Patient Satisfaction Rates When Implementing a Fast Track System into an Emergency Room

Emergency rooms are often overcrowding by patients that may not require the level of care that an emergency room is able to provide. Many of these patients can be seen in a urgent care clinic or a doctors office. The purpose of this study is to reduce the overcrowding in emergency rooms by finding a way to quickly and effectively treat these patients and keep the patients satisfied with the care they receive. The research has found that a fast track system helps with this. A fast track system uses only a small number of smaller rooms to be able to get patients treated without taking up much time or tying up resources or staff from assisting more critical patients. The fast track has been proven to increase patient satisfaction and reduce the wait times in emergency rooms. With little cost to implement, the emergency room would benefit from this small change

Educators\u27 Oral Histories of Tampa Bay Area Writing Project Involvement

The purpose of this study was to describe and explain participants’ perceptions of Tampa Bay Area Writing Project (TBAWP) influence on professional learning over time. This study explored Writing Project impact on professional learning by accessing the oral histories of three educators who were involved in TBAWP between 1998 and 2004. The research question was: • In what ways, if any, has long-term involvement in the Tampa Bay Area Writing Project impacted the teaching practice, career growth, and professional learning of participating educators? This qualitative study employed constructivism as the theoretical framework. Analysis of study data resulted in specific findings. Educators’ stories revealed Writing Project participation significantly impacted their teaching practice, career growth, and professional learning. The lasting impact of Writing Project involvement was seen in the ways in which educators infused the concept of community into their teaching practice, accepted leadership positions within the profession, and ultimately went on to conduct professional learning experiences for educators. Data analysis generated a conceptual model that examines the lasting impact of educator professional learning. Implications of this finding are significant for longitudinal inquiry of educator professional learning and for impact studies of long-term Writing Project involvement. In addition to providing exemplars of educator stories of practice over time, the study contributed to development of a fuller understanding of effective professional development, educator professional learning, and the lasting impact of Writing Project involvement

Three Works in Progress

Collective self-study enables participants to collaboratively examine their way of work (Samaras & Freese, 2006). Utilizing technological tools, two graduate students and one professor in this collective self-study explored various aspects of a graduate student teaching mentorship and reflected on possible implications for practice. The use of various technological tools such as email, iChat, Skype, and Wikispaces facilitated examination of this mentorship

The Fall of Icarus: A Paid Intern\u27s Search for Her Teacher Identity

While “reality shock” for beginning teachers has been well documented (Veenman, 1984), few studies have examined the transition to teaching of beginning teachers in accelerated preparation programs (Huling-Austin, 1986; Zeichner, 2012). This case study, taken from a larger study, examines the concerns a paid intern in her first semester of teaching. Findings suggest that conflict between her success-oriented self-perception and perceived failures to reach her own ideal within the realities of practice caused anxiety as she struggled to negotiate her teacher identity. (495

Printable QR code paper microfluidic colorimetric assay for screening volatile biomarkers

We present a QR code paper microfluidic colorimetric assay that can exploit the hardware and software on mobile devices, and circumvent sample preparation by directly targeting volatile biomarkers. Our platform is a printable microarray of well-defined reaction regions, which outputs an instant diagnosis by directing the user to a URL containing their test result, while simultaneously storing epidemiological data for remote access and bioinformatics. To assist in the rapid identification of Escherichia coli in bloodstream infections, we employed an existing colorimetric reagent (p-dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde) and adapted its use to detect volatile indole, a biomarker produced by E. coli. Our assay was able to quantitatively detect indole in the headspace of E. coli culture after 12 h of growth (27.0 ± 3.1 ppm), assisting in species-level identification hours earlier than existing methods. Results were confirmed with headspace solid-phase microextraction (HS-SPME) two-dimensional gas chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC×GC-ToFMS), which estimated indole concentration in E. coli culture to average 32.3 ± 5.2 ppm after 12 h of growth. This QR paper microfluidic platform represents a novel development in both telemedicine and diagnostics using volatile biomarkers. We envision that our QR code platform can be extended to other colorimetric assays for real-time diagnostics in low-resource environments. © 2018 Elsevier B.V