Approaches to assessing and minimizing blood wastage in the hospital and blood supply chain

Despite the scale of blood usage worldwide, blood remains a scarce and precious resource. As with any perishable product, careful management of inventories to minimize wastage is crucial. However, due to the nature of the supply of blood, wastage is not only an economic issue as every unit wasted, squanders the time and effort of the human donor. Blood inventory management is therefore a trade-off, ensuring 100% availability of all blood products at all times whilst minimizing wastage. Hospitals are at the front line of blood use and are the location where much blood is wasted. Inventory management practices in hospital transfusion laboratories are critical. Much of the extant literature in this area posits that good management of hospital blood inventories is due to sophisticated inventory models and algorithms. However, recent research has found that good management practices are much more important. The drivers for low wastage and good inventory management practice can be described using six key themes. Blood supply chain management is much more than managing wastage in hospitals. Proper management of the supply chain as a whole can lead to significant reductions in blood wastage. Recent research has found that methods commonly used in commercial supply chain management can lead to efficiencies in the blood supply chain context. An example of this is stock sharing or lateral transhipment of blood units close to expiry between hospitals, reducing wastage across the supply chain

A joint network design and mulit-echelon inventory optimisation approach for supply chain segmentation

Segmenting large supply chains into lean and agile segments has become a powerful strategy allowing companies to manage different market demands effectively. A current stream of research into supply chain segmentation proposes demand volume and variability as the key segmentation criteria. This literature adequately justifies these criteria and analyses the benefits of segmentation. However, current work fails to provide approaches for allocating products to segments which go beyond simple rules of thumb, such as 80-20 Pareto rules. We propose a joint network and safety stock optimisation model which optimally allocates Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) to segments. We use this model, populated both with synthetic data and data from a real case study and demonstrate that this approach significantly improves cost when compared to using simple rules of thumb alone

A refined framework of information sharing in perishable product supply chains

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the relationship between information sharing and performance of perishable product supply chains (PPSC). Building on transaction cost economics (TCE), organisational information processing theory (OIPT), and contingency theory (CT), this study proposes a theoretical framework to guide future research into information sharing in perishable product supply chains (IS-PPSC). Design/methodology/approach Using the systematic literature review methodology, 48 peer-reviewed articles are carefully selected, mapped, and assessed. Template analysis is performed to unravel the relationship mechanisms between information sharing and PPSC performance. Findings The authors find that the relationship between information sharing and PPSC performance is currently unclear, and there is inconsistency in the positioning of information sharing among constructs and variables in the IS-PPSC literature. This implies a requirement to refine the relationship between information sharing and PPSC performance. The review also revealed that the role of perishable product characteristics has largely been ignored in existing research. Originality/value This study applies relevant multiple theoretical perspectives to overcome the ambiguity of the IS-PPSC literature and contributes nine propositions to guide future research. Accordingly, this study contributes to the refined roles of relationship uncertainty, environmental uncertainty, information sharing capabilities, and perishable product characteristics in shaping the relationship between information sharing and PPSC performance

Improving blood safety and availability: a collective mindfulness perspective in the supply chain

Purpose – Maintaining a safe and available supply of blood requires a mindfully coordinated supply chain (SC) and is fundamental to the effective operation of health systems across the world. This study investigates how blood supply chain (BSC) actors demonstrate collective mindfulness (CM) principles in their operations and how these demonstrations lead to improvements in blood safety and availability (BSA) in different operational contexts. Design/methodology/approach – Six case studies drawn from two contrasting BSCs, the UK and Indonesia, which differ in structure and regulation are investigated in this research. Qualitative data are collected and analysed using template analysis. Findings – The cases reveal how the CM principles are demonstrated in the supply chain context in a range of operational conditions and their impact on BSA. The BSC actors in the more centralised and tightly regulated cases display more behaviours consistent with more of the CM principles over a greater range of operational conditions compared to those in the more decentralised and loosely regulated cases. As such, more improvements in BSA are found in the former compared to the latter cases. Originality/value – This paper is considered the first to investigate the demonstration of CM principles at the SC as opposed to the single organisational level. It proposes an alternative approach to understanding and evaluating reliability performance using behavioural rather than statistical principles

Testing the use of static chamber boxes to monitor greenhouse gas emissions from wood chip storage heaps

This study explores the use of static chamber boxes to detect whether there are fugitive emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from a willow chip storage heap. The results from the boxes were compared with those from 3-m stainless steel probes inserted into the core of the heap horizontally and vertically at intervals. The results from probes showed that there were increases of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the heap over the first 10 days after heap establishment, which were correlated with a temperature rise to 60 °C. As the CO2 declined, there was a small peak in methane (CH4) concentration in probes orientated vertically in the heap. Static chambers positioned at the apex of the heap detected some CO2 fluxes as seen in the probes; however, the quantities were small and random in nature. A small (maximum 5 ppm) flux in CH4 occurred at the same time as the probe concentrations peaked. Overall, the static chamber method was not effective in monitoring fluxes from the heap as there was evidence that gases could enter and leave around the edges of the chambers during the course of the experiment. In general, the use of standard (25 cm high) static chambers for monitoring fluxes from wood chip heaps is not recommended

