Examining the implementation of the patient-centered recovery model in psychiatric nursing

The Recovery Care Model is the recommended evidence-based model for delivering holistic, patient-centered care for mental health clients. The model is a more therapeutic approach than the traditional medical model and upholds the ideas that psychiatric clients are more than just their illness, should be respected as unique individuals, and provided with hope and empowerment in their care while being given the opportunity for informed and autonomous decision-making. Although research has shown support for the Recovery Care Model, its implementation has not been fully accomplished in all psychiatric facilities. Of all of the members of the health care team, nurses have the most extensive and prolonged interaction with clients and are strategically positioned to be at the forefront of this shift towards recovery-based services. The aim of this study was to discover whether the Recovery Care Model is being utilized fully in psychiatric nursing care in the Augusta/Rockingham/Staunton community in Virginia. Eight psychiatric nurses and fifteen psychiatric clients provided qualitative and quantitative input regarding the usage of the ten fundamentals of the Recovery Care Model in the acute psychiatric nursing care system via a Qualtrics survey. Of the ten fundamentals, there were three areas of care that were identified as needing improvement including; care that focuses on strengths, is respectful, and includes peer support. From this survey, it appears that the Recovery Care Model is not fully embraced and executed by psychiatric nurses. Education and change in the cultural mindset of psychiatric nurses can help aid in this transition

Coming out stories of gay and lesbian young adults: Relation between memory characteristics and psychological well-being

Gay and lesbian young adults (N = 53) were interviewed in detail about coming out for the first time to each of their parents. Participants also completed an extensive battery of psychological measures, including event centrality related to disclosure to their mother and father, parental attachment, attitudes toward homosexuality, relationship satisfaction, anxiety, and depression. Analyses of memory content and structure (complexity, coherence, descriptiveness) were conducted, and the relation between memory qualities and well-being were analyzed. Hypotheses related to disclosure to parents and peers were largely supported. The majority of participants first disclosed their sexual orientation to a friend. More participants came out to their mother than to their father, and when disclosure was made to both parents, mothers were more likely to be told prior to fathers. Mothers were most often told using direct methods, such as a face-to-face conversation, whereas fathers were more likely to be informed using indirect methods, such as in a letter or via another person. Mothers also tended to first inquire about their sons\u27 sexuality, which ultimately led to their disclosure; mothers inquired about sexual orientation less with their daughters. Related to psychosocial well-being, individuals with more positive attitudes toward homosexuality were more satisfied with romantic relationships and less anxious. More positive relationships with parents were associated with a secure homosexual identity and less anxiety. In contrast, highly central and negative or mixed feelings about coming out to mothers were associated with a less secure homosexual identity. There were only scattered and unexpected findings related to narrative complexity, descriptiveness, and coherence. Grade level and reading ease were related to attachment; positive relationships with parents were associated with more simplistic coming out narratives. Individuals with more descriptive narratives, as measured by the proportion of adjective, adverbs, and modifiers, were more depressed. Lastly, participants with highly central and negative coming out experiences with fathers produced more coherent narratives. Findings are discussed in relation to the autobiographical memory, sexuality, attachment, and clinical literatures. Future directions and conclusions are also presented

The Collaborative Evolution of the Writing Teacher Educator and the Methods Course

In this article, we describe a collaborative approach to preparing graduate students for teaching the methods class at our university. We document the approach to preparation, our connections to the methods course itself, the tensions in the methods course that we identified in working together, and the important choices about and modifications we made to the course based on the tensions we identified. Our collaborative approach to preparing and planning for the methods class gave us a deep understanding of our context and unique challenges as we evolved the course

A retrospective analysis of the factors associated with surgical checklist compliance using data from a local health unit in Italy, 2018–2021

