13,487 research outputs found

    Validity, reliability, acceptability, and utility of the Social Inclusion Questionnaire User Experience (SInQUE): a clinical tool to facilitate social inclusion amongst people with severe mental health problems.

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    BACKGROUND: Individuals with severe mental health problems are at risk of social exclusion, which may complicate their recovery. Mental health and social care staff have, until now, had no valid or reliable way of assessing their clients' social inclusion. The Social Inclusion Questionnaire User Experience (SInQUE) was developed to address this. It assesses five domains: social integration; productivity; consumption; access to services; and political engagement, in the year prior to first psychiatric admission (T1) and the year prior to interview (T2) from which a total score at each time point can be calculated. AIMS: To establish the validity, reliability, and acceptability of the SInQUE in individuals with a broad range of psychiatric diagnoses receiving care from community mental health services and its utility for mental health staff. METHOD: Participants were 192 mental health service users with psychosis, personality disorder, or common mental disorder (e.g., depression, anxiety) who completed the SInQUE alongside other validated outcome measures. Test-retest reliability was assessed in a sub-sample of 30 participants and inter-rater reliability was assessed in 11 participants. SInQUE ratings of 28 participants were compared with those of a sibling with no experience of mental illness to account for shared socio-cultural factors. Acceptability and utility of the tool were assessed using completion rates and focus groups with staff. RESULTS: The SInQUE demonstrated acceptable convergent validity. The total score and the Social Integration domain score were strongly correlated with quality of life, both in the full sample and in the three diagnostic groups. Discriminant validity and test-retest reliability were established across all domains, although the test-retest reliability on scores for the Service Access and Political Engagement domains prior to first admission to hospital (T1) was lower than other domains. Inter-rater reliability was excellent for all domains at T1 and T2. CONCLUSIONS: The component of the SInQUE that assesses current social inclusion has good psychometric properties and can be recommended for use by mental health staff

    Patients' preferences for the management of non-metastatic prostate cancer: discrete choice experiment

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    Objective To establish which attributes of conservative treatments for prostate cancer are most important to men. Design Discrete choice experiment. Setting Two London hospitals. Participants 129 men with non-metastatic prostate cancer, mean age 70 years; 69 of 118 (58%) with T stage 1 or 2 cancer at diagnosis. Main outcome measures Men's preferences for, and trade-offs between, the attributes of diarrhoea, hot flushes, ability to maintain an erection, breast swelling or tenderness, physical energy, sex drive, life expectancy, and out of pocket expenses. Results The men's responses to changes in attributes were all statistically significant. When asked to assume a starting life expectancy of five years, the men were willing to make trade-offs between life expectancy and side effects. On average, they were most willing to give up life expectancy to avoid limitations in physical energy (mean three months) and least willing to trade life expectancy to avoid hot flushes (mean 0.6 months to move from a moderate to mild level or from mild to none). Conclusions Men with prostate cancer are willing to participate in a relatively complex exercise that weighs up the advantages and disadvantages of various conservative treatments for their condition. They were willing to trade off some life expectancy to be relieved of the burden of troublesome side effects such as limitations in physical energy

    Changes to the air‐sea flux and distribution of radiocarbon in the ocean over the 21st century

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    We investigate the spatiotemporal evolution of radiocarbon (Δ14C) in the ocean over the 21st century under different scenarios for anthropogenic CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 and radiocarbon changes using a 3‐D ocean carbon cycle model. Strong decreases in atmospheric Δ14C in the high‐emission scenario result in strong outgassing of 14C over 2050–2100, causing Δ14C spatial gradients in the surface ocean and vertical gradients between the surface and intermediate waters to reverse sign. Surface Δ14C in the subtropical gyres is lower than Δ14C in Pacific Deep Water and Southern Ocean surface water in 2100. In the low‐emission scenario, ocean Δ14C remains slightly higher than in 1950 and relatively constant over 2050–2100. Over the next 20 years we find decadal changes in Δ14C of −30‰ to +5‰ in the upper 2 km of the ocean, which should be detectable with continued hydrographic surveys. Our simulations can help in planning future observations, and they provide a baseline for investigating natural or anthropogenic changes in ocean circulation using ocean Δ14C observations and models

    Componential coding in the condition monitoring of electrical machines Part 2: application to a conventional machine and a novel machine

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    This paper (Part 2) presents the practical application of componential coding, the principles of which were described in the accompanying Part 1 paper. Four major issues are addressed, including optimization of the neural network, assessment of the anomaly detection results, development of diagnostic approaches (based on the reconstruction error) and also benchmarking of componential coding with other techniques (including waveform measures, Fourier-based signal reconstruction and principal component analysis). This is achieved by applying componential coding to the data monitored from both a conventional induction motor and from a novel transverse flux motor. The results reveal that machine condition monitoring using componential coding is not only capable of detecting and then diagnosing anomalies but it also outperforms other conventional techniques in that it is able to separate very small and localized anomalies

    Transferring research from a university to the United Kingdom National Health Service : The implications for impact

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    This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.The aim of this article is to inform readers of the author's reflections on the experience of transferring universitybased research into the commercial sector, and of the processes and strategies employed when preparing for impact in so doing. Concepts for the transfer are illustrated by the author's reflection on aspects that arose during the birthing and subsequent start-up of a university spin-off, Pathways2Wellbeing, a form of reflection-on-action. This is the vehicle for the adaption required to transfer research into the delivery of a specialised clinic in the United Kingdom National Health Service for people with medically unexplained, persistent, bodily symptoms such as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and chronic pain. It is hoped that the article will provide readers with an insight into how knowledge transfer can take place through engagement with stakeholders to create an exchange of knowledges to result in impact on health service policy for service users, despite the challenges, and the enablers that facilitated this process. The reflections on the process of knowledge transfer and the implications for impact are underpinned by relevant theory.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

    Finite Projective Spaces, Geometric Spreads of Lines and Multi-Qubits

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    Given a (2N - 1)-dimensional projective space over GF(2), PG(2N - 1, 2), and its geometric spread of lines, there exists a remarkable mapping of this space onto PG(N - 1, 4) where the lines of the spread correspond to the points and subspaces spanned by pairs of lines to the lines of PG(N - 1, 4). Under such mapping, a non-degenerate quadric surface of the former space has for its image a non-singular Hermitian variety in the latter space, this quadric being {\it hyperbolic} or {\it elliptic} in dependence on N being {\it even} or {\it odd}, respectively. We employ this property to show that generalized Pauli groups of N-qubits also form two distinct families according to the parity of N and to put the role of symmetric operators into a new perspective. The N=4 case is taken to illustrate the issue.Comment: 3 pages, no figures/tables; V2 - short introductory paragraph added; V3 - to appear in Int. J. Mod. Phys.

    Girls Making History: Pilot Interim Report

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    Multilayer adsorption and desorption: Cs and Li on Ru(0001)

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    We use a multilayer lattice gas model for adsorption and desorption to analyze and simulate desorption data for Li and Cs on Ru(0001) extracting surface binding energies and lateral interactions. The latter are repulsive for the first layer and attractive for subsequent ones
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