Achieving culturally competent cancer care: A qualitative study drawing on the perspectives of cancer survivors and oncology nurses.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to understand how cancer survivors and nurses define and experience cultural care and to make recommendations toward improvements in nursing practice. METHODS: The study used a descriptive qualitative design. Data were collected from 29 cancer survivors and 23 oncology nurses by using in-depth semi-structured interviews. Data were transcribed and themes identified. RESULTS: Three themes emerged from the data; 1) cross-cultural care expectations, 2) reality of cross-cultural care activities, and 3) improving culturally sensitive care. CONCLUSIONS: The data reveals that relationship between the nurse and cancer survivor is critical to an awareness of cultural needs but that nurses need help in raising their own awareness and appreciation of the benefits and impact of culturally competent care. It is only through creating self-awareness amongst nurses, in the context of each survivor and their needs and beliefs, will the standards of practice improve delivering the health outcomes that those in their care deserve

Data vaults: a database welcome to scientific file repositories

Efficient management and exploration of high-volume scientific file repositories have become pivotal for advancement in science. We propose to demonstrate the Data Vault, an extension of the database system architecture that transparently opens scientific file repositories for efficient in-database processing and exploration. The Data Vault facilitates science data analysis using high-level declarative languages, such as the traditional SQL and the novel array-oriented SciQL. Data of interest are loaded from the attached repository in a just-in-time manner without need for up-front data ingestion. The demo is built around concrete implementations of the Data Vault for two scientific use cases: seismic time series and Earth observation images. The seismic Data Vault uses the queries submitted by the audience to illustrate the internals of Data Vault functioning by revealing the mechanisms of dynamic query plan generation and on-demand external data ingestion. The image Data Vault shows an application view from the perspective of data mining researchers