Nurses' perceptions of aids and obstacles to the provision of optimal end of life care in ICU

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Design of masonry walls subjected to concentrated vertical loads

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Epidemiology and molecular investigation of hepatitis C infection following holiday haemodialysis

Background Hepatitis C virus infection (HCV) is not infrequent among haemodialysis patients. Most published reports suggest that patient-to-patient spread, either directly or indirectly, is the most common mode of transmission in renal units. Aim To investigate the source of an outbreak, and the route of transmission, of acute HCV infection in two Scottish patients occurring within eight weeks of receiving haemodialysis in the same unit while on holiday in Majorca. Methods This was an international epidemiological and molecular investigation of HCV infection among a cohort of haemodialysis patients from nine countries. Findings No further HCV-positive infections were observed among residents and holidaymakers receiving haemodialysis at the unit in Majorca. Molecular investigations confirmed that a Spanish healthcare worker (HCW) was the source of infection for the two Scottish patients. The investigators were unable to determine the route of transmission. Conclusions This outbreak is the first reported case of HCW-to-patient transmission of HCV in a renal unit, and the third reported case of transmission involving a HCW who had not performed invasive procedures. The issue of whether renal units are an exceptional case with regards to the risk of transmission associated with non-invasive procedures should be considered, in conjunction with the need to improve surveillance of blood-borne virus transmissions in renal units in the UK and abroad

On the instrumentation of OpenMP and OmpSs Tasking constructs

Parallelism has become more and more commonplace with the advent of the multicore processors. Although different parallel pro- gramming models have arisen to exploit the computing capabilities of such processors, developing applications that take benefit of these pro- cessors may not be easy. And what is worse, the performance achieved by the parallel version of the application may not be what the developer expected, as a result of a dubious ut ilization of the resources offered by the processor. We present in this paper a fruitful synergy of a shared memory parallel compiler and runtime, and a performance extraction library. The objective of this work is not only to reduce the performance analysis life-cycle when doing the parallelization of an application, but also to extend the analysis experience of the parallel application by incorporating data that is only known in the compiler and runtime side. Additionally we present performance results obtained with the execution of instrumented application and evaluate the overhead of the instrumentation.Peer Reviewe