Rationale: Since its publication, the World Health Organization Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC) has been progressively adopted by healthcare providers around the world to monitor and safeguard the delivery of surgeries. In one Italian region's health system, the SSC and other two surgery‐specific checklists were supplemented by a document that records any non‐conformity (NC) arising from the safety checks. Aims and Objectives: In this study, we investigated the factors associated with NCs using data from a local health unit (LHU). The secondary aim of this study was to explore the potential impact of the coronavirus crisis on surgical checklist compliance. Methods: We used data on surgical activity from the Modena LHU between 2018and 2021 and the accompanying NC documents. The primary goal was to estimate the relative risk (RR) of NCs according to several factors, including checklist incompleteness and surgery class (elective, urgent or emergency), using Poisson regression. A similar analysis was performed separately for 2018–2019 and2020–2021 to assess the COVID‐19 potential impact. Results and Conclusions: Checklist compliance in the LHU was 95%, with the presence of NCs in about 7% of surgeries. The factors that increased the RR were incompleteness of the checklist (adjusted RR = 3.12; 95% confidence interval[CI] = 2.86–3.40), urgent surgeries (adjusted RR [aRR] = 1.59; 95% CI = 1.47–1.72),emergencies (aRR = 2.09; 95% CI = 1.15–3.79), and surgeries with more than four procedures (aRR = 1.64; 95% CI = 1.41–1.92). Most notably, the RR for incomplete checklists showed a negative association with NCs before the COVID‐19 outbreak but positive afterwards. Checklist compliance was overall satisfactory, though the observation of noncompliant checklists of about 1000 per year suggests there is stillroom for improvement. Moreover, attention to the checklist best practices and organization of outpatient workload may have been affected by the exceptional circumstances of the pandemic

The influence of dynamics and speech on understanding humanoid facial expressions

Human communication relies mostly on nonverbal signals expressed through body language. Facial expressions, in particular, convey emotional information that allows people involved in social interactions to mutually judge the emotional states and to adjust its behavior appropriately. First studies aimed at investigating the recognition of facial expressions were based on static stimuli. However, facial expressions are rarely static, especially in everyday social interactions. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that the dynamics inherent in a facial expression could be fundamental in understanding its meaning. In addition, it has been demonstrated that nonlinguistic and linguistic information can contribute to reinforce the meaning of a facial expression making it easier to be recognized. Nevertheless, few studies have been performed on realistic humanoid robots. This experimental work aimed at demonstrating the human-like expressive capability of a humanoid robot by examining whether the effect of motion and vocal content influenced the perception of its facial expressions. The first part of the experiment aimed at studying the recognition capability of two kinds of stimuli related to the six basic expressions (i.e. anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise): static stimuli, that is, photographs, and dynamic stimuli, that is, video recordings. The second and third parts were focused on comparing the same six basic expressions performed by a virtual avatar and by a physical robot under three different conditions: (1) muted facial expressions, (2) facial expressions with nonlinguistic vocalizations, and (3) facial expressions with an emotionally neutral verbal sentence. The results show that static stimuli performed by a human being and by the robot were more ambiguous than the corresponding dynamic stimuli on which motion and vocalization were associated. This hypothesis has been also investigated with a 3-dimensional replica of the physical robot demonstrating that even in case of a virtual avatar, dynamic and vocalization improve the emotional conveying capability

Can a Humanoid Face be Expressive? A Psychophysiological Investigation

Non-verbal signals expressed through body language play a crucial role in multi-modal human communication during social relations. Indeed, in all cultures, facial expressions are the most universal and direct signs to express innate emotional cues. A human face conveys important information in social interactions and helps us to better understand our social partners and establish empathic links. Latest researches show that humanoid and social robots are becoming increasingly similar to humans, both esthetically and expressively. However, their visual expressiveness is a crucial issue that must be improved to make these robots more realistic and intuitively perceivable by humans as not different from them. This study concerns the capability of a humanoid robot to exhibit emotions through facial expressions. More specifically, emotional signs performed by a humanoid robot have been compared with corresponding human facial expressions in terms of recognition rate and response time. The set of stimuli included standardized human expressions taken from an Ekman-based database and the same facial expressions performed by the robot. Furthermore, participants’ psychophysiological responses have been explored to investigate whether there could be differences induced by interpreting robot or human emotional stimuli. Preliminary results show a trend to better recognize expressions performed by the robot than 2D photos or 3D models. Moreover, no significant differences in the subjects’ psychophysiological state have been found during the discrimination of facial expressions performed by the robot in comparison with the same task performed with 2D photos and 3D models

