Validation of the Factor Structure of the Health Professionals’ Attitudes Toward the Homeless Inventory (HPATHI)

Background - Considerable stigma exists toward persons experiencing homelessness (PEH)—a vulnerable population at greater risk for health disparities.1, 2 - Many healthcare students begin their programs without interacting with PEH and with preconceived notions influenced by societal stigma. - Interprofessional education programs, such as the Enhancing Services for People Experiencing Homelessness program below, have incorporated experiential learning into curricula to address student biases and develop understanding and compassion. Educating students to understand issues that PEH face can help mitigate healthcare disparities. - Evaluating the effectiveness of these interprofessional educational experiences requires valid assessment of the attitudes, interest, and confidence of students from various professions about working with PEH. - The Health Professional Attitudes Toward the Homeless Inventory (HPATHI) is frequently used for this purpose, including for ESHP, but has several limitations: Developed with a sample of medical students, overgeneralizing its validity for other health professions Standard-practice psychometric approaches were not used to support its validity. Final solution included several cross-loaded items.https://jdc.jefferson.edu/jcipeposters/1012/thumbnail.jp

Gender, war and militarism: making and questioning the links

The gender dynamics of militarism have traditionally been seen as straightforward, given the cultural mythologies of warfare and the disciplining of ‘masculinity’ that occurs in the training and use of men's capacity for violence in the armed services. However, women's relation to both war and peace has been varied and complex. It is women who have often been most prominent in working for peace, although there are no necessary links between women and opposition to militarism. In addition, more women than ever are serving in many of today's armies, with feminists rather uncertain on how to relate to this phenomenon. In this article, I explore some of the complexities of applying gender analyses to militarism and peace work in sites of conflict today, looking most closely at the Israeli feminist group, New Profile, and their insistence upon the costs of the militarized nature of Israeli society. They expose the very permeable boundaries between the military and civil society, as violence seeps into the fears and practices of everyday life in Israel. I place their work in the context of broader feminist analysis offered by researchers such as Cynthia Enloe and Cynthia Cockburn, who have for decades been writing about the ‘masculinist’ postures and practices of warfare, as well as the situation of women caught up in them. Finally, I suggest that rethinking the gendered nature of warfare must also encompass the costs of war to men, whose fundamental vulnerability to psychological abuse and physical injury is often downplayed, whether in mainstream accounts of warfare or in more specific gender analysis. Feminists need to pay careful attention to masculinity and its fragmentations in addressing the topic of gender, war and militarism

Phylogenetic relationships of Indian caecilians (Amphibia: Gymnophiona) inferred from mitochondrial rRNA gene sequences

India has a diverse caecilian fauna, including representatives of three of the six currently recognized families, the Caeciliidae, Ichthyophiidae, the endemic Uraeotyphlidae, but previous molecular phylogenetic studies of caecilians have not included sequences for any Indian caecilians. Partial 12S and 16S mitochondrial gene sequences were obtained for a single representative of each of the caecilian families found in India and aligned against previously reported sequences for 13 caecilian species. The resulting alignment (16 taxa, 1200 sites, of which 288 cannot be aligned unambiguously) was analyzed using parsimony, maximum-likelihood, and distance methods. As judged by bootstrap proportions, decay indices, and leaf stabilities, well-supported relationships of the Indian caecilians are recovered from the alignment. The data (1) corroborate the hypothesis, based on morphology, that the Uraeotyphlidae and Ichthyophiidae are sister taxa, (2) recover a monophyletic Ichthyophiidae, including Indian and South East Asian representatives, and (3) place the Indian caeciliid Gegeneophis ramaswamii as the sister group of the caeciliid caecilians of the Seychelles. Rough estimates of divergence times suggest an origin of the Uraeotyphlidae and Ichthyophiidae while India was isolated from Laurasia and Africa and are most consistent with an Indian origin of these families and subsequent dispersal of ichthyophiids into South East Asia

The Impact of Student Hotspotting on Patients & the Jefferson Health System

Introduction “Super-utilizers”, patients with five or more hospital admissions in the past year, account for half of all healthcare expenditures and present a significant financial burden to our healthcare system. In Pennsylvania “super-utilizers” result in $1.25 billion of healthcare spending and Philadelphia has the highest number of “super-utilizers” in the state. To address this crisis, Jefferson University serves as one of four new national hubs for student hotspotting. Teams of interprofessional health professions students along with faculty and staff advisors enroll “super-utilizers” and provide targeted interventions to address social determinants of health, reduce hospitalizations and improve patient outcomes. Methods To examine the impact of this program on patients, objective healthcare outcomes were obtained from EPIC. Costs were obtained from the hospital Care Coordination team and national average figures to examine the impact on the Jefferson health system. Data were collected from six months pre-, during, and post-intervention for the hotspotting intervention group and for a matched control group of non-program participants. Pre- and post-intervention analysis was performed using random effects Poisson regression. Results Pre- and post-intervention analysis found a 6% reduction in ED visits, 48% reduction in the number of outpatient visits, 18% reduction in total days in hospital, and 14% reduction in 30 day readmissions for the intervention vs. the control group. Average total costs of care decreased for both the experimental and control group with a 36% cost reduction per patient in the intervention group. Conclusion Participation in student hotspotting is a promising way to help address the needs of “super-utilizes”. Student hotspotting appears to have a positive impact on reducing the costs of care and improving health outcomes for high utilizer patients

