The Integration of the Program Evaluation Standards into an Evaluation Toolkit for a Transformative Model of Care for Mental Health Service Delivery

Background: Stepped Care 2.0 (SC2.0) is a transformative model of mental health service delivery. This model was created by Stepped Care Solutions (SCS), a not-for-profit consultancy that collaborates with governments, public service organizations, and other institutions that wish to redesign their mental health and addictions systems of care. The SC2.0 model is based on 10 foundational principles and 9 core components that can be flexibly adapted to an organization’s or community’s needs. The model supports groups to reorganize and deliver mental health care in an evidence-informed, person-centric way. SCS partnered with evaluators from the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcome Sciences (CHÉOS) to create a toolkit that provides evaluation guidance. The toolkit includes a theory of change, guidance on selecting evaluation questions and designs, and an evaluation matrix including suggested process and outcome metrics, all of which can be tailored to each unique implementation of the SC2.0 model. The objective of this resource is to support organizations and communities to conduct high-quality evaluations for the purpose of continuous improvement (a core component of the model of care) and to assess the model’s impact. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the integration of the program evaluation standards (PES) into an evaluation toolkit for SC2.0. Setting: In this paper, we describe the toolkit development, focusing on how the PES were embedded in the process and tools. We explore how the integration of the PES into the toolkit supports evaluators to enhance the quality of their evaluation planning, execution, and meta-evaluation. Intervention: Not applicable Research Design: Not applicable Data Collection and Analysis: Not applicable Findings: In this paper, we describe the toolkit development, focusing on how the PES were embedded in the process and tools. We explore how the integration of the PES into the toolkit supports evaluators to enhance the quality of their evaluation planning, execution, and meta-evaluation. Keywords: program evaluation standards; evaluation; mental healt

Holistic Transfer: Towards Non-Disruptive Fine-Tuning with Partial Target Data

We propose a learning problem involving adapting a pre-trained source model to the target domain for classifying all classes that appeared in the source data, using target data that covers only a partial label space. This problem is practical, as it is unrealistic for the target end-users to collect data for all classes prior to adaptation. However, it has received limited attention in the literature. To shed light on this issue, we construct benchmark datasets and conduct extensive experiments to uncover the inherent challenges. We found a dilemma -- on the one hand, adapting to the new target domain is important to claim better performance; on the other hand, we observe that preserving the classification accuracy of classes missing in the target adaptation data is highly challenging, let alone improving them. To tackle this, we identify two key directions: 1) disentangling domain gradients from classification gradients, and 2) preserving class relationships. We present several effective solutions that maintain the accuracy of the missing classes and enhance the overall performance, establishing solid baselines for holistic transfer of pre-trained models with partial target data.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2023 main trac

Anomalous Heat Conduction and Anomalous Diffusion in Low Dimensional Nanoscale Systems

Thermal transport is an important energy transfer process in nature. Phonon is the major energy carrier for heat in semiconductor and dielectric materials. In analogy to Ohm's law for electrical conductivity, Fourier's law is a fundamental rule of heat transfer in solids. It states that the thermal conductivity is independent of sample scale and geometry. Although Fourier's law has received great success in describing macroscopic thermal transport in the past two hundreds years, its validity in low dimensional systems is still an open question. Here we give a brief review of the recent developments in experimental, theoretical and numerical studies of heat transport in low dimensional systems, include lattice models, nanowires, nanotubes and graphenes. We will demonstrate that the phonon transports in low dimensional systems super-diffusively, which leads to a size dependent thermal conductivity. In other words, Fourier's law is breakdown in low dimensional structures

