Nurse-patient interaction and communication: a systematic literature review

Aim: The purpose of this review is to describe the use and definitions of the concepts of nurse-patient interaction and nurse-patient communication in nursing literature. Furthermore, empirical findings of nurse-patient communication research will be presented, and applied theories will be shown. Method: An integrative literature search was executed. The total number of relevant citations found was 97. The search results were reviewed, and key points were extracted in a standardized form. Extracts were then qualitatively summarized according to relevant aspects and categories for the review. Results: The relation of interaction and communication is not clearly defined in nursing literature. Often the terms are used interchangeably or synonymously, and a clear theoretical definition is avoided or rather implicit. Symbolic interactionism and classic sender-receiver models were by far the most referred to models. Compared to the use of theories of adjacent sciences, the use of original nursing theories related to communication is rather infrequent. The articles that try to clarify the relation of both concepts see communication as a special or subtype of interaction. Conclusion: The included citations all conclude that communication skills can be learned to a certain degree. Involvement of patients and their role in communication often is neglected by authors. Considering the mutual nature of communication, patients’ share in conversation should be taken more into consideration than it has been until now. Nursing science has to integrate its own theories of nursing care with theories of communication and interaction from other scientific disciplines like sociology

Project Games

Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 11485)We consider a strategic game called project game where each agent has to choose a project among his own list of available projects. The model includes positive weights expressing the capacity of a given agent to contribute to a given project. The realization of a project produces some reward that has to be allocated to the agents. The reward of a realized project is fully allocated to its contributors, according to a simple proportional rule. Existence and computational complexity of pure Nash equilibria is addressed and their efficiency is investigated according to both the utilitarian and the egalitarian social function

Positional scoring-based allocation of indivisible goods

International audienceWe define a family of rules for dividing $m$ indivisible goods among agents, parameterized by a scoring vector and a social welfare aggregation function. We assume that agents' preferences over sets of goods are additive, but that the input is ordinal: each agent reports her preferences simply by ranking single goods. Similarly to positional scoring rules in voting, a scoring vector s = (s1, ... , sm) consists of m nonincreasing, nonnegative weights, where si is the score of a good assigned to an agent who ranks it in position i. The global score of an allocation for an agent is the sum of the scores of the goods assigned to her. The social welfare of an allocation is the aggregation of the scores of all agents, for some aggregation function * such as, typically, + or min. The rule associated with s and * maps a profile to (one of) the allocation(s) maximizing social welfare. After defining this family of rules, and focusing on some key examples, we investigate some of the social-choice-theoretic properties of this family of rules, such as various kinds of monotonicity, and separability. Finally, we focus on the computation of winning allocations, and on their approximation: we show that for commonly used scoring vectors and aggregation functions this problem is NP-hard and we exhibit some tractable particular case