Identifying depressed fathers during a home visit: why and how.

The knowledge and expertise required for child and family health nursing practice has continued to evolve as a consequence of research-based interventions and policy changes affecting families. The benefits of sustained home visiting on family health and wellbeing are now accepted and Australian trials have demonstrated improvements in maternal–infant attachment and mothers’ relationship with their child. At the level of clinical practice, best practice approaches for nurses visiting new mothers have moved away from delivering specific clinical procedures to focusing on the particular needs and circumstances of the parent and family, emphasising psychological support and health promotion in partnership and collaboration with parents. A particular focus on detecting postnatal maternal depression has arisen due to the development of the National Perinatal Depression Initiative. Child and family health nurses now regularly screen mothers using the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Recent evidence of the impact of fathers’ depression on children and mothers has drawn attention to fathers’ mental health in the perinatal period. Fathers’ postnatal depression has been shown to impact on children’s development at similar levels to mothers’ and while children are most affected by two depressed parents, the effect of fathers’ depression is independent of mood disorder in the mother. Nurses making home visits have an opportunity to engage with fathers and many do so when the father is available. In this paper we present the evidence and rationale for assessing fathers’ depression or anxiety at the postnatal home visit

Free-Range Pre-Programmed RC Car

There is a growing interest in the capabilities and utilization of autonomous vehicles. The objective of this project is to design a small scale illustration of an autonomous vehicle driven by user input. An application will be designed that will allow a user to create a track that an RC car will accurately follow. As the car follows the track, a microcontroller on the vehicle will send movement information back to the application. This information is used by the application to process where the vehicle is currently at and where it needs to go. While in motion, on-board sensors will actively detect obstacles in the path and adjust the vehicle’s direction to avoid collision

Detection of ionized gas in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae

We report the detection of ionized intracluster gas in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Pulsars in this cluster with a negative period derivative, which must lie in the distant half of the cluster, have significantly higher measured integrated electron column densities than the pulsars with a positive period derivative. We derive the plasma density within the central few pc of the cluster using two different methods which yield consistent values. Our best estimate of n_e = (0.067+-0.015)/cm^3 is about 100 times the free electron density of the ISM in the vicinity of 47 Tucanae, and the ionized gas is probably the dominant component of the intracluster medium.Comment: 5 pages, 3 included figures, accepted for publication by ApJ Letter