Healthcare professionals' intentions to use wiki-based reminders to promote best practices in trauma care: a survey protocol

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Healthcare professionals are increasingly using wikis as collaborative tools to create, synthesize, share, and disseminate knowledge in healthcare. Because wikis depend on collaborators to keep content up-to-date, healthcare professionals who use wikis must adopt behaviors that foster this collaboration. This protocol describes the methods we will use to develop and test the metrological qualities of a questionnaire that will assess healthcare professionals' intentions and the determinants of those intentions to use wiki-based reminders that promote best practices in trauma care.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using the Theory of Planned Behavior, we will conduct semi-structured interviews of healthcare professionals to identify salient beliefs that may affect their future use of wikis. These beliefs will inform our questionnaire on intended behavior. A test-retest of the survey will verify the questionnaire's stability over time. We will interview 50 healthcare professionals (25 physicians and 25 allied health professionals) working in the emergency departments of three trauma centers in Quebec, Canada. We will analyze the content of the interviews and construct and pilot a questionnaire. We will then test the revised questionnaire with 30 healthcare professionals (15 physicians and 15 allied health professionals) and retest it two weeks later. We will assess the internal consistency of the questionnaire constructs using Cronbach's alpha coefficients and determine their stability with the intra-class correlation (ICC).</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>To our knowledge, this study will be the first to develop and test a theory-based survey that measures healthcare professionals' intentions to use a wiki-based intervention. This study will identify professionals' salient beliefs qualitatively and will quantify the psychometric capacities of the questionnaire based on those beliefs.</p

High activity catechol 1,2-dioxygenase from Stenotrophomonas maltophilia strain KB2 as a useful tool in cis,cis-muconic acid production

This is the first report of a catechol 1,2-dioxygenase from Stenotrophomonas maltophilia strain KB2 with high activity against catechol and its methyl derivatives. This enzyme was maximally active at pH 8.0 and 40 °C and the half-life of the enzyme at this temperature was 3 h. Kinetic studies showed that the value of K(m) and V(max) was 12.8 μM and 1,218.8 U/mg of protein, respectively. During our studies on kinetic properties of the catechol 1,2-dioxygenase we observed substrate inhibition at >80 μM. The nucleotide sequence of the gene encoding the S. maltophilia strain KB2 catechol 1,2-dioxygenase has high identity with other catA genes from members of the genus Pseudomonas. The deduced 314-residue sequence of the enzyme corresponds to a protein of molecular mass 34.5 kDa. This enzyme was inhibited by competitive inhibitors (phenol derivatives) only by ca. 30 %. High tolerance against condition changes is desirable in industrial processes. Our data suggest that this enzyme could be of use as a tool in production of cis,cis-muconic acid and its derivatives