Involking silvern voices in healthcare : transforming practice by engaging older adults in collaborative partnerships

Canada's population is aging. This growing trend will ultimately have an impact on nursing practice as older individuals continue to seek healthcare services. Nurses must be able to work in collaboration with the older population to provide quality care. This action research study explored participative healthcare from an older adult's perspective. This study revealed that older adults prefer to be active participants in their care. The major theme that emerged was true partnership. Three sub-themes that emerged were communication, respect, and trust. These three sub-themes work in unity to contribute to a healthcare experience that exemplifies true partnerships. This study proposes a definition of true partnership as being open to and inviting mutual communication in an atmosphere that encourages equity sharing of information contributing to respect and the development of trust that results in confident collaboration in care

Numerical simulation of surface acoustic wave actuated enantiomer separation by the finite element immersed boundary method

Enantiomers are chiral objects such as chemical molecules that can be distinguished by their handedness. They typically occur as racemic compounds of left- and right-handed species which may have completely different properties. Therefore, in applications such as drug design in pharmacology, enantiomer separation is an important issue. Here, we present a new technology for enantiomer separation by surface acoustic wave generated vorticity patterns consisting of pairwise counter-rotating vortices in a carrier fluid. The enantiomers are injected onto the surface of the fluid between two counter-rotating vortices such that right-handed (left-handed) enantiomers get attracted by left-rotating (right-rotating) vortices. In particular, we are concerned with the numerical simulation of this separation process by an application of the finite element immersed boundary method which relies on the solution of a coupled system consisting of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and the equations of motion of the immersed enantiomers described with respect to an Eulerian and a Lagrangian coordinate system. For a model system of deformable, initially L-shaped enantiomers the results of the numerical simulations reveal a perfect separation

Transport at interfaces in lipid membranes and enantiomer separation

We study the dynamics and formation of differently ordered lateral phases of interfacial lipid layers for two types of lipid systems, a vesicle-supported bilayer and a Langmuir–Blodgett monolayer, both in experiment and by simulation. Similarly, we investigate the dynamics of objects embedded in a simpler interface given by an air–water surface and demonstrate the surface-acoustic-wave-actuated separation of enantiomers (chiral objects) on the surface of the carrier fluid. It turns out that the dynamics and the separation of the phases do not only depend on parameters such as temperature, mobilities and line tension but also on the mechanics of the lipid layers subjected to exterior forces as, for instance, compression, extensional and shear forces in film-balance experiments. Since the mechanical behavior of lipid layers is viscoelastic, we use a modeling approach based on the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations with a viscoelastic stress term and a capillary term, a convective Jeffrey (Oldroyd) equation of viscoelasticity, and the Cahn–Hilliard equation with a transport term. The numerical simulations are based on C0-interior-penalty discontinuous-Galerkin methods for the Cahn– Hilliard equation. Model-validation results and the verification of the simulation results by experimental data are presented. The feasibility of enantiomer separation by surface-acoustic-wave-generated vorticity patterns is shown both experimentally and through numerical simulations. This technique is cost-effective and provides an extremely high time resolution of the dynamics of the separation process compared to more traditional approaches. The experimental setup is an enhanced Langmuir–Blodgett film balance with a surface-acoustic-wave-generated vorticity pattern of the fluid, where model enantiomers (custom-made photoresist particles) float on the surface of the carrier fluid. For the simulations, we propose a finite element immersed boundary method (FEIBM) for deformable enantiomers and a fictitious-domain approach based on a distributed Lagrangian multiplier finite element immersed boundary method (DLM-FEIBM) for rigid chiral objects, both of which lead to simulation results consistent with experiments