Health informatics education for clinicians and managers - What's holding up progress?

This paper reports outcomes of a national survey of health informatics (HI) education and training carried out in the UK. A questionnaire to elicit details of HI and IT skills teaching was derived from a national consensus document (Learning to Manage Health Information, LtMHI). Forms were sent to all pre-qualification medical and nursing schools and to a stratified sample of postgraduate and post-registration programmes. Three case studies were carried out in acute hospital trusts to gain insight into opportunities for continuing professional development in health informatics and IT. Our evidence suggests that in the UK, health informatics is not yet integrated into the clinical curriculum. Nearly all the pre-qualification courses made some provision for teaching IT skills. Nonetheless, many respondents felt that students did not receive sufficient training. There was considerable variation in the amount of HI teaching provided in the different educational sectors. The case studies suggested very little HI training was provided for clinical staff and take-up of provision was not monitored. A number of factors are holding up progress, the most important being a lack of staff with the knowledge and skills to provide academic leadership. The paper outlines some steps that need to be taken to ensure health informatics is embedded in all clinical curricula. © 2003 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved

Enabling Policy Environments for Co-operative Development: A Comparative Experience

This research project will identify effective tax policy models and strategies of policy advancement for the co-operative sector. The project will draw on a comparative analysis of tax models from Spain (Mondragon Co-op) and Italy (Emilia Romagna region) and will include a scan of tax policy and legislation regarding co-operatives in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and northern Ontario. The objective of this research is to analyze different tax policies that have played a key role in the development of the co-operative sector and in creating sector controlled, self-sustaining co-operative development and financing tools by exploring the possibilities of parlaying the research results from the international models into appropriate models in Canada, with specific consideration to the Manitoba context. This research will build on existing literature regarding tax models and policies, supports and barriers, and the various factors that contributed to the sustainability of co-operative development in various parts of the world. A review of the tax legislation in key tax systems (namely Spanish, Italian, and Canadian at the federal/provincial levels) will also be necessary

La terminología de la gestión financiera y empresarial (inglés-francés-español) al servicio de la práctica de la traducción especializada

En el presente artículo pretendemos ofrecer una recopilación terminológica y fraseológica, en forma de glosario trilingüe (inglésfrancésespañol), procedente del análisis de documentos especializados relacionados con la gestión económica y empresarial. En una segunda parte realizamos algunas reflexiones sobre la práctica de la traducción económica de inglés o francés a español en contexto académico y profesional.G.I. HUM 767 (ayudas a Grupos de Investigación de la Junta de Andalucía) / Editorial Comares (colección interlingua

Finite Element Modelling of Soft Contact Lenses on Eye

When fitting soft contact lenses, it is impossible to visualise the tear layer below the lens in white light. In addition, being permeable, soft lenses absorbs normal fluorescein and use of high molecular fluorescein is not sensitive enough to identify subtle changes in fit. This study provides a software tool based on a Finite Element Model of the human eye, developed over a period of more than 15 years at both Dundee University and Liverpool University, that can demonstrate the fit of a known contact lens design on a particular subject’s eye through computer simulation. Using this new technique, thickness maps for the tear layer under contact lenses can be created. These maps give important feedback to the contact lens fitting and design process and have the potential to enable the full customisation of contact lenses. In addition, the model itself can demonstrate how the lens settles onto the eye during the blink process, together with rebound from the corneal surface directly after the blink

Levelling the Eye to Provide a More Accurate Ocular Shape for Comparative Analysis and Contact Lens Fitting

Topography maps play an important, increasing role in contact lenses design and fitting, particularly for large diameter lenses. Whenever an eye is measured using a topography machine, the fixation point is required to be in the machine head, around 2 to 10 cm in front of the eye. This practice induces rotation of the eye which can result in tilted maps, affecting measurement accuracy. Additionally, this measurement is necessarily around the visual axis whereas the geometric axis is more important for ocular shape measurements. It is not a simple matter to compensate for this induced error, as the eye itself has few, if any, identifiable characteristics to facilitate correct orientation. This study developed methodologies to level the eye topography data around its geometrical axis, thus providing more accurate information regarding ocular shape

