Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Diabetes Care and Outcomes: A Mixed Methods Study

Limited research has examined racial/ethnic differences in diabetes care and outcomes among primary care patients. This study examined racial/ethnic differences in diabetes care and outcomes among an ambulatory patient population and explored patient perceptions of the patient-provider relationship to inform strategies to improve care delivery. Using data from 62,149 adults with diabetes who received care within Atrium Health in 2013, regression models assessed associations between race/ethnicity and the following outcomes: glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) tests, low density lipoprotein (LDL) and blood pressure (BP) screening, foot and eye exams, and HbA1c, LDL, and BP control. Eleven patients with diabetes and uncontrolled hypertension participated in three focus groups about their perceptions of the patient-provider relationship. Compared to non-Hispanic Whites, non-Hispanic Blacks had 22% to 73% higher odds of receiving screenings (HbA1c, LDL, BP, foot and eye exams;

Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Panel Two: Who\u27s Minding the Baby?)

A central characteristic of our current gender arrangements is that they pit ideal worker women against marginalized caregiver women in a series of patterned conflicts I call gender wars. One version of these are the mommy wars that we see often covered in the press between employed mothers and mothers at home. Employed mothers at times participate in the belittlement commonly felt by homemakers. Also mothers at home, I think, at times participate in the guilt-tripping that\u27s often felt by mothers who are employed. These gender wars are a central but little understood characteristic of the gender system that grew up after 1780, which historians call domesticity. One of the basic arguments in the book is that gender has proved unbending in the sense that we\u27ve progressed from the original form of domesticity, the breadwinner/housewife version, to the contemporary form of domesticity, the ideal worker-marginalized caregiver system. This modern form is what I sometimes call an attempt again to invent a language that is widely accessible, the dominant domestic ecology. I found that if you call it the sex-gender system, people feel somewhat differently than if you call it the dominant family ecology. The important point is that these gender wars, which are an inherent characteristic of domesticity, are seriously undertheorized by feminist theorists. I think they\u27re really important, because they go to the core of building an effective coalition for gender change with respect to this work-family axis, these economic meanings of gender that Adrienne and I are focusing on. The classic strategy of American feminists has been that women should achieve equality by performing as ideal workers along with the men, with child care delegated to the market. I call this the full commodification model, until Adrienne came up with a far better name. She calls it the delegation model. So I\u27ll call it the delegation model. Delegation to the market in this country, which was originally conceived of to involve some degree of social subsidy, has become delegation to a largely unsubsidized market in which child care workers are among the lowest-paid workers in the society. They also have extremely high rates of turnover, which is not good because children need continuity of care. The result is a delegation model that is not likely to appeal to nonprivileged people, because in this social context, delegation means that working-class people, who a generation ago had access to the same kind of mothercare that middle-class people had, today have only market child care that reflects their disadvantaged class position

Stability of a vortex in a small trapped Bose-Einstein condensate

A second-order expansion of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the interaction parameter determines the thermodynamic critical angular velocity Omega_c for the creation of a vortex in a small axisymmetric condensate. Similarly, a second-order expansion of the Bogoliubov equations determines the (negative) frequency omega_a of the anomalous mode. Although Omega_c = -omega_a through first order, the second-order contributions ensure that the absolute value |omega_a| is always smaller than the critical angular velocity Omega_c. With increasing external rotation Omega, the dynamical instability of the condensate with a vortex disappears at Omega*=|omega_a|, whereas the vortex state becomes energetically stable at the larger value Omega_c. Both second-order contributions depend explicitly on the axial anisotropy of the trap. The appearance of a local minimum of the free energy for a vortex at the center determines the metastable angular velocity Omega_m. A variational calculation yields Omega_m=|\omega_a| to first order (hence Omega_m also coincides with the critical angular velocity Omega_c to this order). Qualitatively, the scenario for the onset of stability in the weak-coupling limit is the same as that found in the strong-coupling (Thomas-Fermi) limit.Comment: 8 pages, RevTe