient-nurse interaction is under examined from a social perspective. Current research focuses mostly on specific contexts of care delivery and experience related to medical condition or illness, or to nurses' speciality. Consequentially, this paper is about the social meanings and understandings at play within situated patient-nurse interaction in the community practice setting in a transforming healthcare service. Methods: Grounded theory methodology was used and the research process was characterised by principles of theoretical sensitivity and constant comparative analysis. The field of study was four health centres in the community. The participants were patients and nurses representative of those attending or working in the health centres and meeting there by scheduled appointment. Data collection methods were observations, informal interviews and semi-structured interviews. Results: Key properties of 'Being a good patient, being a good nurse', 'Institutional experiences' and 'Expectations about healthcare' were associated with the construction of a category entitled 'Experience'. Those key properties captured that in an evolving healthcare environment individuals continually re-constructed their reality of being a patient or nurse as they endeavoured to perform appropriately; articulation of past and present healthcare experiences was important in that process. Modus operandi in role as patient was influenced by past experiences in healthcare and by those in non-healthcare institutions in terms of engagement and involvement (or not) in interaction. Patients' expectations about interaction in healthcare included some uncertainly as they strived to make sense of the changing roles and expertise of nurses and, differentiating between the roles and expertise of nurses and doctors. Conclusions: The importance of social meanings and understandings in patient-nurse interaction is not fully apparent to nurses, but important in the patient experience. Seeking understanding from a social perspective makes a contribution to enhancing knowledge about patient-nurse interaction with subsequent impact on practice, in particular the development of the patient-nurse relationship. The implications are that the meanings and understandings patients and nurses generate from experiences beyond and within their situated interaction are pivotal to the development of their relationship in the transforming community healthcare environment

    LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

    Get PDF
    A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

    Nurse-patient interaction and communication: a systematic literature review

    Full text link
    Aim: The purpose of this review is to describe the use and definitions of the concepts of nurse-patient interaction and nurse-patient communication in nursing literature. Furthermore, empirical findings of nurse-patient communication research will be presented, and applied theories will be shown. Method: An integrative literature search was executed. The total number of relevant citations found was 97. The search results were reviewed, and key points were extracted in a standardized form. Extracts were then qualitatively summarized according to relevant aspects and categories for the review. Results: The relation of interaction and communication is not clearly defined in nursing literature. Often the terms are used interchangeably or synonymously, and a clear theoretical definition is avoided or rather implicit. Symbolic interactionism and classic sender-receiver models were by far the most referred to models. Compared to the use of theories of adjacent sciences, the use of original nursing theories related to communication is rather infrequent. The articles that try to clarify the relation of both concepts see communication as a special or subtype of interaction. Conclusion: The included citations all conclude that communication skills can be learned to a certain degree. Involvement of patients and their role in communication often is neglected by authors. Considering the mutual nature of communication, patients’ share in conversation should be taken more into consideration than it has been until now. Nursing science has to integrate its own theories of nursing care with theories of communication and interaction from other scientific disciplines like sociology

    Anthropogenically-mediated density dependence in a declining farmland bird

    Get PDF
    Land management intrinsically influences the distribution of animals and can consequently alter the potential for density-dependent processes to act within populations. For declining species, high densities of breeding territories are typically considered to represent productive populations. However, as density-dependent effects of food limitation or predator pressure may occur (especially when species are dependent upon separate nesting and foraging habitats), high territory density may limit per-capita productivity. Here, we use a declining but widespread European farmland bird, the yellowhammer Emberiza citrinella L., as a model system to test whether higher territory densities result in lower fledging success, parental provisioning rates or nestling growth rates compared to lower densities. Organic landscapes held higher territory densities, but nests on organic farms fledged fewer nestlings, translating to a 5 times higher rate of population shrinkage on organic farms compared to conventional. In addition, when parental provisioning behaviour was not restricted by predation risk (i.e. at times of low corvid activity), nestling provisioning rates were higher at lower territory densities, resulting in a much greater increase in nestling mass in low density areas, suggesting that food limitation occurred at high densities. These findings in turn suggest an ecological trap, whereby preferred nesting habitat does not provide sufficient food for rearing nestlings at high population density, creating a population sink. Habitat management for farmland birds should focus not simply on creating a high nesting density, but also on ensuring heterogeneous habitats to provide food resources in close proximity to nesting birds, even if this occurs through potentially restricting overall nest density but increasing population-level breeding success

    LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

    Get PDF
    (Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg2^2 field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5σ\sigma point-source depth in a single visit in rr will be 24.5\sim 24.5 (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg2^2 with δ<+34.5\delta<+34.5^\circ, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, ugrizyugrizy, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg2^2 region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to r27.5r\sim27.5. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

    Blood Viscosity and Hematocrit as Risk Factors for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus: The Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study

    Get PDF
    Several lines of evidence support the notion that elevated blood viscosity may predispose to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus by limiting delivery of glucose, insulin, and oxygen to metabolically active tissues. To test this hypothesis, the authors analyzed longitudinal data on 12,881 initially nondiabetic adults, aged 45–64 years, who were participants in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study (1987–1998). Whole blood viscosity was estimated by using a validated formula based on hematocrit and total plasma proteins at baseline. At baseline, estimated blood viscosity was independently associated with several features of the metabolic syndrome. In models adjusted simultaneously for known predictors of diabetes, estimated whole blood viscosity and hematocrit predicted incident type 2 diabetes mellitus in a graded fashion (Ptrend (linear) < 0.001): Compared with their counterparts in the lowest quartiles, adults in the highest quartile of blood viscosity (hazard ratio = 1.68, 95% confidence interval: 1.53, 1.84) and hematocrit (hazard ratio = 1.63, 95% confidence interval: 1.49, 1.79) were over 60% more likely to develop diabetes. Therefore, elevated blood viscosity and hematocrit deserve attention as emerging risk factors for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus
    corecore