1,876 research outputs found
National Vascular Registry: 2015 Annual Report.
The National Vascular Registry is commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement
Partnership (HQIP) to measure the quality and outcomes of care for patients who undergo
major vascular surgery in NHS hospitals in England and Wales. It aims to provide
comparative information on the performance of NHS vascular units and thereby support
local quality improvement as well as inform patients about major vascular interventions
delivered in the NHS. As such, all NHS hospitals in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern
Ireland are encouraged to participate in the Registry.
The measures used to describe the patterns and outcomes of care are drawn from various
national guidelines including: the “Provision of Services for Patients with Vascular Disease”
document and the Quality Improvement Frameworks published by the Vascular Society, and
the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines on stroke and
peripheral arterial disease.
This report provides a description of the care provided by NHS vascular units, and contains
information on the process and outcomes of care for: (i) patients undergoing abdominal
aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair, (ii) patients undergoing carotid endarterectomy, (iii) patients
undergoing a revascularisation procedure (angioplasty/stent or bypass) or major
amputation for lower-limb peripheral arterial disease (PAD). In addition, the report
presents the findings of an organisational audit conducted in August 2015
National Vascular Registry: 2014 Progress Report.
The National Vascular Registry is commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement
Partnership (HQIP) to measure the quality and outcomes of care for patients who undergo
major vascular surgery in NHS hospitals in England and Wales. It aims to provide
comparative information on the performance of NHS hospitals and thereby support local
quality improvement as well as inform patients about the care delivered in the NHS. As
such, all NHS hospitals in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are encouraged to
participate in the Registry.
The measures used to describe the patterns and outcomes of care are drawn from various
national guidelines including: the “2014 The Provision of Services for Patients with Vascular
Disease” and the Quality Improvement Frameworks published by the Vascular Society, and
the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines on stroke and
peripheral arterial disease.
In 2014, the Registry published NHS trust and surgeon-level information for elective infrarenal
Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm (AAA) repair and carotid endarterectomy on the Registry
website. From 28 October, information on both procedures has been available on the
www.vsqip.org.uk website for all UK NHS trusts that currently perform them. For English
NHS trusts, the same information was published for individual consultants, as part of NHS
England’s “Everyone Counts: Planning for Patients 2013/4” initiative. Consultant-level
information was also published for NHS hospitals in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland
for consenting surgeons.
This progress report aims to complement that information by (1) providing an overview of
care delivered by the NHS at a national level, and (2) describing various developments
within the National Vascular Registry. The Registry will publish its next annual report on
major vascular surgery in November 2015
Inequality, poverty and the privatization of essential services: A "systems of provision" study of water, energy and local buses in the UK
This paper is concerned with the distributional effects of the deregulation and privatization of essential services in Britain since the 1980s, based on a cross-sector study of water, energy and local bus transport. Our approach locates end users within the structures and processes, and prevailing narratives that underpin both production and consumption. This framework highlights the ways that the provisioning of these vital services is contested, contradictory and underpinned by power relations. We show that, at one end, investors in these sectors have made generous returns on their investments but their methods of profit maximization are often not in the public interest. Meanwhile these profits are financed by end users’ payments of bills and fares. Many lower-income households face challenges in terms of affording, and even accessing, these essential services. Regulation has failed to provide adequate social protection. We argue that adverse social outcomes emerge from systemic factors embedded in these modes of provision. A narrative of politically-neutral, technocratic solutions belies the underlying contested nature of privatized monopolistic shared essential services. Moreover, a policy preoccupation with markets and competition obscures the inequality embedded in the underlying structures and processes and undermines more collective and equitable forms of provisioning
Three-body problem in Fermi gases with short-range interparticle interaction
We discuss 3-body processes in ultracold two-component Fermi gases with
short-range intercomponent interaction characterized by a large and positive
scattering length . It is found that in most cases the probability of 3-body
recombination is a universal function of the mass ratio and , and is
independent of short-range physics. We also calculate the scattering length
corresponding to the atom-dimer interaction.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
What do people do with porn? qualitative research into the consumption, use and experience of pornography and other sexually explicit media