Historical controversies about the thalamus: from etymology to function

The authors report on and discuss the historical evolution of the 3 intellectual and scientific domains essential for the current understanding of the function of the human thalamus: 1) the identification of the thalamus as a distinct anatomical and functional entity, 2) the subdivision of thalamic gray matter into functionally homogeneous units (the thalamic nuclei) and relative disputes about nuclei nomenclature, and 3) experimental physiology and its limitations.Galen was allegedly the first to identify the thalamus. The etymology of the term remains unknown although it is hypothesized that Galen may have wanted to recall the thalamus of Odysseus. Burdach was the first to clearly and systematically define the thalamus and its macroscopic anatomy, which paved the way to understanding its internal microarchitecture. This structure in turn was studied in both nonhuman primates (Friedemann) and humans (Vogt and Vogt), leading to several discrepancies in the findings because of interspecies differences. As a consequence, two main nomenclatures developed, generating sometimes inconsistent (or nonreproducible) anatomo-functional correlations. Recently, considerable effort has been aimed at producing a unified nomenclature, based mainly on functional data, which is indispensable for future developments. The development of knowledge about macro- and microscopic anatomy has allowed a shift from the first galenic speculations about thalamic function (the "thalamus opticorum nervorum") to more detailed insights into the sensory and motor function of the thalamus in the 19th and 20th centuries. This progress is mostly the result of lesion and tracing studies. Direct evidence of the in vivo function of the human thalamus, however, originates from awake stereotactic procedures only.Our current knowledge about the function of the human thalamus is the result of a long process that occurred over several centuries and has been inextricably intermingled with the increasing accumulation of data about thalamic macro- and microscopic anatomy. Although the thalamic anatomy can currently be considered well understood, further studies are still needed to gain a deeper insight into the function of the human thalamus in vivo

Micronutrient Deficits Are Still Public Health Issues among Women and Young Children in Vietnam

Background: The 2000 Vietnamese National Nutrition Survey showed that the population’s dietary intake had improved since 1987. However, inequalities were found in food consumption between socioeconomic groups. As no national data exist on the prevalence of micronutrient deficiencies, a survey was conducted in 2010 to assess the micronutrient status of randomly selected 1526 women of reproductive age and 586 children aged 6–75 mo. Principal Findings: In women, according to international thresholds, prevalence of zinc deficiency (ZnD, 67.262.6%) and vitamin B12 deficiency (11.761.7%) represented public health problems, whereas prevalence of anemia (11.661.0%) and iron deficiency (ID, 13.761.1%) were considered low, and folate (,3%) and vitamin A (VAD,,2%) deficiencies were considered negligible. However, many women had marginal folate (25.1%) and vitamin A status (13.6%). Moreover, overweight (BMI$23 kg/m 2 for Asian population) or underweight occurred in 20 % of women respectively highlighting the double burden of malnutrition. In children, a similar pattern was observed for ZnD (51.963.5%), anemia (9.161.4%) and ID (12.961.5%) whereas prevalence of marginal vitamin A status was also high (47.362.2%). There was a significant effect of age on anemia and ID prevalence, with the youngest age group (6–17 mo) having the highest risk for anemia, ID, ZnD and marginal vitamin A status as compared to other groups. Moreover, the poorest groups of population had a higher risk for zinc, anemia and ID

When opposites attract? Exploring the existence of complementarity in self-brand congruence processes

In the psychology of human interpersonal attraction, complementarity is a well-recognized phenomenon, where individuals are attracted to partners with different but complementary traits to their own. Although scholarship in human-brand relations draws heavily from interpersonal attraction theory, preferred techniques for measuring self-brand congruence tend to capture it in only one form: the similarity configuration, which expresses the extent to which brand traits essentially resemble or mirror a consumer’s own. Hence, the aim of this study is to explore, for the first time, the existence of complementarity in self-brand congruence. From a canonical correlation analysis of survey data in which respondents rated their own personality traits and those of their favorite brand, the existence of both similarity and complementarity configurations is indeed revealed. Based on this, the study then derives a measure of self-brand congruence that captures both configurations, and tests its predictive power for a range of brand-related outcomes. The new measure is found to perform well against existing measures of self-brand congruence based purely on a similarity configuration, particularly for emotionally based brand-related outcomes