An updated version of wannier90: A tool for obtaining maximally-localised Wannier functions

et al.wannier90 is a program for calculating maximally-localised Wannier functions (MLWFs) from a set of Bloch energy bands that may or may not be attached to or mixed with other bands. The formalism works by minimising the total spread of the MLWFs in real space. This is done in the space of unitary matrices that describe rotations of the Bloch bands at each k-point. As a result, wannier90 is independent of the basis set used in the underlying calculation to obtain the Bloch states. Therefore, it may be interfaced straightforwardly to any electronic structure code. The locality of MLWFs can be exploited to compute band-structure, density of states and Fermi surfaces at modest computational cost. Furthermore, wannier90 is able to output MLWFs for visualisation and other post-processing purposes. Wannier functions are already used in a wide variety of applications. These include analysis of chemical bonding in real space; calculation of dielectric properties via the modern theory of polarisation; and as an accurate and minimal basis set in the construction of model Hamiltonians for large-scale systems, in linear-scaling quantum Monte Carlo calculations, and for efficient computation of material properties, such as the anomalous Hall coefficient. We present here an updated version of wannier90, wannier90 2.0, including minor bug fixes and parallel (MPI) execution for band-structure interpolation and the calculation of properties such as density of states, Berry curvature and orbital magnetisation. wannier90 is freely available under the GNU General Public License from http://www.wannier.org/.Peer Reviewe

Automated high-throughput Wannierisation

Funder: European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (project E-CAM). Grant agreement no. 676531Funder: NCCR MARVEL of the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Union’s Centre of Excellence MaX “Materials design at the Exascale”. Grant no. 824143AbstractMaximally-localised Wannier functions (MLWFs) are routinely used to compute from first-principles advanced materials properties that require very dense Brillouin zone integration and to build accurate tight-binding models for scale-bridging simulations. At the same time, high-throughput (HT) computational materials design is an emergent field that promises to accelerate reliable and cost-effective design and optimisation of new materials with target properties. The use of MLWFs in HT workflows has been hampered by the fact that generating MLWFs automatically and robustly without any user intervention and for arbitrary materials is, in general, very challenging. We address this problem directly by proposing a procedure for automatically generating MLWFs for HT frameworks. Our approach is based on the selected columns of the density matrix method and we present the details of its implementation in an AiiDA workflow. We apply our approach to a dataset of 200 bulk crystalline materials that span a wide structural and chemical space. We assess the quality of our MLWFs in terms of the accuracy of the band-structure interpolation that they provide as compared to the band-structure obtained via full first-principles calculations. Finally, we provide a downloadable virtual machine that can be used to reproduce the results of this paper, including all first-principles and atomistic simulations as well as the computational workflows.</jats:p

Automated high-throughput Wannierisation

Funder: European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (project E-CAM). Grant agreement no. 676531Funder: NCCR MARVEL of the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Union’s Centre of Excellence MaX “Materials design at the Exascale”. Grant no. 824143AbstractMaximally-localised Wannier functions (MLWFs) are routinely used to compute from first-principles advanced materials properties that require very dense Brillouin zone integration and to build accurate tight-binding models for scale-bridging simulations. At the same time, high-throughput (HT) computational materials design is an emergent field that promises to accelerate reliable and cost-effective design and optimisation of new materials with target properties. The use of MLWFs in HT workflows has been hampered by the fact that generating MLWFs automatically and robustly without any user intervention and for arbitrary materials is, in general, very challenging. We address this problem directly by proposing a procedure for automatically generating MLWFs for HT frameworks. Our approach is based on the selected columns of the density matrix method and we present the details of its implementation in an AiiDA workflow. We apply our approach to a dataset of 200 bulk crystalline materials that span a wide structural and chemical space. We assess the quality of our MLWFs in terms of the accuracy of the band-structure interpolation that they provide as compared to the band-structure obtained via full first-principles calculations. Finally, we provide a downloadable virtual machine that can be used to reproduce the results of this paper, including all first-principles and atomistic simulations as well as the computational workflows.</jats:p

Vomocytosis: Too Much Booze, Base, or Calcium?

Macrophages are well known for their phagocytic activity and their role in innate immune responses. Macrophages eat non-self particles, via a variety of mechanisms, and typically break down internalized cargo into small macromolecules. However, some pathogenic agents have the ability to evade this endosomal degradation through a nonlytic exocytosis process termed vomocytosis. This phenomenon has been most often studied for Cryptococcus neoformans, a yeast that causes roughly 180,000 deaths per year, primarily in immunocompromised (e.g., human immunodeficiency virus [HIV]) patients. Existing dogma purports that vomocytosis involves distinctive cellular pathways and intracellular physicochemical cues in the host cell during phagosomal maturation. Moreover, it has been observed that the immunological state of the individual and macrophage phenotype affect vomocytosis outcomes. Here we compile the current knowledge on the factors (with respect to the phagocytic cell) that promote vomocytosis of C. neoformans from macrophages

The structured health intervention for truckers (SHIFT) cluster randomised controlled trial : a mixed methods process evaluation

Funding This project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Public Health Research programme (reference: NIHR PHR 15/190/42). The study was also supported by the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre which is a partnership between University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Loughborough University, and the University of Leicester. Laura Gray is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration East Midlands (ARC EM). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. Funding to cover intervention costs (Fitbits, cab workout equipment) was provided by the Higher Education Innovation Fund, via the Loughborough University Enterprise Projects Group. The Colt Foundation provided funding for a PhD Studentship, awarded to Amber Guest (reference: JD/618), which covered Amber’s time and contributions to this project. None of the funding bodies had any role in study design; election, synthesis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. Acknowledgements We gratefully acknowledge the support provided by senior Health and Safety personnel and Transport Managers at our partner logistics company in facilitating this research. We also thank all participants for taking part. We are grateful to the independent members of the Trial Steering Committee for their continued support and advice throughout the trial: Dr. Derrick Bennett, Prof Emma McIntosh, Prof Petra Wark and Mr. Paul Gardiner.Peer reviewedPublisher PD