Service developments for managing people with long-term conditions using case management approaches: an example from Cheshire in the UK

INTRODUCTION: This research has considered current developments in the provision of services for people with long-term conditions within the NHS of England. Community Matrons are being employed and by adopting a case management approach they are aiming to improve patient care and reduce their demands for acute hospital care. DESCRIPTION: Qualitative research was undertaken to explore experiences of community matrons and service leads on the development, implementation and provision of services for people with long-term conditions. CONCLUSIONS: This research provides evidence of what is being done to meet the challenge of long-term conditions and provides lessons for similar challenges and service development for different areas of care and in other countries. Continual system and role change has had effects on service delivery and on the whole care. These effects relate to; defining the role of community matron and structure of service, training staff, identifying patients, providing infrastructure, demonstrating benefits, identifying gaps in services, ability to reduce avoidable admissions and identifying the advantages and difficulties of the role. DISCUSSION: All of these aspects should be used to inform future development

Something borrowed: sequence alignment and the identification of similar passages in large text collections

The following article describes a simple technique to identify lexically-similar passages in large collections of text using sequence alignment algorithms. Primarily used in the field of bioinformatics to identify similar segments of DNA in genome research, sequence alignment has also been employed in many other domains, from plagiarism detection to image processing. While we have applied this approach to a wide variety of diverse text collections, we will focus our discussion here on the identification of similar passages in the famous 18th-century Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert. Reference works, such as encyclopedias and dictionaries, are generally expected to "reuse" or "borrow" passages from many sources and Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie was no exception. Drawn from an immense variety of source material, both French and non-French, many, if not most, of the borrowings that occur in the Encyclopédie are not sufficiently identified (according to our standards of modern citation), or are only partially acknowledged in passing. The systematic identification of recycled passages can thus offer us a clear indication of the sources the philosophes were exploiting as well as the extent to which the intertextual relations that accompanied its composition and subsequent reception can be explored. In the end,we hope this approach to "Encyclopedic intertextuality" using sequence alignment can broaden the discussion concerning the relationship of Enlightenment thought to previous intellectual traditions as well as its reuse in the centuries that followed

ELECTRICITY DEREGULATION: WHAT'S IN STORE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT?

We test the: degree to which electricity consumers will trade off price and environmental attributes, effectiveness of environmental certification, and effectiveness of voluntary versus mandatory environmental disclosure. The type and consistency of information, the degree of difference in environmental attributes and the individual's characteristics all impact the choice of electricity product.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Texas Parks & Wildlife

Monthly magazine discussing natural resources, parks, hunting and fishing, and other information related to the outdoors in Texas

Texas Parks & Wildlife

Monthly magazine discussing natural resources, parks, hunting and fishing, and other information related to the outdoors in Texas