Prenatal Care for Women with Serious Mental Illness

The lifetime prevalence of serious mental illness (SMI) for women in the United States is nearly 6% (NIMH, 2012). Women in this group often have lifestyle and socioeconomic characteristics that lead to poor health status and delays in seeking heath care. While women with SMI are just as likely to have children as their non-mentally ill counterparts, they are more likely to experience pregnancy complications and negative birth outcomes. Prenatal care must take into consideration the unique needs of these women and the challenges they face. Recommendations for improving practice include increasing pregnancy screening, using multidisciplinary teams to provide holistic care, and involving the patient in shared decision-making. This care should be continuous throughout the woman’s childbearing years. Further research is needed to test the effectiveness of models of prenatal care tailored to women with SMI

Motivational Interviewing Tailored Interventions for Heart Failure (MITI-HF): Study Design and Methods

OBJECTIVE: Lack of engagement in self-care is common among patients needing to follow a complex treatment regimen, especially patients with heart failure who are affected by comorbidity, disability and side effects of poly-pharmacy. The purpose of Motivational Interviewing Tailored Interventions for Heart Failure (MITI-HF) is to test the feasibility and comparative efficacy of an MI intervention on self-care, acute heart failure physical symptoms and quality of life. METHODS: We are conducting a brief, nurse-led motivational interviewing randomized controlled trial to address behavioral and motivational issues related to heart failure self-care. Participants in the intervention group receive home and phone-based motivational interviewing sessions over 90-days and those in the control group receive care as usual. Participants in both groups receive patient education materials. The primary study outcome is change in self-care maintenance from baseline to 90-days. CONCLUSION: This article presents the study design, methods, plans for statistical analysis and descriptive characteristics of the study sample for MITI-HF. Study findings will contribute to the literature on the efficacy of motivational interviewing to promote heart failure self-care. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: We anticipate that using an MI approach can help patients with heart failure focus on their internal motivation to change in a non-confrontational, patient-centered and collaborative way. It also affirms their ability to practice competent self-care relevant to their personal health goals

Compound-forming ware: Presented at Researching Words session

This paper analyzes compounds with the word ware and their representation in several dictionaries of modern English. Our aim is to show that ware has developed into two different, currently productive compound-forming elements, one meaning goods, and the other meaning computer software. -Ware is commonly used to form noun compounds that roughly mean "Articles made of [first element in the compound]" or "Articles with [first element in the compound]" (e.g. brassware, glassware, chinaware; hollowware, stemware). The first element in the compound is usually a noun, although -ware also attaches to verbs (bakeware, cookware) and to adjectives (earthenware, flatware). This use of -ware has frequently given rise to proprietary names for kitchen items (CorningWare®, Farberware®). Compounds with -ware are often only used in the singular, although the word housewares is a notable exception. The word hardware has been applied to computer equipment since 1947 (Ayto, Twentieth Century Words, 1999: 280) and subsequently software was modeled on hardware (Ayto, 1999: 440). Currently -ware is a quite productive compound-forming element in computer science and the resulting word refers to some type of software, e.g. adware, freeware, groupware, shareware, spyware. Many of these creations are informal and humourous (e.g. shelfware, unused software that is consequently left on a shelf). A search for words ending in -ware on www.onelook.com shows that the software-related sense is currently more frequent than the goods-related sense. Several English dictionaries consulted did not include the software-related sense; in fact, some did not specifically mention the older use of -ware in compounds referring to goods. Although the software related sense may be too recent, too colloquial, or possibly too ephemeral for dictionary inclusion, the fact that many dictionaries do not have a separate sense for -ware as a compound forming element may be related to the difficulty of describing word-formation elements in a dictionary context (Kastovsky, 2000: "Words and Word-Formation: Morphology in OED"; Berg, 1993: 58-64, A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary). In our paper we suggest how these forms might be described in a general dictionary