Eating Christmas Cookies, Whole-wheat Bread and Frozen Chicken in the Kindergarten: Doing Pedagogy by Other Means

The study presented here explores eating as a pedagogical practice by paying attention to arrangements of things such as Christmas cookies, whole-wheat and white bread, frozen chicken, plates, chairs, tables, and freezers. Through a series of ethnographic research examples from German and Brazilian preschools, it investigates how eating in the kindergarten can be a sensual pleasure, a health risk, an ethnic custom, or a civil right within different local histories. Through specific arrangements of foods and other things, young children are educated to eat with moderation, to change their ethnic dietary habits, or to be "modern citizens". Pedagogy can thus consist of doing public health, doing ethnic identity, or doing citizenship. Eating is an important way of doing pedagogy in early childhood education and care settings. © 2013 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

Patient Engagement and Coaching for Health: The PEACH study – a cluster randomised controlled trial using the telephone to coach people with type 2 diabetes to engage with their GPs to improve diabetes care: a study protocol

BACKGROUND: The PEACH study is based on an innovative 'telephone coaching' program that has been used effectively in a post cardiac event trial. This intervention will be tested in a General Practice setting in a pragmatic trial using existing Practice Nurses (PN) as coaches for people with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Actual clinical care often fails to achieve standards, that are based on evidence that self-management interventions (educational and psychological) and intensive pharmacotherapy improve diabetes control. Telephone coaching in our study focuses on both. This paper describes our study protocol, which aims to test whether goal focused telephone coaching in T2D can improve diabetes control and reduce the treatment gap between guideline based standards and actual clinical practice. METHODS/DESIGN: In a cluster randomised controlled trial, general practices employing Practice Nurses (PNs) are randomly allocated to an intervention or control group. We aim to recruit 546 patients with poorly controlled T2D (HbA1c >7.5%) from 42 General Practices that employ PNs in Melbourne, Australia. PNs from General Practices allocated to the intervention group will be trained in diabetes telephone coaching focusing on biochemical targets addressing both patient self-management and engaging patients to work with their General Practitioners (GPs) to intensify pharmacological treatment according to the study clinical protocol. Patients of intervention group practices will receive 8 telephone coaching sessions and one face-to-face coaching session from existing PNs over 18 months plus usual care and outcomes will be compared to the control group, who will only receive only usual care from their GPs. The primary outcome is HbA1c levels and secondary outcomes include cardiovascular disease risk factors, behavioral risk factors and process of care measures. DISCUSSION: Understanding how to achieve comprehensive treatment of T2D in a General Practice setting is the focus of the PEACH study. This study explores the potential role for PNs to help reduce the treatment and outcomes gap in people with T2D by using telephone coaching. The intervention, if found to be effective, has potential to be sustained and embedded within real world General Practice

Epidemiology of heart failure: Study of Heart failure in the Australian Primary carE setting (SHAPE)

AIMS: At present, there is no robust information on the prevalence and incidence of heart failure (HF) in the general Australian community. The present study of primary care data sought to estimate the prevalence and incidence of HF in the community and to describe the demographic and clinical profile of Australians with HF. METHODS AND RESULTS: We undertook a retrospective cohort study based on analysis of anonymized medical records of adult patients cared for at 43 Australian general practices between 1 July 2013 and 30 June 2018. Data were extracted from coded and uncoded fields in electronic medical records. The prevalence and annual incidence of HF were calculated, along with 95% confidence intervals, using the 'active' population of people who were regular attenders at the practices. Age-standardized estimates were also derived using the 2017 Australian population as reference. The mean age of the population with HF was 69.8 years, 50.6% were female, and mean body mass index was 31.2 kg/m2 . The age-standardized prevalence was 2.199% [95% confidence interval (CI): 2.168-2.23%], and the age-standardized annual incidence was 0.348% (95% CI: 0.342-0.354%). These estimates accord with almost 420 000 people living with HF in Australia in 2017, and >66 000 new cases of HF occurring that year. Only 18.9% of patients with definite HF had this formally captured as a 'diagnosis' in their medical record. HF was more frequent among those of lower socio-economic status. CONCLUSIONS: HF is common in Australia. The majority of HF patients do not have this diagnosis optimally noted in their primary care medical records

Interfacial dominated ferromagnetism in nanograined ZnO: a μSR and DFT study

Diamagnetic oxides can, under certain conditions, become ferromagnetic at room temperature and therefore are promising candidates for future material in spintronic devices. Contrary to early predictions, doping ZnO with uniformly distributed magnetic ions is not essential to obtain ferromagnetic samples. Instead, the nanostructure seems to play the key role, as room temperature ferromagnetism was also found in nanograined, undoped ZnO. However, the origin of room temperature ferromagnetism in primarily non–magnetic oxides like ZnO is still unexplained and a controversial subject within the scientific community. Using low energy muon spin relaxation in combination with SQUID and TEM techniques, we demonstrate that the magnetic volume fraction is strongly related to the sample volume fraction occupied by grain boundaries. With molecular dynamics and density functional theory we find ferromagnetic coupled electron states in ZnO grain boundaries. Our results provide evidence and a microscopic model for room temperature ferromagnetism in oxides