The evidence-base for stroke education in care homes

<b>Summary.</b> <b>Research questions:</b> 1. What are registered care home nurses’ educational priorities regarding stroke care? 2. What are senior care home assistants’ educational priorities regarding stroke care? 3. How do care home nurses conceive stroke care will be delivered in 2010? <b>Study design:</b> This was a 2-year study using focus groups, stroke guidelines, professional recommendations and stroke literature for the development of a questionnaire survey for data collection. Workshops provided study feedback to participants. Data were collected in 2005–2006. <b>Study site:</b> Greater Glasgow NHS Health Board. <b>Population and sample:</b> A stratified random selection of 16 private, 3 voluntary and 6 NHS continuing care homes from which a sample of 115 trained nurses and 19 senior care assistants was drawn. <b>Results:</b> The overall response rate for care home nurses was 64.3% and for senior care assistants, 73.6%. Both care home nurses and senior care assistants preferred accredited stroke education. Care home nurses wanted more training in stroke assessment, rehabilitation and acute interventions whereas senior care assistants wanted more in managing depression, general stroke information and communicating with dysphasic residents. Senior care assistants needed more information on multidisciplinary team working while care home nurses were more concerned with ethical decision-making, accountability and goal setting. <b>Conclusions:</b> Care home staff need and want more stroke training. They are clear that stroke education should be to the benefit of their resident population. Guidelines on stroke care should be developed for care homes and these should incorporate support for continuing professional learning in relation to the resident who has had a stroke

Stroke education for healthcare professionals: making it fit for purpose

<b>Research questions:</b> 1. What are healthcare professionals’ (HCPs) educational priorities regarding stroke care? 2. Do stroke care priorities vary across the primary and secondary sectors? 3. How do HCPs conceive stroke care will be delivered in 2010? <b>Study design:</b> This was a two-year study using focus groups and interviews for instrument development, questionnaires for data collection and workshops to provide study feedback. Data were collected in 2005–06. <b>Study site:</b> One Scottish health board. <b>Inclusion criteria:</b> All National Health Service healthcare professionals working wherever stroke care occurred. <b>Population and sample:</b> Participants were drawn from 4 university teaching hospitals, 2 community hospitals, 1 geriatric medicine day hospital, 48 general practices (GPs), 12 care homes and 15 community teams. The sample comprised 155 doctors, 313 nurses, 133 therapists (physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists), and 29 ‘other HCPs’ (14 dieticians, 7 pharmacists, 2 podiatrists and 6 psychologists). <b>Results:</b> HCPs prefer face-to-face, accredited education but blended approaches are required that accommodate uni- and multidisciplinary demands. Doctors and nurses are more inclined towards discipline-specific training compared to therapists and other healthcare professionals (HCPs). HCPs in primary care and stroke units want more information on the social impact of stroke while those working in stroke units in particular are concerned with leadership in the multidisciplinary team. Nurses are the most interested in teaching patients and carers. <b>Conclusions</b> Stroke requires more specialist stroke staff, the upskilling of current staff and a national education pathway given that stroke care is most effectively managed by specialists with specific clinical skills. The current government push towards a flexible workforce is welcome but should be educationally-sound and recognise the career aspirations of healthcare professionals

Blocked dihydropteridines as nitric oxide synthase activators

It has been shown that 6-acetyl-7,7-dimethyl-5,6,7,8-tetrahydropteridin-4(3H)-one can act as a competent cofactor for the production of nitric oxide by neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS). More information was sought on the structural features that could contribute to strong binding within the enzyme whilst maintaining a fast electron transfer rate. This study was concerned with expansion at the C2-position of the pteridine scaffold. The evidence suggests that expansion at the C2-position had a deleterious effect with respect to Km and as a consequence electron transfer rate. Unexpectedly, several lines of evidence suggested that a methyl substituent on nitrogen at C2 reduced the electron density in the pyrimidine and dihydropterin rings

Neutron Activation Analysis of Microleakage Around a Hydrophobic Composite Restorative

Neutron activation analysis with dysprosium as a tracer was employed to determine quantitatively the microleakage around the restorations of an experimental hydrophobic composite, as well as a commercial composite. Only a negligible uptake of tracer was obtained for the experimental composite, whereas a five-fold uptake was recorded for the commercial composite. Capillary penetration of fluid around a restoration could be greatly reduced by using a hydrophobic composite.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68248/2/10.1177_00220345800590090901.pd

