What are we waiting for? [guest editorial]

The clinical education of Australia's aged care nurses can no longer be treated as the Cinderella of nursing's specialities. It is urgent that ways be agreed and measures taken to bring this branch of the profession, and residential aged care nursing in particular, into mainstream health care services. There should be no need to describe again the evolving shape of Australia's demographic profile between now and the middle of this century; and no need to prove here that the ageing bulge is already placing a severe strain on staffmg in the sector. A substantial percentage of the aged care nursing workforce is nearing retirement and the ratio of departures to recruits seems set to worsen at the same time as demand for high quality nursing care escalates. Important indicators - the number of the most highly dependent residents has doubled in the past seven years; compounding co-morbidities are increasingly common and an estimated 60-80% of residents in residential aged care facilities (RACFs) have a dementing illness - reveal the rapidly rising levels of frailty and dependency in the RACF population....

The Conserved G-Protein Coupled Receptor FSHR-1 Regulates Protective Host Responses to Infection and Oxidative Stress

The innate immune system’s ability to sense an infection is critical so that it can rapidly respond if pathogenic microorganisms threaten the host, but otherwise maintain a quiescent baseline state to avoid causing damage to the host or to commensal microorganisms. One important mechanism for discriminating between pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria is the recognition of cellular damage caused by a pathogen during the course of infection. InCaenorhabditis elegans, the conserved G-protein coupled receptor FSHR-1 is an important constituent of the innate immune response. FSHR-1 activates the expression of antimicrobial infection response genes in infected worms and delays accumulation of the ingested pathogenPseudomonas aeruginosa. FSHR-1 is central not only to the worm’s survival of infection by multiple pathogens, but also to the worm’s survival of xenobiotic cadmium and oxidative stresses. Infected worms produce reactive oxygen species to fight off the pathogens; FSHR-1 is required at the site of infection for the expression of detoxifying genes that protect the host from collateral damage caused by this defense response. Finally, the FSHR-1 pathway is important for the ability of worms to discriminate pathogenic from benign bacteria and subsequently initiate an aversive learning program that promotes selective pathogen avoidance

Perceptions of Collaboration and Service Integration as Strategic Alternatives: An Examination of Social Service Nonprofit Organizations in the Late 1990s

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) have historically dealt with the problem of trying to build organizational capacity while simultaneously dealing with scarce resources. Consequently, practitioners and scholars continue to offer assistance to nonprofits in the development of techniques aimed at addressing these situations. Recent literature shows a push towards innovation, the use of new organizational tax structures, and/or the use of commercial revenue generating activities as plausible strategic alternatives for dealing with declining resources. While these techniques show promise, they typically are reserved for larger nonprofits (as measured by their funding base) and those nonprofits with missions that lend themselves for such activities (e.g., health care, arts and culture). But what about other NPOs that may not be willing to undertake such risk, or who do not have missions that can embrace commercial activity? This article examines two strategies, collaboration and service integration, techniques that are perceived by practitioners to show promise for organizations needing to build capacity, and/or generate new or maintain resources. Based upon data yielded from a national mail survey of social service nonprofit organizations, this article provides an empirical analysis that highlights the extent to which nonprofit social service organizations were engaged in these techniques; and from the perspective of nonprofit upper managers, the impacts their respective nonprofit organizations experienced. Using these data and perspectives, a set of recommendations are derived for today’s organizations to consider. Finding mechanisms to building capacity while increasing organizational resources, including income stream, has never been an easy endeavor for many social service nonprofit organizations. As the number of nonprofit organizations continues to rise, the nonprofit sector faces ever-increasing pressure to become more self-sufficient and resilient, while becoming less reliant upon government funding and charity (Arnold & Edwards, 1998). As nonprofit administrators and academicians probe new and innovative ways for assisting nonprofit organizations in the development of new revenue streams and resources (e.g., innovation, the emergence of new organizational tax structures, the use of commercial activity); the call for collaboration and service integration are still being touted as a plausible means for generating and/or saving resources. This article examines these techniques as a means to develop and enhance organizational resources and strengthen capacity from the perspective of nonprofit practitioners

Cultivation of stable, reproducible microbial communities from different fecal donors using minibioreactor arrays (MBRAs)

Background: Continuous-flow culture models are one tool for studying complex interactions between members of human fecal microbiotas because they allow studies to be completed during an extended period of time under conditions where pH, nutrient availability, and washout of waste products and dead cells can be controlled. Because many of the existing well-validated continuous-flow models are large and complex, we were interested in developing a simpler continuous-flow system that would allow microbial community dynamics to be examined in higher throughput while still maintaining complex microbial communities. To this end, we developed minibioreactor arrays (MBRAs), small volume bioreactors (15 ml) that allow simultaneous cultivation of up to 48 microbial communities in a single anaerobic chamber. Results: We used MBRA to characterize the microbial community dynamics of replicate reactors inoculated from three different human fecal donors and reactors seeded with feces pooled from these three donors. We found that MBRA could be used to efficiently cultivate complex microbial communities that were a subset of the initial fecal inoculum (15–25 % of fecal OTUs initially observed). After an initial acclimation period of approximately 1 week, communities in each reactor stabilized and exhibited day-to-day variation similar to that observed in stable mouse fecal communities. Replicate reactors were predominately populated by shared core microbial communities; variation between replicate reactors was primarily driven by shifts in abundance of shared operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Consistent with differences between fecal donors, MBRA communities present in reactors seeded with different fecal samples had distinct composition and structure. Conclusions: From these analyses, we conclude that MBRAs can be used to cultivate communities that recapitulate key features of human fecal communities and are a useful tool to facilitate higher-throughput studies of the dynamics of these communities