This article reviews qualitative research into the consumption of pornography and other sexually explicit media emerging from a range of subject areas. Taking a critique of quantitative methods and a focus on measuring sexual effects and attitudes as a starting point, it considers the proposition that qualitative work is more suited to an examination of the complex social, cultural and political constructions of sexuality. Examining studies into the way men, women and young people see, experience, and use explicit media texts, the article identifies the key findings that have emerged. Qualitative work shows that sexuality explicit media texts are experienced and understood in a variety of ways and evoke strong and often contradictory reactions, not all of which are represented in public debates about pornography. These texts function in a range of different ways, depending on context; as a source of knowledge, a resource for intimate practices, a site for identity construction, and an occasion for performing gender and sexuality. The article reviews these studies and their findings, identifying what they suggest about directions for future research, both in terms of developing methodology and refining approaches to sexuality and media consumption.</p
On Quartet Superfluidity of Fermionic Atomic Gas
Possibility of a quartet superfluidity in fermionic systems is studied as a
new aspect of atomic gas at ultra low temperatures. The four-fold degeneracy of
hyperfine state and moderate coupling is indispensable for the quartet
superfluidity to occur. Possible superconductivity with quartet condensation in
electron systems is discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure. J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. vol.74 (2005) No.7, in press;
Note added for related previous works; some typographic errors revise
Memory distortions: When suggestions cannot be easily ignored
In the present study, the persistence of personal false memories (FMs) after social feedback that denies their truth was assessed. Participants imitated actions performed by the experimenter (Session 1) and watched a doctored video with performed and critical “fake” actions (Session 2), followed by a memory rating and a recognition task. A few days later (Session 3), participants were clearly told that some memories were false and received daily reminders of the correct list of objects/actions before testing their memory again in Session 4. Results of both memory ratings and recognition indicated effective FM implantation. Interestingly, response times for correct rejections were longer for fake than true objects, suggesting participants struggled to ignore false suggestions. Crucial for our aim, Session 4 showed that FM persisted also after the debriefing and repeated presentations of correct list of objects/actions, suggesting that FMs for actions are rather difficult to discard
Alcohol-induced retrograde facilitation renders witnesses of crime less suggestible to misinformation
RATIONALE: Research has shown that alcohol can have both detrimental and facilitating effects on memory: intoxication can lead to poor memory for information encoded after alcohol consumption (anterograde amnesia) and may improve memory for information encoded before consumption (retrograde facilitation). This study examined whether alcohol consumed after witnessing a crime can render individuals less vulnerable to misleading post-event information (misinformation). METHOD: Participants watched a simulated crime video. Thereafter, one third of participants expected and received alcohol (alcohol group), one third did not expect but received alcohol (reverse placebo), and one third did not expect nor receive alcohol (control). After alcohol consumption, participants were exposed to misinformation embedded in a written narrative about the crime. The following day, participants completed a cued-recall questionnaire about the event. RESULTS: Control participants were more likely to report misinformation compared to the alcohol and reverse placebo group. CONCLUSION: The findings suggest that we may oversimplify the effect alcohol has on suggestibility and that sometimes alcohol can have beneficial effects on eyewitness memory by protecting against misleading post-event information
Telephone conversation impairs sustained visual attention via a central bottleneck
Recent research has shown that holding telephone conversations disrupts one's driving ability. We asked whether this effect could be attributed to a visual attention impairment. In Experiment 1, participants conversed on a telephone or listened to a narrative while engaged in multiple object tracking (MOT), a task requiring sustained visual attention. We found that MOT was disrupted in the telephone conversation condition, relative to single-task MOT performance, but that listening to a narrative had no effect. In Experiment 2, we asked which component of conversation might be interfering with MOT performance. We replicated the conversation and single-task conditions of Experiment 1 and added two conditions in which participants heard a sequence of words over a telephone. In the shadowing condition, participants simply repeated each word in the sequence. In the generation condition, participants were asked to generate a new word based on each word in the sequence. Word generation interfered with MOT performance, but shadowing did not. The data indicate that telephone conversation disrupts attention at a central stage, the act of generating verbal stimuli, rather than at a peripheral stage, such as listening or speaking
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