Effect of Correcting Non-Orthogonal Astigmatism in Corneas with Novel Optical System

For normal eyes, astigmatism is assumed to have orthogonal axes between its optical power meridians. Irregular (non-orthogonal) astigmatism is defined as having axes with less than 90° between them. The eye condition Keratoconus generally results in non-orthogonal (NO) astigmatism and this cannot be fully corrected by conventional orthogonal optics. Objects viewed by people with significant NO astigmatism can present as multiple images or appear severely ghosted or distorted. All ophthalmic spectacle lenses and toric contact lenses assume astigmatism has orthogonal axes, making it difficult to correct NO astigmatism optically. Additionally, topography machine software imposes orthognal axes on their power map outputs, so it is not possible to easily assess the extent of NO astigmatism present in any individual eye. An investigation was undertaken to attempt to correct NO astigmatism with an appropriate optical system and assess the ffect on viausl acuity. Raw data was taken from scanning topography machines and processed to detect the natural maximum and minimum power meridians of the anterior and posterior cornea. Axial and tangential maps were created as well as power maps achieved through Light Ray Tracing A means of creating spectacle trial lenses with NO power axes was developed and three sets made to use as refraction trial lenses. The axes of each set were orientated at 80°, 70° & 60° respectively and cyl powers -1.00DC to -6.00 DC in 1.00DC steps plus an additional -0.50DC lens. Three subjects were chosen to be refracted by these lenses: two with mild keratoconus and one with longstanding, non strabismic ambylopia. They were refracted with each set of lenses, using a standard LogMAR Chart. The chart was changed randomly in between testing each set. For each subject, the refraction starting point was taken from the orthogonal spectacle prescription. The subjects were refracted with NO cyls from each set of lenses and wre asked to locate the point of optimal acuity by rotating the lens. This was independently checked by the examiner. To ensure that the subject was not experiencing a placebo effect, the lenses were randomly “flipped” during the examination. Unlike conventional cyl lenses, which present the same power meridians whichever way the lens is presented to the eye, NO lenses will present meridians at different axes when flipped which should cause an obvious difference in VA

Back-translation for discovering distant protein homologies

Frameshift mutations in protein-coding DNA sequences produce a drastic change in the resulting protein sequence, which prevents classic protein alignment methods from revealing the proteins' common origin. Moreover, when a large number of substitutions are additionally involved in the divergence, the homology detection becomes difficult even at the DNA level. To cope with this situation, we propose a novel method to infer distant homology relations of two proteins, that accounts for frameshift and point mutations that may have affected the coding sequences. We design a dynamic programming alignment algorithm over memory-efficient graph representations of the complete set of putative DNA sequences of each protein, with the goal of determining the two putative DNA sequences which have the best scoring alignment under a powerful scoring system designed to reflect the most probable evolutionary process. This allows us to uncover evolutionary information that is not captured by traditional alignment methods, which is confirmed by biologically significant examples.Comment: The 9th International Workshop in Algorithms in Bioinformatics (WABI), Philadelphia : \'Etats-Unis d'Am\'erique (2009

Graphene electrodes for adaptive liquid crystal contact lenses

The superlatives of graphene cover a whole range of properties: electrical, chemical, mechanical, thermal and others. These special properties earn graphene a place in current or future applications. Here we demonstrate one such application – adaptive contact lenses based on liquid crystals, where simultaneously the high electrical conductivity, transparency, flexibility and elasticity of graphene are being utilised. In our devices graphene is used as a transparent conductive coating on curved PMMA substrates. The adaptive lenses provide a +0.7 D change in optical power with an applied voltage of 7.1 Vrms - perfect to correct presbyopia, the age-related condition that limits the near focus ability of the eye