Inhibition of the gastric H,K-ATPase by potassium competitive acid blockers

The gastric H,K-ATPase is a membrane protein found in the parietal cells of the stomach, where it couples H+ extrusion to the uptake of K+ , leading to the acidification of gastric juice (1). Acid-related diseases are an important public health issue where the mainstay of treatment has been the suppression of H,K-ATPase activity. As K+ plays a vital role in this catalytic cycle, for the dephosphorylation of the H,K-ATPase and the subsequent conformational changes, acid secretion can be inhibited by agents that are competitive with respect to K+ binding. This argument led in the past decades to the development of a new class of acid suppressants, known as potassium competitive acid blockers (P-CABs). Since a systematic investigation of enzyme-inhibition mechanisms has become a fruitful way to design and test new drugs, the effects of P-CABs-type inhibitors have been extensively studied analyzing how the apparent Michaelis and Menten parameters are affected (2). Working with the non-compartmentalized enzyme preparation, we analyzed the interactions between K+ , the H,K-ATPase, and two different inhibitors under steady state conditions. Our results from ATPase activity as a function of K+ concentration was described by a rational function where the maximal exponent on [K+] is 2. Data show that K+ , as a product, can inhibit the reaction steps that involve its release, which implies that ATPase activity would not obey the Michaelis-Menten equation. This can lead to mistakes when analysing the results according to variations in Vmax and KM . Here we propose a minimal model to describe the binding of K+ to different enzyme conformations and the inhibition by P-CABs compounds allowing a more realistic evaluation of their effects.Fil: Cerf, Nicole Talia. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas "Prof. Alejandro C. Paladini". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas; ArgentinaFil: Faraj, Santiago Enrique. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas "Prof. Alejandro C. Paladini". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas; ArgentinaFil: Valsecchi, Wanda M.. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas "Prof. Alejandro C. Paladini". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Rolando Carlos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas "Prof. Alejandro C. Paladini". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas; ArgentinaFil: Montes, Monica Raquel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas "Prof. Alejandro C. Paladini". Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica. Instituto de Química y Físico-Química Biológicas; ArgentinaXLIX Reunión Anual de la Sociedad Argentina de BiofísicaArgentinaSociedad Argentina de Biofísic

Brown and Beige Adipose Tissue and Aging

Across aging, adipose tissue (AT) changes its quantity and distribution: AT becomes dysfunctional with an increase in production of inflammatory peptides, a decline of those with anti-inflammatory activity and infiltration of macrophages. Adipose organ dysfunction may lead to age-related metabolic alterations. Aging is characterized by an increase in adiposity and a decline in brown adipose tissue (BAT) depots and activity, and UCP1 expression. There are many possible links to age-associated involution of BAT, including the loss of mitochondrial function, impairment of the sympathetic nervous system, age-induced alteration of brown adipogenic stem/progenitor cell function and changes in endocrine signals. Aging is also associated with a reduction in beige adipocyte formation. Beige adipocytes are known to differentiate from a sub-population of progenitors resident in white adipose tissue (WAT); a defective ability of progenitor cells to proliferate and differentiate has been hypothesized with aging. The loss of beige adipocytes with age may be caused by changes in trophic factors in the adipose tissue microenvironment, which regulate progenitor cell proliferation and differentiation. This review focuses on possible mechanisms involved in the reduction of BAT and beige activity with aging, along with possible targets for age-related metabolic disease therapy