4,157 research outputs found
Behaviour change interventions to influence antimicrobial prescribing: a cross-sectional analysis of reports from UK state-of-the-art scientific conferences
Background To improve the quality of antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) interventions the application of behavioural sciences supported by multidisciplinary collaboration has been recommended. We analysed major UK scientific research conferences to investigate AMS behaviour change intervention reporting. Methods Leading UK 2015 scientific conference abstracts for 30 clinical specialties were identified and interrogated. All AMS and/or antimicrobial resistance(AMR) abstracts were identified using validated search criteria. Abstracts were independently reviewed by four researchers with reported behavioural interventions classified using a behaviour change taxonomy. Results Conferences ran for 110 days with >57,000 delegates. 311/12,313(2.5%) AMS-AMR abstracts (oral and poster) were identified. 118/311(40%) were presented at the UK’s infectious diseases/microbiology conference. 56/311(18%) AMS-AMR abstracts described behaviour change interventions. These were identified across 12/30(40%) conferences. The commonest abstract reporting behaviour change interventions were quality improvement projects [44/56 (79%)]. In total 71 unique behaviour change functions were identified. Policy categories; “guidelines” (16/71) and “service provision” (11/71) were the most frequently reported. Intervention functions; “education” (6/71), “persuasion” (7/71), and “enablement” (9/71) were also common. Only infection and primary care conferences reported studies that contained multiple behaviour change interventions. The remaining 10 specialties tended to report a narrow range of interventions focusing on “guidelines” and “enablement”. Conclusion Despite the benefits of behaviour change interventions on antimicrobial prescribing, very few AMS-AMR studies reported implementing them in 2015. AMS interventions must focus on promoting behaviour change towards antimicrobial prescribing. Greater focus must be placed on non-infection specialties to engage with the issue of behaviour change towards antimicrobial use
Inorganic Nitrate: Marker or Mediator of Mortality?
This is the final version of the article. Available from Wiley Open Access via the DOI in this record.Editoria
Loss Tolerant Optical Qubits
We present a linear optics quantum computation scheme that employs a new
encoding approach that incrementally adds qubits and is tolerant to photon loss
errors. The scheme employs a circuit model but uses techniques from cluster
state computation and achieves comparable resource usage. To illustrate our
techniques we describe a quantum memory which is fault tolerant to photon loss
Efficient Toffoli Gates Using Qudits
The simplest decomposition of a Toffoli gate acting on three qubits requires
{\em five} 2-qubit gates. If we restrict ourselves to controlled-sign (or
controlled-NOT) gates this number climbs to six. We show that the number of
controlled-sign gates required to implement a Toffoli gate can be reduced to
just {\em three} if one of the three quantum systems has a third state that is
accessible during the computation, i.e. is actually a qutrit. Such a
requirement is not unreasonable or even atypical since we often artificially
enforce a qubit structure on multilevel quantums systems (eg. atoms, photonic
polarization and spatial modes). We explore the implementation of these
techniques in optical quantum processing and show that linear optical circuits
could operate with much higher probabilities of success
Distance measures to compare real and ideal quantum processes
With growing success in experimental implementations it is critical to
identify a "gold standard" for quantum information processing, a single measure
of distance that can be used to compare and contrast different experiments. We
enumerate a set of criteria such a distance measure must satisfy to be both
experimentally and theoretically meaningful. We then assess a wide range of
possible measures against these criteria, before making a recommendation as to
the best measures to use in characterizing quantum information processing.Comment: 15 pages; this version in line with published versio
Loss-tolerant operations in parity-code linear optics quantum computing
A heavy focus for optical quantum computing is the introduction of
error-correction, and the minimisation of resource requirements. We detail a
complete encoding and manipulation scheme designed for linear optics quantum
computing, incorporating scalable operations and loss-tolerant architecture.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
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