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 $a$. It is found that in most cases the probability of 3-body recombination is a universal function of the mass ratio and $a$, 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