MEDICATION THERAPY MANAGEMENT: \u3ci\u3eEmpowering the Patient\u3c/i\u3e

Medication Therapy Management provides the community with many benefits. In order to demonstrate the importance, we used pharmacist surveys to convey how often MTM is utilized, pharmacists perspectives on service utilization and challenges, and goals and expectations of the outcomes of MTM services

MEDICATION THERAPY MANAGEMENT: \u3ci\u3eEmpowering the Patient\u3c/i\u3e

Medication Therapy Management provides the community with many benefits. In order to demonstrate the importance, we used pharmacist surveys to convey how often MTM is utilized, pharmacists perspectives on service utilization and challenges, and goals and expectations of the outcomes of MTM services

Outpatient antibiotic prescription trends in the United States: A national cohort study

OBJECTIVETo characterize trends in outpatient antibiotic prescriptions in the United StatesDESIGNRetrospective ecological and temporal trend study evaluating outpatient antibiotic prescriptions from 2013 to 2015SETTINGNational administrative claims data from a pharmacy benefits manager PARTICIPANTS. Prescription pharmacy beneficiaries from Express Scripts Holding CompanyMEASUREMENTSAnnual and seasonal percent change in antibiotic prescriptionsRESULTSApproximately 98 million outpatient antibiotic prescriptions were filled by 39 million insurance beneficiaries during the 3-year study period. The most commonly prescribed antibiotics were azithromycin, amoxicillin, amoxicillin/clavulanate, ciprofloxacin, and cephalexin. No significant changes in individual or overall annual antibiotic prescribing rates were found during the study period. Significant seasonal variation was observed, with antibiotics being 42% more likely to be prescribed during February than September (peak-to-trough ratio [PTTR], 1.42; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.39–1.61). Similar seasonal trends were found for azithromycin (PTTR, 2.46; 95% CI, 2.44–3.47), amoxicillin (PTTR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.42–1.89), and amoxicillin/clavulanate (PTTR, 1.78; 95% CI, 1.68–2.29).CONCLUSIONSThis study demonstrates that annual national outpatient antibiotic prescribing practices remained unchanged during our study period. Furthermore, seasonal peaks in antibiotics generally used to treat viral upper respiratory tract infections remained unchanged during cold and influenza season. These results suggest that inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics remains widespread, despite the concurrent release of several guideline-based best practices intended to reduce inappropriate antibiotic consumption; however, further research linking national outpatient antibiotic prescriptions to associated medical conditions is needed to confirm these findings.Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol 2018;39:584–589</jats:sec

A defence of classical rhetoric in Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence

This study warns that Scottish education is in danger of losing a valuable and venerable element of the school curriculum: the Classics. In order to demonstrate what Scottish education stands to lose, this study defends one particular element of the Classics, rhetoric, understood as the practice of effective speaking and effective writing for the purpose of persuasion. Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), first conceived in 2002 and implemented in 2010, is still a fledgling curricular initiative and schools are currently in an adjustment phase while existing syllabus content and pedagogical approaches are reviewed in order to better reflect the aims and purposes of the new curriculum. With increased focus on teacher autonomy, flexibility, personalisation and choice (Scottish Government 2008), now is an ideal time, I claim, to reveal and defend the contribution of rhetoric to this curriculum. This study promotes the learning and teaching of rhetoric in Scottish secondary schools, citing its potential to enrich not just the Classics but many areas of the curriculum, and makes particular claims for its contribution to cultivating critical and responsible citizens. Set against a broader backdrop of political and philosophical influences on curriculum reform and educational policy, this research examines the origins, aims and purposes of CfE and suggests that, although clearly influenced by supranational expectations regarding employability, economic growth and adequately equipping the future workforce, the curriculum appears to uphold the value of the Arts and Humanities and places education for citizenship at its core. These moves imply progress, at least in Scotland, towards ameliorating the ‘crisis in the Humanities’ and making room for increased focus on cross-curricular skills and abilities which are considered important for responsible citizenship: literacy, speaking and listening, argumentation and debate. The retention of Classical languages in Scotland’s new curriculum offers renewed hope, at least at the policy level, for the revitalisation of Classics teaching in Scottish schools. Yet despite their inclusion in the curriculum, they have received no promotion and there are no teacher training places available in Classical languages in Scotland so, at a practical level, the future of the subjects remains in crisis. By focussing on the educational merit of just one feature of the Classics, this study aims to highlight the value of rhetoric in CfE and in so doing raise the profile and improve the image of Classical language education. I argue that the Classical rhetorical framework, developed as a method for citizens to represent themselves effectively in public, has much to offer the development of literacy, critical literacy and critical thinking. These skills are shown to be linked to citizenship education and particular attention is paid to what is meant by ‘responsible citizenship’ in CfE. The argument is made that popular interpretations of the policy imply personally responsible or participatory conceptions of citizenship, but I promote a maximal interpretation in the form of ‘justice-oriented’ citizenship (Westheimer and Kahne 2004: 242). I defend that it is this conception of citizenship which is optimal for Scottish democracy both to appeal to the Scottish democratic intellect (Davie 1961) and to advance the values of wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity, the values inscribed on the mace in the Scottish Parliament (Gillies 2006). Despite ambiguity in CfE regarding the form of democracy envisaged for the 21st century, I argue that the study of rhetoric cultivates knowledge and skills which are particularly pertinent and beneficial to deliberative democracy and that in such a conception of democracy, rhetoric complements critical argumentation as a method of deliberation between citizens. I claim that it does so by facilitating narrative imagination, engaging the emotions and by providing a communicative bridge between diversely positioned deliberators. After highlighting and defending the value of rhetoric in CfE, the study concludes with the consideration of how rhetoric might best be positioned in the curriculum and advances a number of possible pedagogical models for its delivery, the most practical of which is offered by a cross-curricular approach but the most desirable of which is conferred by Classical languages

