Bacterial contamination of anesthesia machines’ internal breathing-circuit-systems

Background: Bacterial contamination of anesthesia breathing machines and their potential hazard for pulmonary infection and cross-infection among anesthetized patients has been an infection control issue since the 1950s. Disposable equipment and bacterial filters have been introduced to minimize this risk. However, the machines’ internal breathing-circuit-system has been considered to be free of micro-organisms without providing adequate data supporting this view. The aim of the study was to investigate if any micro-organisms can be yielded from used internal machines’ breathing-circuit-system. Based on such results objective reprocessing intervals could be defined

Understanding the UK hospital supply chain in an era of patient choice

Author Posting © Westburn Publishers Ltd, 2011. This is a post-peer-review, pre-copy-edit version of an article which has been published in its definitive form in the Journal of Marketing Management, and has been posted by permission of Westburn Publishers Ltd for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Journal of Marketing Management, 27(3-4), 401 - 423, doi:10.1080/0267257X.2011.547084 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2011.547084The purpose of this paper is to investigate the UK hospital supply chain in light of recent government policy reform where patients will have, inter alia, greater choice of hospital for elective surgery. Subsequently, the hospital system should become far more competitive with supply chains having to react to these changes as patient demand becomes less predictable. Using a qualitative case study methodology, hospital managers are interviewed on a range of issues. Views on the development of the hospital supply chain in different phases are derived, and are used to develop a map of the current hospital chain. The findings show hospital managers anticipating some significant changes to the hospital supply chain and its workings as Patient Choice expands. The research also maps the various aspects of the hospital supply chain as it moves through different operational phases and highlights underlying challenges and complexities. The hospital supply chain, as discussed and mapped in this research, is original work given there are no examples in the literature that provide holistic representations of hospital activity. At the end, specific recommendations are provided that will be of interest to service to managers, researchers, and policymakers

Attachment styles and personal growth following romantic breakups: The mediating roles of distress, rumination, and tendency to rebound

© 2013 Marshall et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.The purpose of this research was to examine the associations of attachment anxiety and avoidance with personal growth following relationship dissolution, and to test breakup distress, rumination, and tendency to rebound with new partners as mediators of these associations. Study 1 (N = 411) and Study 2 (N = 465) measured attachment style, breakup distress, and personal growth; Study 2 additionally measured ruminative reflection, brooding, and proclivity to rebound with new partners. Structural equation modelling revealed in both studies that anxiety was indirectly associated with greater personal growth through heightened breakup distress, whereas avoidance was indirectly associated with lower personal growth through inhibited breakup distress. Study 2 further showed that the positive association of breakup distress with personal growth was accounted for by enhanced reflection and brooding, and that anxious individuals’ greater personal growth was also explained by their proclivity to rebound. These findings suggest that anxious individuals’ hyperactivated breakup distress may act as a catalyst for personal growth by promoting the cognitive processing of breakup-related thoughts and emotions, whereas avoidant individuals’ deactivated distress may inhibit personal growth by suppressing this cognitive work

Comparing life cycle energy and global warming potential of carbon fibre composite recycling technologies and waste management options

Carbon fibre reinforced polymers (CFRP) are used in increasing quantities as they have some of the best properties in terms of specific strength and stiffness of any widely available material. By 2020, annual global CFRP production is expected to be over 140,000 tonnes. However, the resulting increased quantity of CFRP waste has highlighted the need for sustainable treatment options as carbon fibre manufacture has high-energy intensity. A life cycle methodology is used to evaluate primary energy demand (PED) and global warming potential (GWP) leveraging best available literature data, process models, and experimental work. Overall results indicate that recycling scenarios are generally the environmentally preferable options over landfill and incineration. However, the relative environmental benefits of advanced recycling processes (i.e., pyrolysis, fluidised bed, and chemical recycling process) depend on the method used to determine displacement of virgin carbon fibre by recycled carbon fibre. Totally, recycling processes can achieve a representative GWP of -19 to -27 kg CO2eq. and PED of -395 to -520 MJ per kg CFRP, providing superior environmental performance to conventional composite waste treatment technologies