Twelve Tips for Optimising Medical Student Fitness to Practise

Fitness to practise processes are in place to safeguard patient safety and maintain professional standards. This Twelve Tips article provides context to medical student fitness to practise in the UK and situates process under the regulator and the university. The Tips examine some of the dichotomies and pitfalls in an increasingly litigious field and provide operational recommendations. The authors draw on their experience across several medical schools and highlight some of the complexities at play. Fairness through diverse panel constituency, and education and training for panel members are highlighted. The potential impact of mental health diagnoses on outcomes is considered, alongside the need for support for practitioners involved in this high-stakes process. The tips outlined are broadly transferable to other regulated programmes nationally and internationally and link to postgraduate practice. The authors hope to ignite a dialogue in an area with limited benchmarking and literature

Quality Customer Service as a Competitive Advantage in the Telecommunication Industry in the Western Region of Ghana

The rise and fall of many organizations in Ghana in recent years calls for an evaluation of reasons given in many research works. The paper presents such evaluation of reasons presented in many literatures which are popular, linking it to organizations such as Telecommunication Companies which are struggling to survive competition in Ghana. Many writers have attributed the problems with different factors. After many years of looking in to the problem, the researchers have come out with their own conclusions which are regarded as the real issue. The paper analyses the evidence obtained from the survey of the customers. It seeks to explain why quality customer service plays a major role for the survival of many of the telecommunication companies drawing upon the evidence from the previous literatures. Based on the literature review and a pilot study, many customer requirements and features were identified and were used to determine the level of service quality. Thus, the closing chapter deals with the summary of the major findings, recommendations and conclusions. The eligibility criteria for the conclusion are the sample of those respondents of the telecommunication companies in the Western Region of Ghana. Keywords: Quality Customer Service, Competitive Advantage, Telecommunication Companies, Western Region, Ghana

The Impact of Whatsapp Messenger Usage on Students Performance in Tertiary Institutions in Ghana

The perceived high level of usage of social networking applications amongst students of tertiary institutions in Ghana is inevitable. However, little is understood from empirical viewpoint about the intensity, of usage of whatsapp messenger and its impact on the academic performance of students in tertiary institutions. This study seeks to empirically identify the impact of social network (whatsapp messenger) on the performance of tertiary students in Ghana from the perspective of the students.  To achieve this, 50 students from five tertiary institutions were interviewed and 500 questionnaires were administered to students from same institutions. The study revealed that, whatsapp instead of making communication easier and faster thereby enhancing effective flow of information and idea sharing among students, rather has impacted negatively on the performance of tertiary students in Ghana .The study among other things unveiled the following: whatsapp takes much of students study time , results in procrastination related problems, destroys students’ spellings and grammatical construction of sentences, leads to lack of concentration during lectures,   results in difficulty in balancing online activities (whatsapp) and academic preparation and  distracts students from completing their assignments and adhering to their private studies time table. Keywords: Whatsapp Messenger, Impact, Students Performance, Tertiary institutions, Ghana

The Tarasoff rule: the implications of interstate variation and gaps in professional training

Recent events have revived questions about the circumstances that ought to trigger therapists' duty to warn or protect. There is extensive interstate variation in duty to warn or protect statutes enacted and rulings made in the wake of the California Tarasoff ruling. These duties may be codified in legislative statutes, established in common law through court rulings, or remain unspecified. Furthermore, the duty to warn or protect is not only variable between states but also has been dynamic across time. In this article, we review the implications of this variability and dynamism, focusing on three sets of questions: first, what legal and ethics-related challenges do therapists in each of the three broad categories of states (states that mandate therapists to warn or protect, states that permit therapists to breach confidentiality for warnings but have no mandate, and states that give no guidance) face in handling threats of violence? Second, what training do therapists and other professionals involved in handling violent threats receive, and is this training adequate for the task that these professionals are charged with? Third, how have recent court cases changed the scope of the duty? We conclude by pointing to gaps in the empirical and conceptual scholarship surrounding the duty to warn or protect

