A peer mentoring initiative developed to engage and mentor peers to decrease OSCE anxiety and encourage strong health assessment techniques

This study examined if participating in a student-led mentoring initiative assisted first year nursing students with their anxiety on Objective Structured Clinical Exams (OSCEs). Previous research has identified that OSCEs can be stressful for learners (Clarke, McDonald & Rainey, 2012; Rushforth, 2007). Peer mentors however have been shown to help decrease anxiety, increase confidence and help students gain feedback (Stone et al., 2013; Giordana, & Wedin, 2010). However, limited research exists to determine if mentoring initiatives help mitigate the anxiety nursing students feel when being tested on their health assessment skills using OSCEs. As a result, a comparative design was used to examine perceived anxiety between nursing students who participated in the mentoring initiative (SOOA) and those who did not. All first-year nursing students were provided with the opportunity to voluntarily participate in SOOA.  At the end of the school semester, prior to final OSCEs, all first year students were asked to complete a paper and pencil survey. The survey included standard demographic questions along with questions about participation in SOOA. In addition, a 40-item Likert scale was included which assessed subsets of anxiety and self-efficacy. The anxiety scale was adapted from Hodapp and Bensen’s and included items from the Revised Test Anxiety (RTA) scale, and the German Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI-G). Quantitative data analysis using student surveys were utilized to determine if any differences in anxiety level or self-efficacy exist between students based on their level of participation in SOOA. Students who attended SOOA frequently (defined as 10 or more times) reported the lowest worry and emotionality scores regarding their OSCE examinations compared with students who only attended SOOA occasionally. With the increasing use of OSCE examinations in education and related anxiety, mentoring initiatives such as SOOA should be considered as an approach to decrease anxiety amongst first year nursing students

SARS-CoV-2-specific nasal IgA wanes 9 months after hospitalisation with COVID-19 and is not induced by subsequent vaccination

BACKGROUND: Most studies of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 focus on circulating antibody, giving limited insights into mucosal defences that prevent viral replication and onward transmission. We studied nasal and plasma antibody responses one year after hospitalisation for COVID-19, including a period when SARS-CoV-2 vaccination was introduced. METHODS: In this follow up study, plasma and nasosorption samples were prospectively collected from 446 adults hospitalised for COVID-19 between February 2020 and March 2021 via the ISARIC4C and PHOSP-COVID consortia. IgA and IgG responses to NP and S of ancestral SARS-CoV-2, Delta and Omicron (BA.1) variants were measured by electrochemiluminescence and compared with plasma neutralisation data. FINDINGS: Strong and consistent nasal anti-NP and anti-S IgA responses were demonstrated, which remained elevated for nine months (p < 0.0001). Nasal and plasma anti-S IgG remained elevated for at least 12 months (p < 0.0001) with plasma neutralising titres that were raised against all variants compared to controls (p < 0.0001). Of 323 with complete data, 307 were vaccinated between 6 and 12 months; coinciding with rises in nasal and plasma IgA and IgG anti-S titres for all SARS-CoV-2 variants, although the change in nasal IgA was minimal (1.46-fold change after 10 months, p = 0.011) and the median remained below the positive threshold determined by pre-pandemic controls. Samples 12 months after admission showed no association between nasal IgA and plasma IgG anti-S responses (R = 0.05, p = 0.18), indicating that nasal IgA responses are distinct from those in plasma and minimally boosted by vaccination. INTERPRETATION: The decline in nasal IgA responses 9 months after infection and minimal impact of subsequent vaccination may explain the lack of long-lasting nasal defence against reinfection and the limited effects of vaccination on transmission. These findings highlight the need to develop vaccines that enhance nasal immunity. FUNDING: This study has been supported by ISARIC4C and PHOSP-COVID consortia. ISARIC4C is supported by grants from the National Institute for Health and Care Research and the Medical Research Council. Liverpool Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre provided infrastructure support for this research. The PHOSP-COVD study is jointly funded by UK Research and Innovation and National Institute of Health and Care Research. The funders were not involved in the study design, interpretation of data or the writing of this manuscript

Flattening is an Improvement

) James Riely 1 and Jan Prins 2 1 DePaul University 2 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Abstract. Flattening is a program transformation that eliminates nested parallel constructs, introducing flat parallel (vector) operations in their place. We define a sufficient syntactic condition for the correctness of flattening, providing a static approximation of Blelloch&apos;s &quot;containment&quot;. This is acheived using a typing system that tracks the control flow of programs. Using a weak improvement preorder, we then show that the flattening transformations are intensionally correct for all well-typed programs. 1 Introduction The study of program transformations has largely been concerned with functional correctness, i.e. whether program transformations preserve program meaning. However, if we include an execution cost-model as part of the programming language semantics, then we can ask whether program transformations additionally preserve or &quot;improve&quot; program performance. One progra..