Flipping the Training in Health Professions Education

Background: To study the flipping  or inverted method of teaching in health professionals involved in medical education  Method: A cross sectional study was conducted to collect data about perception of faculty regarding flipped method as a faculty training method. Convenient method of sampling was done to collect data from 31 participants. Specific objective for this purpose was to determine if there was a significant difference from the normal in perception of faculty trained by flipping the classroom? We hypothesized that there will be a significant difference in perception of faculty trained in a flipped classroom as compared to normal. The average score on the questionnaire was taken as a reference for normal. Results: The results of the study were statistically significant at 95% confidence interval, t (30) = 7.43, p = 0.000<0.05. Conclusion: Faculty had a positive perception about flipped method of training. This method is useful and feasible for faculty trainin

Perception of Medical Students Regarding Case Based Learning

oai:supp:article/14Background: To determine perception of first yearmedical students about Case Based Learning (CBL)in a modular curriculum.Methods: In this cross sectional quantitative studyconvenient method of sampling was used to collectdata from seventy-nine participants on a reliablesurvey tool (Cronbach alpha reliability=.87). Ethicalapproval was obtained and consent for the study wastaken from study participants. The data wasanalyzed on SPSS version 22.Results: The eight questions asked in the surveyyielded a statistically significant result withFriedman’s chi square=85.84 (df=7) p=.000<0.5, forperception of students in CBL session. We acceptedthe alternate hypothesis.Conclusion: Most of the students agree that CBL isuseful. It promotes group discussions, interpersonalskills, feedback by students and teachers and helpsthem to correlate clinical data

Psychiatric Co-morbidity in Medical and Surgical In-patients, Referred for Psychiatric Consultation

Background: To assess by Liaison Psychiatry the pattern of psychiatric co-morbidity in referred medical and surgical in-patients in a tertiary care hospital. Methods: This was a descriptive study, conducted at Department of Psychiatry, out-patient services in Fauji Foundation Hospital, Rawalpindi. One hundred consecutive hospitalized patients referred to Department of Psychiatry from Medical and Surgical Units of Fauji Foundation Hospital were enrolled in the study during a period of seven months. A semi structured proforma was used for collection of demographic data and detailed information regarding reasons of psychiatric referral along with current medical and surgical complaints. Results: Mean age of the sample was 39.9 years, 77% of the patients were female and majority of the patients, 62% were married. All the patients belonged to either poor class (61%) or lower middle class (39%). Professional categories showed house wives (54%) comprising the major group and 25% were students. Majority of the patients, 56% were referred from medical departments and the main reason for referral was medically unexplained physical symptoms (36%) of one hundred consultations. General Health Questionnaire 12 (GHQ-12) screened 89% of cases with psychiatric co-morbidity as compared to 11% non cases without psychiatric symptomatology. Majority (51%) of the patients had diagnosis of depressive episode, mild moderate or severe and 19% of the patients had dissociative (conversion) disorder as the second commonest diagnosis. Conclusions: There is generally a low referral rate despite significant psychiatric morbidity among medical and surgical in-patients. Further studies should be conducted in the field of liaison psychiatry to address other variables such as length of hospital stay, use of laboratory investigations and pattern of prescription medicines

Late Marriages and Moral Conduct: Ethnography of Males of District Khanewal

Delayed marriage is particularly an ingrained socio-cultural trend among the masses, which is widely prevalent in the Middle East, West Asia, United States and North Africa. The escalating concern about the prevention of health issues, challenged physical condition and psychological disorders among the offspring have led majority of the couples to seek counselling, considering it an imperative aspect of their marital relationship. Despite its advantage, such an approach has caused social confusion and disorder in the society too resulting in delayed marriages. In this regard, the delayed marriage is an interesting anthro-biological problem widespread among the people of Khanewal city. In the face of such challenged physiological functioning of the individuals and the unreliableexisting multi-layered treatment mechanism; masses customarilyobserve and practice this phenomenon

Improved harvest and desapping practices affect mango fruit quality along the supply chains

This study was aimed at evaluating the impact of improved harvest and handling practices including careful fruit harvesting along with 4-6 inches long pedicels, de-stemming and de-sapping in 0.5% lime solution, 2-3 min dip and washing in tap water, on the fruit quality of mango along domestic supply chains in Pakistan compared with traditional harvest and handling system prevailing in local mango industry. Six domestic supply chains in two mango cultivars Sindhri and Samar Bahisht Chaunsa were monitored in this regard. The impact assessments were made on the basis of performance against sap burn, skin browning, lenticels spots, rots and physical damage. The effect on fruit skin color and firmness was also studied. Significant interaction of skin browning, sapburn injury, rots and physical damage was found with the practices adopted at farm level. These problems were found to start from farm (origin) and significantly increase along the supply chains depending upon the procedures adopted for produce harvest and handling. The fruits passed through improved practice had significantly better quality at retail with less skin browning (39.17% in improved vs 58.33% in traditional), low sap burn damage (15.83% vs 73.34%), smaller extent of rots (22.50% vs 68.33%) and physical damages (14.17% vs 34.17%). Non significant differences were found among the analyzed practices regarding fruit skin color, firmness and lenticel spots. Overall, the improved harvest and lime desapping technology showed potential as a best practice for the better management of mango fruit quality along the domestic supply chains. © 2011 Friends Science Publishers

Max-gain relay selection scheme for wireless networks

© 2020 Karabuk University Next generation wireless systems are supposed to handle high amount of data with broader coverage and high quality of service (QoS). When a signal travels from a source to destination, the signal quality may suffer from the fading, which makes it difficult to receive correct messages. To handle the impact of fading, various diversity techniques are performed with Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO). Considering cooperative wireless networks, virtual MIMOs are being used, which also called cooperative diversity. In this paper, we propose a max-gain relay selection scheme (MGRS) for buffer-aided wireless cooperative networks. This scheme determines the best link using the maximum gain based on quality of link and available buffer size. The time slot is divided into two parts, one is used to choose the best link from the source to relay transmission (odd slot) and another time slot (even) is used based on the selection of the best link from the relay to destination. Markov chain model is use to measure buffer status and QoS parameters to evaluate the performance. The proposed scheme provides better QoS (12%) compared to the existing relay selection schemes with respect to throughput, end-to-end delay and outage probability

Formal modelling of TCP congestion control mechanisms ECN/RED and SAP-LAW in the presence of UDP traffic

Congestion avoidance mechanisms are used to prevent the saturation of the gateway which represents a bottleneck of the system. Recently, a new method for the congestion avoidance has been proposed: the smart access point with limited advertised window (SAP-LAW). The main idea is to hijack at the gateway the acknowledge packets in the transmission control protocol (TCP) connections in order to artificially reduce the advertised destination window according to some bandwidth allocation policy. Therefore, the flux control mechanism is artificially exploited to control the congestion at the bottleneck. The advantage of this approach is that it does not drop any packet and does not require any modification in the TCP implementations at the clients. While the most popular congestion avoidance mechanisms are the explicit congestion notification (ECN) and the random early detection (RED). In this paper, we propose stochastic models for the ECN/RED and SAP-LAW mechanisms in order to compare their performances under different scenarios. The models are studied in mean field regime, i.e. under a great number of TCP connections and UDP-based transmissions. Different from previous work for the ECN/RED, in this paper, we consider the presence of UDP traffic with bursts and the case of not greedy TCP connections. The models for SAP-LAW are totally new. The comparison is performed in terms of different performance indices including average queue length, system throughput, and expected waiting time