16,479 research outputs found
EAPC task force on education for psychologists in palliative care
It is argued that psychological aspects of care and psychosocial problems are essential components of palliative care. However, the provision of appropriate services remains somewhat arbitrary. Unlike medical and nursing care, which are clearly delivered by doctors and nurses respectively, psychological and psychosocial support in palliative care are not assigned exclusively to psychologists. It is generally expected that all professionals working in palliative care should have some knowledge of the psychological dynamics in terminal illness, as well as skills in communication and psychological risk assessment. On the one hand, palliative care education programmes for nurses and doctors comprise a considerable amount of psychological and psychosocial content. On the other hand, only a few palliative care associations provide explicit information on the role and tasks of psychologists in palliative care. Psychologists’ associations do not deal much with this issue either. If they refer to it at all, it is in the context of the care of the aged, end-of-life care or how to deal with grief
The SF36 as an outcome measure of services for end stage renal failure
OBJECTIVE: —To evaluate the use of the short
form 36 (SF36) as a measure of health
related quality of life of patients with end
stage renal failure, document the results,
and investigate factors, including mode of
treatment, which may influence it.
DESIGN: Cross sectional survey of patients
with end stage renal failure, with the
standard United Kingdom version of the
SF36 supplemented by specific questions
for end stage renal failure.
SETTING: A teaching hospital renal unit.
Subjects and methods—660 patients
treated at the Sheffield Kidney Institute by
haemodialysis, peritoneal dialysis, and
transplantation. Internal consistency, percentage
of maximal or minimal responses,
SF36 scores, effect sizes, correlations
between independent predictor variables
and individual dimension scores of the
SF36. Multiple regression analysis of the
SF36 scores for the physical functioning,
vitality, and mental health dimensions
against treatment, age, risk (comorbidity)
score, and other independent variables.
RESULTS: A high response rate was
achieved. Internal consistency was good.
There were no floor or ceiling effects other
than for the two “role” dimensions. Overall
health related quality of life was poor
compared with the general population.
Having a functioning transplant was a significant
predictor of higher score in the
three dimensions (physical functioning,
vitality, and mental health) for which
multiple regression models were constructed.
Age, sex, comorbidity, duration
of treatment, level of social and emotional
support, household numbers, and hospital
dialysis were also (variably) significant
predictors.
CONCLUSIONS: The SF36 is a practical and
consistent questionnaire in this context,
and there is evidence to support its
construct validity. Overall the health related
quality of life of these patients is
poor, although transplantation is associated
with higher scores independently of
the effect of age and comorbidity. Age,
comorbidity, and sex are also predictive of
the scores attained in the three dimensions
studied. Further studies are required
to ascertain whether altering those
predictor variables which are under the
influence of professional carers is associated
with changes in health related quality
of life, and thus confirm the value of this
outcome as a measure of quality of care
How much does teenage parenthood affect long term outcomes? A systematic review.
Background: The rates of teenage pregnancy in the UK are relatively high. Although early entry to parenthood can be a positive experience, most studies find large adverse effects on long term outcomes for the mother, child and father, in addition to being costly for the NHS. This is why the government launched its Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999. However, there is growing evidence that teenage pregnancy might be mainly an indicator of disadvantage which is the underlying cause of the negative outcomes.
Methods: A systematic literature review was undertaken of studies which used a UK dataset to quantify any long term outcomes of a teenage birth upon the mother, father or child. Studies were included if they used appropriate methods to isolate the causal effect of early parenthood. The databases searched included Medline, Cochrane, EconLit and Web of Science.
Results: Six studies were identified by the review; five studies considered the mother’s socioeconomic outcomes, one study reported the child’s outcomes, and no studies met the inclusion criteria for the father’s outcomes. The studies suggested that early motherhood accounts for relatively few of the negative long term socioeconomic outcomes and it is predominantly an indicator of a disadvantaged family background.
Conclusion: Limited evidence is available to understand the long term outcomes associated with teenage birth within the UK for the mother, father and child. Current econometric studies suggest that effective interventions to prevent teenage pregnancies will not eradicate the poorer long term socioeconomic outcomes often associated with early motherhood. Thus policy should focus on reducing initial disadvantage in addition to preventing teenage pregnancy. Additional econometric analyses around the mothers’, fathers’ and children’s long term socioeconomic and health-related outcomes would be
valuable
The prevalence of medical reasons for non-participation in the Scottish breast and bowel cancer screening programmes
Objective: Increasing uptake of cancer screening is a priority for health systems internationally, however, some patients may not attend because they are undergoing active treatment for the cancer of interest or have other medical reasons that mean participation would be inappropriate. This study aims to quantify the proportion of non-participants who have a medical reason for not attending cancer screening.<p></p>
Methods: Medical reasons for not participating in breast and bowel screening were defined a priori on the basis of a literature review and expert opinion. The notes of 700 patients at two GP practices in Scotland were reviewed, to ascertain the prevalence of medical reasons amongst non-participants. Simple proportions and confidence intervals were calculated.<p></p>
Results: 17.4% of breast and 2.3% of bowel screening non-participants had a medical reason to not participate. The two most common reasons were previous breast cancer follow up (8.86%) and recent mammogram (6.57%).<p></p>
Conclusion: These patients may not benefit from screening while also being distressed by receiving an invitation. This issue also makes accurate monitoring and target-setting for improving uptake difficult. Further work is needed to estimate robustly the extent to which medical reasons account for screening non-participation in a larger population.<p></p>