Easy as 4-AT: Improving Delirium Screening in Acute Elderly Admissions with a Targeted Educational Intervention

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Intergenerational learning and place-making in a deindustrialized locality: “Tracks of the Past” in Lanarkshire, Scotland

Previously deposited in Glasgow University repository on 20 May 2022 at: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/271365/This paper contributes to scholarship on the long experience of deindustrialization. It emphasizes contemporary place-making in navigating the much-changed socioeconomic landscapes that the closure of mills, mines, shipyards and factories have left behind. The ‘half-life of deindustrialization' suggests these experiences have been received through understandings of labour and community with origins in the industrial era. ‘Tracks of the Past' was a school-based education project themed around workers' occupation of Caterpillar's earth-moving machinery plant in Lanarkshire, Scotland. The occupation was a response to Caterpillar's shock closure announcement and the loss of 1,200 jobs. It lasted 103 days between January and April 1987 when closure was reluctantly conceded. A Caterpillar Workers Legacy Group (CWLG) commemorated the occupation's thirtieth anniversary. During 2018, academics collaborated with the CWLG to develop a curriculum for a local high school class. ‘Tracks' produced lessons where students engaged with archival sources and physical objects, interviewed members of the CWLG and conducted online research. The ‘learning journey' montages that the students produced combined conversations in 2018 with sources from three decades earlier, often reflecting on the occupation as a historical episode in a highly localised context. Others implicated the closure within an international pattern, linking Caterpillar’s divestment to the actions of multinationals in the contemporary global economy. In neither case did the invocation of the occupation lead to a straightforward translation of the occupation into contemporary workplace justice issues as the CWLG had hoped. However, these results did suggest a creative deployment of the past that rationalised the occupation with reference to contemporary deindustrialized contexts. These findings demonstrate the utility of the half-life through a lingering industrial past, but also demonstrate the need to conceptualise agents or custodians of labour history and challenge the linearity of passing time that an incrementally receding industrial era implicates.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547922000011inpressinpres

Space-borne quantum memories for global quantum communication

Global scale quantum communication links will form the backbone of the quantum internet. However, exponential loss in optical fibres precludes any realistic application beyond few hundred kilometres. Quantum repeaters and space-based systems offer to overcome this limitation. Here, we analyse the use of quantum memory (QM)-equipped satellites for quantum communication focussing on global range repeaters and Measurement-Device-Independent (MDI) QKD. We demonstrate that satellites equipped with QMs provide three orders of magnitude faster entanglement distribution rates than existing protocols where QMs are located in ground stations. We analyse how entangle- ment distribution performance depends on memory characteristics, determine benchmarks to assess performance of different tasks, and propose various architectures for light-matter interfaces. Our work provides a practical roadmap to realise unconditionally secure quantum communications over global distances with current technologies