Assessing the Perceptions and Attitudes of Burnout Syndrome in Nurse Practitioners in Primary Care Settings

The implications of workload and personal and patient-related burnout have been identified in numerous physicians’ studies. While burnout syndrome has become a subject of great interest for examining provider burnout to assess successful solutions, there is minimal research unique to nurse practitioners in primary care settings. This project was intended to determine the prevalence and effect of nurse practitioners’ burnout in primary care settings and make recommendations for improving nurse practitioners’ overall health and well-being. The key outcomes of concern for this project were, first, improvement in burnout scores on the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory tool pre- and posteducational intervention, and second, participation in an online survey. A 19-question pre- and postsurvey were sent to 600 nurse practitioners, yielding a 21% response rate (N = 75). Of the 75 respondents, the smallest and largest preintervention personal burnout score was 0, and the highest was 95. The results from this project suggest that additional research is warranted. Keywords: Burnout, burnout syndrome, nurse practitioner, primary care, resiliency, retention in nurse practitioners, self-care, and quality of car

Metastable helium molecules as tracers in superfluid liquid 4^{4}He

Metastable helium molecules generated in a discharge near a sharp tungsten tip operated in either pulsed mode or continuous field-emission mode in superfluid liquid $^{4}$He are imaged using a laser-induced-fluorescence technique. By pulsing the tip, a small cloud of He$_{2}^{*}$ molecules is produced. At 2.0 K, the molecules in the liquid follow the motion of the normal fluid. We can determine the normal-fluid velocity in a heat-induced counterflow by tracing the position of a single molecule cloud. As we run the tip in continuous field-emission mode, a normal-fluid jet from the tip is generated and molecules are entrained in the jet. A focused 910 nm pump laser pulse is used to drive a small group of molecules to the vibrational $a(1)$ state. Subsequent imaging of the tagged $a(1)$ molecules with an expanded 925 nm probe laser pulse allows us to measure the velocity of the normal fluid. The techniques we developed demonstrate for the first time the ability to trace the normal-fluid component in superfluid helium using angstrom-sized particles.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

A Path to the Direct Detection of sub-GeV Dark Matter Using Calorimetric Readout of a Superfluid 4^4He Target

A promising technology concept for sub-GeV dark matter detection is described, in which low-temperature microcalorimeters serve as the sensors and superfluid $^4$He serves as the target material. A superfluid helium target has several advantageous properties, including a light nuclear mass for better kinematic matching with light dark matter particles, copious production of scintillation light, extremely good intrinsic radiopurity, a high impedance to external vibration noise, and a unique mechanism for observing phonon-like modes via liberation of $^4$He atoms into a vacuum (`quantum evaporation'). In this concept, both scintillation photons and triplet excimers are detected using calorimeters, including calorimeters immersed in the superfluid. Kinetic excitations of the superfluid medium (rotons and phonons) are detected using quantum evaporation and subsequent atomic adsorption onto a microcalorimeter suspended in vacuum above the target helium. The energy of adsorption amplifies the phonon/roton signal before calorimetric sensing, producing a gain mechanism that can reduce the techonology's recoil energy threshold below the calorimeter energy threshold. We describe signal production and signal sensing probabilities, and estimate electron recoil discrimination. We then simulate radioactive backgrounds from gamma rays and neutrons. Dark matter - nucleon elastic scattering cross-section sensitivities are projected, demonstrating that even very small (sub-kg) target masses can probe wide regions of as-yet untested dark matter parameter space