Art therapy after stroke: Evidence and a need for further research

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in The Arts in Psychotherapy. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.This review presents available evidence regarding the benefits of art therapy and therapeutic arts interventions for stroke survivors. Whilst available evidence is very limited, it suggests that art therapy may address many of the diverse cognitive, emotional and functional needs of people disabled by stroke. Attention, spatial processing, sequencing and planning seem to improve among those who persist with art therapy. Use of the stroke-affected limb may increase. Several studies report improvements in social interaction, and emotional expression. Most published reports offer single case examples, which are idiographic and illuminating. Nonetheless, the brevity of these reports, the reliance on therapist's own accounts, and uncertainties surrounding case selection make generalization of the findings uncertain. There is a pressing need for multi-method research studies. These could use quantitative standardized scales to explore changes in stroke survivors’ physical and emotional functioning, and qualitative enquiry to gain the insights of stroke survivors concerning the art therapy process. Such research designs might help to establish a better recognized role for art therapy within multidisciplinary stroke rehabilitation programs

Student Satisfaction and Quality Improvement for an Alzheimer’s Virtual Interprofessional Training (AVIT) Program

Learning Objectives Identify key areas of focus for addressing student satisfaction in 3-DVW IPE simulations Discuss specific quality improvement strategies targeting student satisfaction and engagement based on the Flexible Learning Model Apply findings of the continuous quality improvement (CQI) strategies used in the AVIT 3-D virtual world simulation to their own approaches to CQI for virtual simulation

Loneliness and negative life events as predictors of hopelessness and suicidal behaviors in hispanics: evidence for a diathesis-stress model

In the present study, we examined loneliness and negative life events as predictors of suicide risk (viz., hopelessness and suicidal behaviors) in a sample of 160 Hispanic adults. Consistent with expectations, we found loneliness and negative life events to be positively associated with both hopelessness and suicidal behaviors. In addition, results of conducting hierarchical regression analyses indicated that loneliness accounted for significant amounts of variance in both measures of suicide risk, ranging from 24% to 29% of the variance. The inclusion of negative life events as a predictor was found to account for additional unique variance in hopelessness (3%), but not in suicidal behaviors, beyond what was predicted by loneliness. Finally, consistent with a diathesis-stress model, the Loneliness × Negative Life Events interaction was found to account for an additional 3% of the variance in both suicide risk measures. Implications of the present findings for future research on suicide risk in Hispanics are discussed. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 66:1–12, 2010.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78294/1/20721_ftp.pd

Asymptotic normalization coefficients (nuclear vertex constants) for p+7Be→8Bp+^7Be\to ^8B and the direct 7Be(p,γ)8B^7Be(p,\gamma)^8B astrophysical S-factors at solar energies

A new analysis of the precise experimental astrophysical S-factors for the direct capture $^7Be(p,\gamma)$ $^8B$ reaction [A.J.Junghans et al.Phys.Rev. C 68 (2003) 065803 and L.T. Baby et al. Phys.Rev. C 67 (2003) 065805] is carried out based on the modified two - body potential approach in which the direct astrophysical S-factor, ${\rm S_{17}(E)}$, is expressed in terms of the asymptotic normalization constants for $p+^7Be\to ^8B$ and two additional conditions are involved to verify the peripheral character of the reaction under consideration. The Woods-Saxon potential form is used for the bound ($p+^7Be$)- state wave function and for the $p^7Be$- scattering wave function. New estimates are obtained for the ^{\glqq}indirectly measured\grqq values of the asymptotic normalization constants (the nuclear vertex constants) for the $p+^7Be\to ^8B$ and $S_{17}(E)$ at E$\le$ 115 keV, including $E$=0. These values of $S_{17}(E)$ and asymptotic normalization constants have been used for getting information about the ^{\glqq}indirectly measured\grqq values of the $s$ wave average scattering length and the $p$ wave effective range parameters for $p^7Be$- scattering.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

Occupational therapy for rheumatoid arthritis: A systematic review

Patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) show a reduction in physical capacities compared with healthy persons. Symptoms such as pain, fatique, stiffness, and decreased muscle strength cause difficulties with daily activities such as grooming and dressing, cooking a meal, cleaning, shopping, work, and leisure activities. The physical, personal, familial, social, and vocational consequences of RA are extensive. Occupational therapy (OT) is concerned with facililtating people in performing their activities of daily living overcoming barriers by maintaining or improving abilities, or compensating for decreased ability in the performance of occupation (1). The most important interventions in OT are training of skills, counseling, education about joint protection, prescription of assistive devices, and the provision of splints (2). Advice/ instruction in the use of assistive devices, training in self-care activities, and training in productivity activities are the 3 interventions for RA patients chosen most often by occuptional therapists (3). (aut. ref.