Preventative Oral Health Services Provided by Nurses\u27 Aides to Nursing Home Residents

The purposes of this investigation were to identify: 1) what preventive oral health services were provided by nurses\u27 aides to nursing home residents, 2) how frequent preventive oral health services were performed by nurses\u27 aides, 3) who nurses\u27 aides reported abnormal or suspicious findings detected in the resident\u27s mouth, 4) what factors discouraged and encouraged nurses\u27 aides performance of oral health services, and 5) how nurses\u27 aides rated their oral health knowledge of services they performed. The study population was comprised of a random sample of 40 percent of nursing home facilities in southeastern Virginia. A 14-item questionnaire was administered to nurses\u27 aides employed at 11 (79 percent of sample) nursing home facilities. Data were analyzed using the Statistical Analysis System (SAS). Frequency distributions and percentages were tabulated for discrete, nominal, and ordinal scaled data. Results suggest that nurses\u27 aides employed in southeastern Virginia nursing facilities typically perform preventive oral health services such as toothbrushing, mouthrinsing, and denture cleaning procedures for nursing home residents. The majority of nurses\u27 aides indicated that patient cooperativeness was a major factor that encouraged or discouraged the performance of oral health services. Nurses\u27 aides typically reported suspicious and abnormal findings detected in residents\u27 mouths to the nurse in charge of shift. The majority of nurses\u27 aides rated their oral health knowledge of denture cleaning and toothbrushing as excellent. However, a large percentage of nurses\u27 aides rated their oral health knowledge of saliva substitutes and flossing as poor

Exterior accessibility issues: a study of the outdoor spaces connected with housing facilities at Louisiana State University

This document investigates Louisiana State University’s progress in becoming a fully accessible campus, specifically in regard to student housing and the surrounding amenities such as laundry facilities, dining facilities and recreational areas. The benchmarks used for determining this include the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the Universal Design Handbook and surveys of other campuses that have made greater strides in this area. This document seeks to determine the extent to which Louisiana State University has become accessible for wheelchair users and bring to light examples of areas of difficulty in the housing cluster area. Equally important in this document are issues of aesthetics and the consideration of the psychological ramifications of mandated architectural components such as ramps and curb cuts being placed in out of the way areas, thereby creating a hierarchical disadvantage for physically impaired users of the campus and lessening the quality of the overall experience. The overarching intention of this document is to provide a framework for improving accessibility in order to bring the entire university community together in fully accessible spaces

Hirschhorn's identities

We prove a general identity between power series and use this identity to give proofs of a number of identities proposed by M.D. Hirschhorn. We also use the identity to give proofs of a well-known result of Jacobi, the quintuple-product identity and Winquist's identit

Funding, reputation and targets: the discursive logics of high-stakes testing

This paper provides insights into teacher and school-based administrators’ responses to policy demands for improved outcomes on high-stakes, standardised literacy and numeracy tests in Australia. Specifically, the research reveals the effects of the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), and associated policies, in the state of Queensland. Drawing suggestively across Michel Foucault’s notions of disciplinary power and subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, the research utilises interviews with teachers and school-based administrators to reveal how high-stakes, standardised testing practices served to discursively constitute performative teacher subjectivities around issues of funding, teacher and school reputation and target-setting within what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’. The paper argues that the contestation evident within this field is also reflective and constitutive of more educative schooling discourses and practices, even as performative logics dominate

Tackling the edge dynamic graph colouring problem with and without future adjacency information

Many real world operational research problems, such as frequency assignment and exam timetabling, can be reformulated as graph colouring problems (GCPs). Most algorithms for the GCP operate under the assumption that its constraints are fixed, allowing us to model the problem using a static graph. However, in many real-world cases this does not hold and it is more appropriate to model problems with constraints that change over time using an edge dynamic graph. Although exploring methods for colouring dynamic graphs has been identified as an area of interest with many real-world applications, to date, very little literature exists regarding such methods. In this paper we present several heuristic methods for modifying a feasible colouring at time-step t into an initial, but not necessarily feasible, colouring for a “similar” graph at time-step t+1t+1 . We will discuss two cases; (1) where changes occur at random, and (2) where probabilistic information about future changes is provided. Experimental results are also presented and the benefits of applying these particular modification methods are investigated