Health, Climate Change and Energy Vulnerability: A Retrospective Assessment of Strategic Health Authority Policy and Practice in England

Background: A number of policy documents suggest that health services should be taking climate change and sustainability seriously and recommendations have been made to mitigate and adapt to the challenges health care providers will face. Actions include, for example, moving towards locally sourced food supplies, reducing waste, energy consumption and travel, and including sustainability in policies and strategies. A Strategic Health Authority (SHA) is part of the National Health Service (NHS) in England. They are responsible for developing strategies for the local health services and ensuring high-quality performance. They manage the NHS locally and are a key link between the U.K. Department of Health and the NHS. They also ensure that national priorities are integrated into local plans. Thus they are in a key position to influence policies and practices to mitigate and adapt to the impact of climate change and promote sustainability.Aim: The aim of this study was to review publicly available documents produced by Strategic Health Authorities (SHA) to assess the extent to which current activity and planning locally takes into consideration climate change and energy vulnerability.Methods: A retrospective thematic content analysis of publicly available materials was undertaken by two researchers over a six month period in 2008. These materials were obtained from the websites of the 10 SHAs in England. Materials included annual reports, plans, policies and strategy documents.Results: Of the 10 SHAs searched, 4 were found to have an absence of content related to climate change and sustainability. Of the remaining 6 SHAs that did include content related to climate change and energy vulnerability on their websites consistent themes were seen to emerge. These included commitment to a regional sustainability framework in collaboration with other agencies in the pursuit and promotion of sustainable development.Results indicate that many SHAs in England have yet to embrace sustainability, or to integrate preparations for climate change and energy vulnerability within their organisational strategies. Evidence also suggests that SHAs that have recognised the importance of sustainability within their documentation and policies have yet to fully demonstrate this in practice through the implementation of these policies.Conclusions: Further research is required to investigate means by which SHAs (U.K.) and agencies responsible for health service policy in other countries may be enabled to include a greater consideration of sustainability and climate change within their policies, and to find effective ways of implementing these policies within daily working practice

Possibility of Macroscopic resonant Tunneling near the Superconductor- Insulator Transition in YBaCuO Thin Films

Experimental results of I-V characteristics near the superconductor-insulator transition observed for disorder-tuned YBaCuO thinfilms are presented. The I-V characteristics exibit new quasiperiodic structures as a function of the current. The current interval, the number of the dI/dV peaks, and the magnetic field dependence of the peaks are consistent with the theoretical predictions of the resonant tunneling of a phase particle ina tilted-cosine potential for asingle Josephson junction with small capacitance.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, in press (Europhys. Lett.

Fetal Outcomes among Grand Multiparous and Multiparous Women in Mulago Hospital, Uganda

Objective: To compare fetal outcomes among grand multiparous (para 5-9) and multiparous (para 2-4) delivering in Mulago hospital, Uganda.Design: Prospective cohort study.Setting: Mulago hospital, Uganda.Subjects: One hundred and fifty six grand multiparous and multiparous women were recruited on admission in labour ward and followed up through labour and immediate post partum period. Fetal outcomes among the two groups were collected and analyzed.Results: The admissions to SCU were similar in the two groups i.e. 11(7%) GMP vs. 11(7%) MP, the number of fresh still births was higher among the grandmultiparas 13(8.3%) GMP vs. 7(4.5%) MP though this was not statistically significant. The fetal weight did not significantly differ in the two groups.Conclusion: There was no difference in fetal outcomes among GMPs when compared to MPs.Key words: Grand multiparous (GMP), Multiparous (MP), Birth weight,  Special Care Unit (SCU), Apgar score, Fresh Still Birth (FSB)

<Session 5: Wildlife Tracking I>Simultaneous measurements of breaths and energy expenditure reveal the dive tactics of sea turtles

19–22 May 2022 Kyoto, JapanAir-breathing divers are assumed to have evolved to apportion their time between surface and underwater periods to maximize the benefit gained from diving activities. However, whether they change their time allocation depending on the aim of the dive is still unknown. This may be particularly crucial for 'surfacers' because they dive for various purposes in addition to foraging. In this study, we counted breath events at the surface and estimated oxygen consumption during resting, foraging, and other dives in 11 green turtles (Chelonia mydas) in the wild. Breath events were counted by a head-mounted acceleration logger or direct observation based on an animal-borne video logger, and oxygen consumption was estimated by measuring overall dynamic body acceleration. Our results indicate that green turtles maximized their submerged time, following this with 5-7 breaths to replenish oxygen for resting dives. However, they changed their dive tactic during foraging and other dives; they surfaced without depleting their oxygen content, followed by only a few breaths for effective foraging and locomotion. These dichotomous surfacing tactics would be the result of behavioral modifications by turtles depending on the aim of each dive

Mechanism of Lattice-Distortion-Induced Electric-Polarization Flop in the Multiferroic Perovskite Manganites

Magnetoelectric phase diagrams of the perovskite manganites, Eu1-xYxMnO3 and Gd1-xTbxMnO3, are theoretically studied. We first construct a microscopic model, and then analyze the model using the Monte-Carlo method. We reproduce the diagrams, which contain two different multiferroic states, i.e., the ab-plane spin cycloid with electric polarization P//a and the bc-plane spin cycloid with P//c. We reveal that their competition originates from a conflict between the single-ion anisotropy and the Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya interaction, which is controlled by the second-neighbor spin exchanges enhanced by the GdFeO3-type distortion. This leads to a P flop from a to c with increasing x in agreement with the experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures. Recalculated results after correcting errors in the assignment of DM vectors. The conclusion is not affecte