New Consequences of Induced Transparency in a Double-Lambda scheme: Destructive Interference In Four-wave Mixing
We investigate a four-state system interacting with long and short laser
pulses in a weak probe beam approximation. We show that when all lasers are
tuned to the exact unperturbed resonances, part of the four-wave mixing (FWM)
field is strongly absorbed. The part which is not absorbed has the exact
intensity required to destructively interfere with the excitation pathway
involved in producing the FWM state. We show that with this three-photon
destructive interference, the conversion efficiency can still be as high as
25%. Contrary to common belief,our calculation shows that this process, where
an ideal one-photon electromagnetically induced transparency is established, is
not most suitable for high efficiency conversion. With appropriate
phase-matching and propagation distance, and when the three-photon destructive
interference does not occur, we show that the photon flux conversion efficiency
is independent of probe intensity and can be close to 100%. In addition, we
show clearly that the conversion efficiency is not determined by the maximum
atomic coherence between two lower excited states, as commonly believed. It is
the combination of phase-matching and constructive interference involving the
two terms arising in producing the mixing wave that is the key element for the
optimized FWM generation. Indeed, in this scheme no appreciable excited state
is produced, so that the atomic coherence between states |0> and |2> is always
very small.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. A, 7 pages, 4 figure
The accelerating influence of humans on mammalian macroecological patterns over the late Quaternary
The transition of hominins to a largely meat-based diet ~1.8 million years ago led to the exploitation of other mammals for food and resources. As hominins, particularly archaic and modern humans, became increasingly abundant and dispersed across the globe, a temporally and spatially transgressive extinction of large-bodied mammals followed; the degree of selectivity was unprecedented in the Cenozoic fossil record. Today, most remaining large-bodied mammal species are confined to Africa, where they coevolved with hominins. Here, using a comprehensive global dataset of mammal distribution, life history and ecology, we examine the consequences of “body size downgrading” of mammals over the late Quaternary on fundamental macroecological patterns. Specifically, we examine changes in species diversity, global and continental body size distributions, allometric scaling of geographic range size with body mass, and the scaling of maximum body size with area. Moreover, we project these patterns toward a potential future scenario in which all mammals currently listed as vulnerable on the IUCN\u27s Red List are extirpated. Our analysis demonstrates that anthropogenic impact on earth systems predates the terminal Pleistocene and has grown as populations increased and humans have become more widespread. Moreover, owing to the disproportionate influence on ecosystem structure and function of megafauna, past and present body size downgrading has reshaped Earth\u27s biosphere. Thus, macroecological studies based only on modern species yield distorted results, which are not representative of the patterns present for most of mammal evolution. Our review supports the concept of benchmarking the “Anthropocene” with the earliest activities of Homo sapiens
Componential coding in the condition monitoring of electrical machines Part 2: application to a conventional machine and a novel machine
This paper (Part 2) presents the practical application of componential coding, the principles of which were described in the accompanying Part 1 paper. Four major issues are addressed, including optimization of the neural network, assessment of the anomaly detection results, development of diagnostic approaches (based on the reconstruction error) and also benchmarking of componential coding with other techniques (including waveform measures, Fourier-based signal reconstruction and principal component analysis). This is achieved by applying componential coding to the data monitored from both a conventional induction motor and from a novel transverse flux motor. The results reveal that machine condition monitoring using componential coding is not only capable of detecting and then diagnosing anomalies but it also outperforms other conventional techniques in that it is able to separate very small and localized anomalies
Magnetic structure of free cobalt clusters studied with Stern-Gerlach deflection experiments
We have studied the magnetic properties of free cobalt clusters in two
semi-independent Stern-Gerlach deflection experiments at temperatures between
60 and 307 K. We find that clusters consisting of 13 to 200 cobalt atoms
exhibit behavior that is entirely consistent with superparamagnetism, though
complicated by finite-system fluctuations in cluster temperature. By fitting
the data to the Langevin function, we report magnetic moments per atom for each
cobalt cluster size and compare the results of our two measurements and all
those performed previously. In addition to a gradual decrease in moment per
atom with increasing size, there are oscillations that appear to be caused by
geometrical shell structure. We discuss our observations in light of the two
competing models for Langevin-like magnetization behavior in free clusters,
superparamagnetism and adiabatic magnetization, and conclude that the evidence
strongly supports the superparamagnetic model
Deuteron Dipole Polarizabilities and Sum Rules
The scalar, vector, and tensor components of the (generalized) deuteron
electric polarizability are calculated, as well as their logarithmic
modifications. Several of these quantities arise in the treatment of the
nuclear corrections to the deuterium Lamb shift and the deuterium hyperfine
structure. A variety of second-generation potential models are used and a
(subjective) error is assigned to the calculations. The zero-range
approximation is used to analyze a subset of the results, and a simple
relativistic version of this approximation is developed.Comment: 14 pages, LaTex - submitted to Physical Review
Multifrequency Radio Observations of a SNR in the LMC. The Case of SNR J0527-6549 (DEM l204)
We present a detailed study and results of new Australia Telescope Compact
Array (ATCA) observations of supernova remnant, SNR J0527-6549. This Large
Magellanic Cloud (LMC) ob ject follows a typical supernova remnant (SNR)
horseshoe morphology with a diameter of D=(66x58)+-1 pc which is among the
largest SNRs in the LMC. Its relatively large size indicates older age while a
steeper than expected radio spectral index of aplha=-0.92+-0.11 is more typical
for younger and energetic SNRs. Also, we report detections of regions with a
high order of polarization at a peak value of ~54+-17% at 6 cm.Comment: 9 Pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in SA
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