Pharmacist-led medication-related needs assessment in rural Ghana

Access to both essential and non-essential medications is increasing worldwide. While increased drug access is a positive development, many countries lack the infrastructure for appropriate distribution, administration, and monitoring of drug therapy. The objective of this study was to assess medication and pharmacy-related needs in the rural Ashanti Region of Ghana and to determine barriers of achieving optimal health outcomes in this region. Qualitative domains and associated themes were identified by observations from integration into community culture and from conduction of semi-structured interviews with local community leaders, health workers, or those with knowledge of health-related issues. Eight semi-structured interviews were completed and four thematic domains were identified; access to care, resource shortages, medication safety, and education/training. Barriers and challenges identified under each thematic domain included (but were not limited to) availability of clean water sources, shortages of medications and diagnostic equipment, financial considerations, misunderstanding of medication indications and directions for use, and shortages of qualified pharmacy or dispensary staff. Most respondents also expressed a need for continuing education and training of healthcare personnel. It can be concluded that there is a need for development of health services related to medications. Locally supported interventions and future research should focus on barriers and challenges identified from the thematic domains

Human Decompression Modelling

At present, no decompression algorithm is able to predict safe decompression for all dive scenarios. In practice, empirical adjustments are made by experienced organisations or divers in order to improve decompression profiles for the range of depths and durations needed on any particular dive. Bubble formation and growth in the human body are the fundamental causes of decompression sickness, and it is believed that there is significant scope for incorporating better modelling of these processes into the design of decompression algorithms. VR Technology is a leading supplier of technical dive computers. The company is interested in expanding upon an existing algorithm (the Variable Gradient Model - VGM), which is used to design ascent profiles/decompression schedules and thereby mitigate the risk of decompression sickness in divers. The Study Group took the approach of trying to extend the existing Haldane model to account more explicitly for the formation of bubbles. By extending the model to include bubble dynamics it was expected that some physical understanding could be gained for the existing modifications to some of the parameters. The modelling that occurred consisted of first looking at the Haldane model and then considering a single small isolated bubble in each of the compartments and interpreting the predictions of the model in terms of decompression profiles

A method for detecting characteristic patterns in social interactions with an application to handover interactions

Social interactions are a defining behavioural trait of social animals. Discovering characteristic patterns in the display of such behaviour is one of the fundamental endeavours in behavioural biology and psychology, as this promises to facilitate the general understanding, classification, prediction and even automation of social interactions. We present a novel approach to study characteristic patterns, including both sequential and synchronous actions in social interactions. The key concept in our analysis is to represent social interactions as sequences of behavioural states and to focus on changes in behavioural states shown by individuals rather than on the duration for which they are displayed. We extend techniques from data mining and bioinformatics to detect frequent patterns in these sequences and to assess how these patterns vary across individuals or changes in interaction tasks. To illustrate our approach and to demonstrate its potential, we apply it to novel data on a simple physical interaction, where one person hands a cup to another person. Our findings advance the understanding of handover interactions, a benchmark scenario for social interactions. More generally, we suggest that our approach permits a general perspective for studying social interactions

Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. I. Virialization

(Abridged) Galaxies form in hierarchically assembling dark matter halos. With cosmological three dimensional adaptive mesh refinement simulations, we explore in detail the virialization of baryons in the concordance cosmology, including optically thin primordial gas cooling. We focus on early protogalaxies with virial temperatures of 10^4 K and their progenitors. Without cooling, virial heating occurs in shocks close to the virial radius for material falling in from voids. Material in dense filaments penetrates deeper to about half that radius. With cooling the virial shock position shrinks and also the filaments reach scales as small as a third the virial radius. The temperatures in protogalaxies found in adiabatic simulations decrease by a factor of two from the center and show flat entropy cores. In cooling halos the gas reaches virial equilibrium with the dark matter potential through its turbulent velocities. We observe turbulent Mach numbers ranging from one to three in the cooling cases. This turbulence is driven by the large scale merging and interestingly remains supersonic in the centers of these early galaxies even in the absence of any feedback processes. The virial theorem is shown to approximately hold over 3 orders of magnitude in length scale with the turbulent pressure prevailing over the thermal energy. The turbulent velocity distributions are Maxwellian and by far dominate the small rotation velocities associated with the total angular momentum of the galaxies. Decomposing the velocity field using the Cauchy-Stokes theorem, we show that ample amounts of vorticity are present around shocks even at the very centers of these objects.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to ApJ on 8 March 2007. Revised manuscript. Comments welcom

Social work education in the Arabian Gulf: Challenges and opportunities

© 2017 Taylor & Francis. Religion is an integral part of life in Islamic countries in the Arabian Gulf nations of Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and thus it informs social work education, practice, and policies. With the expansion of social work education around the world—both through Western universities opening international campuses and local universities developing social work programs—any Western faculty is part of developing social work education programs outside of their homeland. The development of social work education programs outside the Western world requires intentionality to avoid colonization (or recolonization) by, for example, adoption of inappropriate curricula and textbooks and/or promotion of culturally irrelevant or inappropriate interventions. Additional challenges, ethical considerations, and knowledge are needed to develop culturally relevant undergraduate and graduate social work education programs in the Arab Gulf region. This article focuses on the experience of Western social work educators in the Arab Gulf who are all Western-born and Western-trained social work faculty members who worked extensively in social work education in the Arabian Gulf region. They have developed programs in these nations and taught in both BSW and MSW programs in the Arab Gulf