Radiation protection at the National Nuclear Research Centre, Pelindaba

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Scales of the Extra Dimensions and their Gravitational Wave Backgrounds

Circumstances are described in which symmetry breaking during the formation of our three-dimensional brane within a higher-dimensional space in the early universe excites mesoscopic classical radion or brane-displacement degrees of freedom and produces a detectable stochastic background of gravitational radiation. The spectrum of the background is related to the unification energy scale and the the sizes and numbers of large extra dimensions. It is shown that properties of the background observable by gravitational-wave observatories at frequencies $f\approx 10^{-4}$ Hz to $10^3$ Hz contain information about unification on energy scales from 1 to $10^{10}$ TeV, gravity propagating through extra-dimension sizes from 1 mm to $10^{-18}$mm, and the dynamical history and stabilization of from one to seven extra dimensions.Comment: 6 pages, Latex, 1 figure, submitted to Phys. Re

An Algorithm for constructing Hjelmslev planes

Projective Hjelmslev planes and Affine Hjelmselv planes are generalisations of projective planes and affine planes. We present an algorithm for constructing a projective Hjelmslev planes and affine Hjelsmelv planes using projective planes, affine planes and orthogonal arrays. We show that all 2-uniform projective Hjelmslev planes, and all 2-uniform affine Hjelsmelv planes can be constructed in this way. As a corollary it is shown that all 2-uniform Affine Hjelmselv planes are sub-geometries of 2-uniform projective Hjelmselv planes.Comment: 15 pages. Algebraic Design Theory and Hadamard matrices, 2014, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics 13

Frodo: Take off the ring! Practical, quantum-secure key exchange from LWE

Lattice-based cryptography offers some of the most attractive primitives believed to be resistant to quantum computers. Following increasing interest from both companies and government agencies in building quantum computers, a number of works have proposed instantiations of practical post-quantum key exchange protocols based on hard problems in ideal lattices, mainly based on the Ring Learning With Errors (R-LWE) problem. While ideal lattices facilitate major efficiency and storage benefits over their nonideal counterparts, the additional ring structure that enables these advantages also raises concerns about the assumed difficulty of the underlying problems. Thus, a question of significant interest to cryptographers, and especially to those currently placing bets on primitives that will withstand quantum adversaries, is how much of an advantage the additional ring structure actually gives in practice. Despite conventional wisdom that generic lattices might be too slow and unwieldy, we demonstrate that LWE-based key exchange is quite practical: our constant time implementation requires around 1.3ms computation time for each party; compared to the recent NewHope R-LWE scheme, communication sizes increase by a factor of 4.7×, but remain under 12 KiB in each direction. Our protocol is competitive when used for serving web pages over TLS; when partnered with ECDSA signatures, latencies increase by less than a factor of 1.6×, and (even under heavy load) server throughput only decreases by factors of 1.5× and 1.2× when serving typical 1 KiB and 100 KiB pages, respectively. To achieve these practical results, our protocol takes advantage of several innovations. These include techniques to optimize communication bandwidth, dynamic generation of public parameters (which also offers additional security against backdoors), carefully chosen error distributions, and tight security parameters

Spectral isolation of naturally reductive metrics on simple Lie groups

We show that within the class of left-invariant naturally reductive metrics $\mathcal{M}_{\operatorname{Nat}}(G)$ on a compact simple Lie group $G$, every metric is spectrally isolated. We also observe that any collection of isospectral compact symmetric spaces is finite; this follows from a somewhat stronger statement involving only a finite part of the spectrum.Comment: 19 pages, new title and abstract, revised introduction, new result demonstrating that any collection of isospectral compact symmetric spaces must be finite, to appear Math Z. (published online Dec. 2009

Impact of analytic provenance in genome analysis

Many computational methods are available for assembly and annotation of newly sequenced microbial genomes. However, when new genomes are reported in the literature, there is frequently very little critical analysis of choices made during the sequence assembly and gene annotation stages. These choices have a direct impact on the biologically relevant products of a genomic analysis - for instance identification of common and differentiating regions among genomes in a comparison, or identification of enriched gene functional categories in a specific strain. Here, we examine the outcomes of different assembly and analysis steps in typical workflows in a comparison among strains of Vibrio vulnificus