Developing and piloting a communication assessment tool assessing patient perspectives on communication with pharmacists (CAT-Pharm)

Background: Effective communication strategies in health care help to enhance patient empowerment and improve clinical outcomes. Objective: Adapt the original Communication Assessment (CAT) instrument for the pharmacist profession (CAT-Pharm) and to test its validity and reliability in two different settings. Setting: Five hospital pharmacies in Italy and five community pharmacies in Malta. Method: Pilot study involving a standardized multi-step process adhering to internationally accepted and recommended guidelines. Corrections and adjustments to the translation addressed linguistic factors and cultural components. CAT-Pharm, compared to the original CAT, maintained 10 out of the 14 items: one was slightly modified; three were changed to better fit the pharmacist role; one was added. Main outcome measure: CAT-Pharm development and testing its practicality to Assess patient perceptions of pharmacists’ interpersonal and communication skills. Results CAT-Pharm was tested on 97 patients in the Italian setting and 150 patients in the Maltese setting to assess the practicality of the tool and its usefulness in investigating gaps and priorities for improving pharmacist-patient communication. Results: Show reliability and internal validity of the CAT-Pharm tool. The analysis of patient perceptions of communication with the pharmacist in Italy indicated differences from that in Malta. The different settings provided insight into the utility of CAT-Pharm. Conclusion: This study provided a valid and reliable tool that could be applied to assess patient perception of the pharmacist's communication abilities

Continuization of Timed Petri Nets: From Performance Evaluation to Observation and Control

Abstract. State explosion is a fundamental problem in the analysis and synthesis of discrete event systems. Continuous Petri nets can be seen as a relaxation of discrete models allowing more efficient (in some cases polynomial time) analysis and synthesis algorithms. Nevertheless computational costs can be reduced at the expense of the analyzability of some properties. Even more, some net systems do not allow any kind of continuization. The present work first considers these aspects and some of the alternative formalisms usable for continuous relaxations of discrete systems. Particular emphasis is done later on the presentation of some results concerning performance evaluation, parametric design and marking (i.e., state) observation and control. Even if a significant amount of results are available today for continuous net systems, many essential issues are still not solved. A list of some of these are given in the introduction as an invitation to work on them.

Removing the wall around welfare: What do We learn from A8 immigrants in the UK?

A relevant question within the growing debate on immigration policy concerns the impact of granting immigrants free access to the welfare system. I analyse the case of the European 2004 Accession (A8) countries and the lift of the temporary limitations to benefit eligibility that citizens from these countries faced until April 2011 in the UK. When the restrictions are relaxed A8 immigrants claim more benefits, but labour supply adjustments occur mainly for those who are more in need for assistance, namely women and the less educated, especially in the presence of children. Moreover, I provide evidence on two potential indirect effects. First, my results support the absence of magnet effects, as arrivals do not change from before to after the change in eligibility rules. Second, I show that granting immigrants access to welfare does not change the composition of the incoming flows

This site is closed! The effect of decommissioning mining waste facilities on mortality in the long run

Mining is typically linked to industrial development. However, waste generated by mineral extraction is a major source of environmental deterioration. This poses a trade-off between preserving the environment and fostering growth. We assess the long-run consequences of reduced exposure to mining waste on health by exploiting municipality-level variation in the staggered closure of facilities that treat and store mining waste in Italy over the course of five decades. We find that shutting down waste facilities decreases decadal mortality by 126 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants (i.e., by nearly 15%), while also improving the literacy and employment rates of the resident population. Our results point to positive health effects dominating potentially negative wealth effects

Management information system adoption at the farm level: evidence from the literature

This paper reviews the academic contributions that have emerged to date on the broad definition of farm-level management information systems (MISs). The purpose is twofold: (1) to identify the theories used in the literature to study the adoption of digital technologies and (2) to identify the drivers of and barriers to the adoption of such technologies. The literature review was based on a comprehensive review of contributions published in the 1998\u20132019 period. The search was both automated and manual, browsing through references of works previously found via high-quality digital libraries.Diffusion of innovations (DOIs) is the most frequently used theoretical framework in the literature reviewed, though it is often combined with other innovation adoption theories. In addition, farms\u2019 and farmers\u2019 traits, together with technological features, play a key role in explaining the adoption of these technologies. Research limitations/implications: So far, research has positioned the determinants of digital technology adoption mainly within the boundaries of the farm. Practical implications: On the practical level, the extensive determinants\u2019 review has potential to serve the aim of policymakers and technology industries, to clearly and thoroughly understand adoption dynamics and elaborate specific strategies to deal with them. This study\u2019s contribution to the existing body of knowledge on the farm-level adoption of digital technologies is twofold: (1) it combines smart farming and existing technologies within the same category of farm-level MIS and (2) it extends the analysis to studies which not only focus directly on adoption but also on software architecture design and development

Distributed Fiedler Vector Estimation with Application to Desynchronization of Harmonic Oscillator Networks

The Fiedler vector of a graph is the eigenvector corresponding to the algebraic connectivity, which is the second-smallest eigenvalue (counting multiple eigenvalues separately) of the corresponding Laplacian matrix. We propose a continuous-time distributed control protocol to drive the value of the state variables of a network toward the Fiedler vector, up to a scale factor. Our protocol is unbiased and robust with respect to the initial network state, but the knowledge of the algebraic connectivity is required. By means of the proposed control law, we design a local state feedback that achieves desynchronization on arbitrary undirected connected networks of diffusively coupled harmonic oscillators. We provide numerical simulations to corroborate the theoretical results