Stability of a tethered satellite system

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76302/1/AIAA-1991-474-527.pd

Bad World: The Negativity Bias In International Politics

A major puzzle in international relations is why states privilege negative over positive information. States tend to inflate threats, exhibit loss aversion, and learn more from failures than from successes. Rationalist accounts fail to explain this phenomenon, because systematically overweighting bad over good may in fact undermine state interests. New research in psychology, however, offers an explanation. The “negativity bias” has emerged as a fundamental principle of the human mind, in which people\u27s response to positive and negative information is asymmetric. Negative factors have greater effects than positive factors across a wide range of psychological phenomena, including cognition, motivation, emotion, information processing, decision-making, learning, and memory. Put simply, bad is stronger than good. Scholars have long pointed to the role of positive biases, such as overconfidence, in causing war, but negative biases are actually more pervasive and may represent a core explanation for patterns of conflict. Positive and negative dispositions apply in different contexts. People privilege negative information about the external environment and other actors, but positive information about themselves. The coexistence of biases can increase the potential for conflict. Decisionmakers simultaneously exaggerate the severity of threats and exhibit overconfidence about their capacity to deal with them. Overall, the negativity bias is a potent force in human judgment and decisionmaking, with important implications for international relations theory and practice

Social workers\u27 perceptions of psychotropic medication use on children and adolescents in foster care

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the attitudes of social workers\u27 regarding psychotropic medication use on children in foster care. This study also addressed any prospective concerns that social workers may have had as they relate to psychotropic medications being administered to children in foster care

Individual variation evades the Prisoner's Dilemma

BACKGROUND: The Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) is a widely used paradigm to study cooperation in evolutionary biology, as well as in fields as diverse as moral philosophy, sociology, economics and politics. Players are typically assumed to have fixed payoffs for adopting certain strategies, which depend only on the strategy played by the opponent. However, fixed payoffs are not realistic in nature. Utility functions and the associated payoffs from pursuing certain strategies vary among members of a population with numerous factors. In biology such factors include size, age, social status and expected life span; in economics they include socio-economic status, personal preference and past experience; and in politics they include ideology, political interests and public support. Thus, no outcome is identical for any two different players. RESULTS: We show that relaxing the assumption of fixed payoffs leads to frequent violations of the payoff structure required for a Prisoner's Dilemma. With variance twice the payoff interval in a linear PD matrix, for example, only 16% of matrices are valid. CONCLUSIONS: A single player lacking a valid PD matrix destroys the conditions for a Prisoner's Dilemma, so between any two players, PD games themselves are fewer still (3% in this case). This may explain why the Prisoner's Dilemma has hardly been found in nature, despite the fact that it has served as a ubiquitous (and still instructive) model in studies of the evolution of cooperation

A nucleotide resolution map of Top2-linked DNA breaks in the yeast and human genome

DNA topoisomerases are required to resolve DNA topological stress. Despite this essential role, abortive topoisomerase activity generates aberrant protein-linked DNA breaks, jeopardising genome stability. Here, to understand the genomic distribution and mechanisms underpinning topoisomerase-induced DNA breaks, we map Top2 DNA cleavage with strand-specific nucleotide resolution across the S. cerevisiae and human genomes—and use the meiotic Spo11 protein to validate the broad applicability of this method to explore the role of diverse topoisomerase family members. Our data characterises Mre11-dependent repair in yeast and defines two strikingly different fractions of Top2 activity in humans: tightly localised CTCF-proximal, and broadly distributed transcription-proximal, the latter correlated with gene length and expression. Moreover, single nucleotide accuracy reveals the influence primary DNA sequence has upon Top2 cleavage—distinguishing sites likely to form canonical DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) from those predisposed to form strand-biased DNA single-strand breaks (SSBs) induced by etoposide (VP16) in vivo