Developing change management skills: a resource for health care professionals and managers

Developing Change Management Skills is the first of the NHS Service Delivery and Organisation (SDO) Programmes resources aimed primarily at development. Five realistically complex case studies, made up of factual incidents woven into a fictional whole, provide the settings that allow readers to reason on behalf of characters within them. In the process they learn about: 1) The strengths and limitations of different change management approaches in different situations 2) How to group the approaches together to increase their usefulness 3) The importance of applying them rigorously, perceptively and creatively 4) How different results arise when they are used by people with different world views. The cases reflect the range of organisations within the NHS, being set in primary care, mental health and acute services trusts, as well as a strategic health authority. Key players within them include an individual team member, a service leader, and executive and non-executive board members. Readers are encouraged to take opportunities to apply the tools before comparing their thinking with that of the authors. In doing so they will develop skills they can apply within their own settings. It will be of interest to anyone in the NHS trying to initiate change, whether they hold formal leadership positions or not. It will also be of interest to developers and trainers

Geography and Sentencing: Does Country of Citizenship Influence Sentence Longevity?

Contentious debates on immigrants in the United States has led to growing interest in their treatment in the criminal justice system. Much of what is known, however, springs from research that treats immigrants as a homogeneous group. The lumping of all immigrants into one category potentially mask variances in sentencing based on national origins. The current study disaggregates federal sentencing data to explore whether length of sentence differs by the defendants' geographical region of citizenship. After controlling for a number of legal and extra-legal factors, sentences imposed upon Mexican citizens were found to be longer than sentences meted out to defendants who are citizens of other countries. Evidence suggesting that national origin has a stronger influence on sentence length than race/ethnicity and legal status was also detected. Implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed

Direct evidence for the magnetic ordering of Nd ions in NdFeAsO by high resolution inelastic neutron scattering

We investigated the low energy excitations in the parent compound NdFeAsO of the Fe-pnictide superconductor in the $\mu$eV range by a back scattering neutron spectrometer. The energy scans on a powder NdFeAsO sample revealed inelastic peaks at E = 1.600 $\pm 0.003 \mu$eV at T = 0.055 K on both energy gain and energy loss sides. The inelastic peaks move gradually towards lower energy with increasing temperature and finally merge with the elastic peak at about 6 K. We interpret the inelastic peaks to be due to the transition between hyperfine-split nuclear level of the $^{143}$Nd and $^{145}$Nd isotopes with spin $I = 7/2$. The hyperfine field is produced by the ordering of the electronic magnetic moment of Nd at low temperature and thus the present investigation gives direct evidence of the ordering of the Nd magnetic sublattice of NdFeAsO at low temperature

Making informed decisions on change: key points for health care managers and professionals

A booklet, drawing on 'Organisational Change: A review for health care managers, professionals and researchers' (NSCCSDO, 2001), which aims to encourage managers and professionals to reflect on and share what helps and hinders successful change to improve the quality of services

Monitoring the CMS strip tracker readout system

The CMS Silicon Strip Tracker at the LHC comprises a sensitive area of approximately 200 m2 and 10 million readout channels. Its data acquisition system is based around a custom analogue front-end chip. Both the control and the readout of the front-end electronics are performed by off-detector VME boards in the counting room, which digitise the raw event data and perform zero-suppression and formatting. The data acquisition system uses the CMS online software framework to configure, control and monitor the hardware components and steer the data acquisition. The first data analysis is performed online within the official CMS reconstruction framework, which provides many services, such as distributed analysis, access to geometry and conditions data, and a Data Quality Monitoring tool based on the online physics reconstruction. The data acquisition monitoring of the Strip Tracker uses both the data acquisition and the reconstruction software frameworks in order to provide real-time feedback to shifters on the operational state of the detector, archiving for later analysis and possibly trigger automatic recovery actions in case of errors. Here we review the proposed architecture of the monitoring system and we describe its software components, which are already in place, the various monitoring streams available, and our experiences of operating and monitoring a large-scale system

Post-traumatic stress disorder following childbirth: an update of current issues and recommendations for future research

Objective: This paper aimed to report the current status of research in the field of post-traumatic stress disorder following childbirth (PTSD FC), and to update the findings of an earlier 2008 paper. Background: A group of international researchers, clinicians and service users met in 2006 to establish the state of clinical and academic knowledge relating to PTSD FC. A paper identified four key areas of research knowledge at that time. Methods: Fourteen clinicians and researchers met in Oxford, UK to update the previously published paper relating to PTSD FC. The first part of the meeting focused on updating the four key areas identified previously, and the second part on discussing new and emerging areas of research within the field. Results: A number of advances have been made in research within the area of PTSD FC. Prevalence is well established within mothers, several intervention studies have been published, and there is growing interest in new areas: staff and pathways; prevention and early intervention; impact on families and children; special populations; and post-traumatic growth. Conclusion: Despite progress, significant gaps remain within the PTSD FC knowledge base. Further research continues to be needed across all areas identified in 2006, and five areas were identified which can be seen as ‘new and emerging’. All of these new areas require further extensive research. Relatively little is still known about PTSD FC

Guidelines for key organizational factors for saas organizations

© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. Software as a Service is a new model of software deployment where a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. Due to benefits offered by it, organizations are transferring towards the SaaS delivery model. As compared to traditional organizations, SaaS organizations must consider key factors to stand out in a competitive market. This paper provides a better understanding of key factors for SaaS organization and provides guidelines for these key factors for SaaS organization. Ultimately, these guidelines will be valuable for SaaS vendors to improve SaaS application performance

Protocol for generating multiphoton entangled states from quantum dots in the presence of nuclear spin fluctuations

Multi-photon entangled states are a crucial resource for many applications in quantum information science. Semiconductor quantum dots offer a promising route to generate such states by mediating photon-photon correlations via a confined electron spin, but dephasing caused by the host nuclear spin environment typically limits coherence (and hence entanglement) between photons to the spin $T_2^*$ time of a few nanoseconds. We propose a protocol for the deterministic generation of multi-photon entangled states that is inherently robust against the dominating slow nuclear spin environment fluctuations, meaning that coherence and entanglement is instead limited only by the much longer spin $T_2$ time of microseconds. Unlike previous protocols, the present scheme allows for the generation of very low error probability polarisation encoded three-photon GHZ states and larger entangled states, without the need for spin echo or nuclear spin calming techniques

Magnetically actuated particle-based procedures in continuous flow

We demonstrate a versatile multilaminar flow microfluidic device in which magnetic particles are used as mobile supports for performing two important applications, namely (i) a clinically relevant sandwich immunoassay, and (ii) polye-lectrolyte coating of templates towards the fabrication of microcapsules for drug delivery applications. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of a different force, diamagnetic repulsion, for deflecting polystyrene particles through a reagent stream with a view to performing multilaminar flow studies on diamagnetic material such as polymer particles and cells