Guidelines for Facilitating a Patient Empowerment Program

The traditional medical treatment model often ignores the emotional, spiritual, social, and cognitive aspects of living with a chronic disease such as diabetes. Empowerment programs address these psychosocial areas by helping individuals develop skills and self-awareness in goal setting, problem solving, stress management, coping, social support, and motivation. Although many diabetes educators have been taught to use an empowerment curriculum to facilitate self-management, there is minimal research concerning the actual process of providing such programs to patients. We evaluated an empowerment curriculum (Empowerment: A Personal Path to Self-Care) with a diverse group of individuals with diabetes to determine the key elements of planning and implementing a successful diabetes patient empowerment program.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68728/2/10.1177_014572179502100408.pd

Work function tuning in hydrothermally synthesized vanadium-doped MoO3 and Co3O4 mesostructures for energy conversion devices

The wide interest in developing green energy technologies stimulates the scientific community to seek, for devices, new substitute material platforms with a low environmental impact, ease of production and processing and long-term stability. The synthesis of metal oxide (MO) semiconductors fulfils these requirements and efforts are addressed towards optimizing their functional properties through the improvement of charge mobility or energy level alignment. Two MOs have rising perspectives for application in light harvesting devices, mainly for the role of charge selective layers but also as light absorbers, namely MoO3 (an electron blocking layer) and Co3O4 (a small band gap semiconductor). The need to achieve better charge transport has prompted us to explore strategies for the doping of MoO3 and Co3O4 with vanadium (V) ions that, when combined with oxygen in V2O5, produce a high work function MO. We report on subcritical hydrothermal synthesis of V-doped mesostructures of MoO3 and of Co3O4, in which a tight control of the doping is exerted by tuning the relative amounts of reactants. We accomplished a full analytical characterization of these V-doped MOs that unambiguously demonstrates the incorporation of the vanadium ions in the host material, as well as the effects on the optical properties and work function. We foresee a promising future use of these materials as charge selective materials in energy devices based on multilayer structures

Математическая психология

The article is devoted to mathematical psychology. The processes associated with the emergence of mathematical psychology and its stages. Definition of the problem of limited modeling capabilities with the help of this psychology. We consider in this article are still major areas of mathematical professor psychology V.Krylov (he played a leading role in the development of mathematical psychology)

The influence of forest reserve protection on the structure, stability, and functioning of dung-associated invertebrate communities

Communities are influenced by many factors, with anthropogenic impacts being one of the strongest. These factors can influence community structure and may cause non-random species loss by filtering certain traits of species, which may also determine how a species contributes to ecosystem functioning. The structure of a community can also be highly variable over short timescales and across seasons, as abiotic factors can alter a resource over the course of days and also alter intensity of competition within a community. These short-timescale influences are most noticeable in an ephemeral resource that is limited in both space and time. Changes in community structure and interactions can be represented as networks of interactions (links) among species (nodes). Interaction networks describe a community and incorporate non-trophic interactions, which can alter their structure. These are generally measured by counting the number of trophic interactions, ignoring non-trophic interactions such as competition. However, competitive interactions may be important for network dynamics, yet the most appropriate way to quantify competition remains unclear. The outcome of a competitive interaction could potentially be predicted by the body size ofcompeting individuals, and this would remove the need to observe individual interactions. These ideas were tested using the dung-associated community in an Afromontane forest reserve in Nigeria across variation in seasons and in areas that were protected from anthropogenic impacts by fencing. Trapping and recording of interactions within the community was used to assess community structure, and experiments were run to test how dung removal and secondary seed dispersal changed across seasons and in protected areas of the forest. The influence of competition was determined by altering the size and number of dung beetles present at the resource. The community structure was influenced by forest protection and varied across seasons. Additionally, the size and number of dung beetles present was higher in protected areas in the wet season, resulting in higher dung removal and secondary seed dispersal and indicating non-random species loss in unprotected areas. The attractiveness of the dung resource changed over short timescales and desiccation occurred rapidly in the dry season, which resulted in decreased insect abundance and diversity over the course of days. Individual dung removal rates were not additive, and could only be used to predict community-level dung removal when taking into account competitive interactions. The body-size ratio between winners and losers of a competition was a good predictor of an interaction outcome. Competition networks were highly connected and nested, with compartmentalisation occurring in the competition network. At the community level, effects of forest protection and changing seasons only altered network nestedness. Therefore, body size can be used to predict species responses to anthropogenic threats and community structure and function when taking into account density-dependent competitive interactions. Furthermore, when determining community responses to anthropogenic threats, sampling across changes in seasons and observing competitive interactions provides more information about a community structure and stability

Patient empowerment in long-term conditions: development and preliminary testing of a new measure

BACKGROUND: Patient empowerment is viewed by policy makers and health care practitioners as a mechanism to help patients with long-term conditions better manage their health and achieve better outcomes. However, assessing the role of empowerment is dependent on effective measures of empowerment. Although many measures of empowerment exist, no measure has been developed specifically for patients with long-term conditions in the primary care setting. This study presents preliminary data on the development and validation of such a measure. METHODS: We conducted two empirical studies. Study one was an interview study to understand empowerment from the perspective of patients living with long-term conditions. Qualitative analysis identified dimensions of empowerment, and the qualitative data were used to generate items relating to these dimensions. Study two was a cross-sectional postal study involving patients with different types of long-term conditions recruited from general practices. The survey was conducted to test and validate our new measure of empowerment. Factor analysis and regression were performed to test scale structure, internal consistency and construct validity. RESULTS: Sixteen predominately elderly patients with different types of long-term conditions described empowerment in terms of 5 dimensions (identity, knowledge and understanding, personal control, personal decision-making, and enabling other patients). One hundred and ninety seven survey responses were received from mainly older white females, with relatively low levels of formal education, with the majority retired from paid work. Almost half of the sample reported cardiovascular, joint or diabetes long-term conditions. Factor analysis identified a three factor solution (positive attitude and sense of control, knowledge and confidence in decision making and enabling others), although the structure lacked clarity. A total empowerment score across all items showed acceptable levels of internal consistency and relationships with other measures were generally supportive of its construct validity. CONCLUSION: Initial analyses suggest that the new empowerment measure meets basic psychometric criteria. Reasons concerning the failure to confirm the hypothesized factor structure are discussed alongside further developments of the scale