European refugee crisis: psychological trauma of refugees and care givers

Purpose – In recent years, the number of refugees and migrants entering Europe has increased dramatically. Such trauma may affect not only refugees themselves, but also care givers and rescue workers. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the intensity and psychological impact of the refugee crisis, with a view to suggesting ways of moving forward. Design/methodology/approach – Based on recent literature, this paper briefly looks at the importance of attention to health and social issues, before discussing the psychological trauma of refugees and potential emotional trauma of those involved in rescue operations. Findings – The provision of psychological support which is both compassionate and culturally competent should be viewed as essential. Furthermore, the development of resources and tools to assist with the current refugee crisis could enable care givers, rescue workers, and healthcare professionals to provide psychological support to migrants and refugees. Such resources could also encourage, and support, frontline responders in caring for their own personal psychological well-being. Originality/value – The content of this paper could help to encourage further research in this field, including research into the emotional trauma of rescue workers. Furthermore, it is intended that this paper could contribute to an on-line knowledge base when considering the development of tools and resources to assist with the current refugee crisis. Keywords Crisis, Refugee, Psychological, Care-givers Paper type General revie

Noradrenergic induction of odor-specific neural habituation and olfactory memories

For many mammals, individual recognition of conspecifics relies on olfactory cues. Certain individual recognition memories are thought to be stored when conspecific odor cues coincide with surges of noradrenaline (NA) triggered by intensely arousing social events. Such familiar stimuli elicit reduced behavioral responses, a change likely related to NA-dependent plasticity in the olfactory bulb (OB). In addition to its role in these ethological memories, NA signaling in the OB appears to be relevant for the discrimination of more arbitrary odorants as well. Nonetheless, no NA-gated mechanism of long-term plasticity in the OB has ever been directly observed in vivo. Here, we report that NA release from locus ceruleus (LC), when coupled to odor presentation, acts locally in the main OB to cause a specific long-lasting suppression of responses to paired odors. These effects were observed for both food odors and urine, an important social recognition cue. Moreover, in subsequent behavioral tests, mice exhibited habituation to paired urine stimuli, suggesting that this LC-mediated olfactory neural plasticity, induced under anesthesia, can store an individual recognition memory that is observable after recovery

Developing tools to promote culturally competent compassion, courage, and intercultural communication in healthcare

Background: Compassion is an important concept in healthcare, and in addition, care should be delivered in a culturally competent manner, taking into account the values, culture, and health beliefs of the individual. However, the training of nurses and other healthcare professionals may not adequately equip them to practice in a manner which is both compassionate and culturally competent. In this paper, we report on the development of three learning tools, designed to promote the skills and strengthen the capacity of nurses and healthcare professionals to provide culturally competent and compassionate care. Methods: The project involved the participation of six European countries in the development of three learning tools, covering culturally competent compassion, culturally competent courage, and intercultural communication. The principles which informed the methodology derive from the previous work on the Papadopoulos, Tilki and Taylor (PTT) model of transcultural nursing and cultural competence, and were also informed by the Intercultural Education of Nurses in Europe (IENE1 & IENE2) projects. Each partner country was required to produce one tool for each topic area, based on guidance provided by the project co-ordinator, leading to the development of eighteen tools in total. The tools were administered mainly to student nurses to test their feasibility. Results: The emerging tools contained important theoretical and practical components, whereby innovative learning methods and case studies were included. Student nurses enjoyed using the tools, and enjoyed their flexibility. The learning tools enabled students to become stimulated and to engage together leading to a positive learning experience. Discussion: The tools allow for a positive learning experience and reflection of good practice to take place. The flexibility and content of the tools allows for them to be of equal value to other healthcare professionals as well as nursing staff. Conclusion: The tools were initially utilised mainly with student nurses and were received with a positive response. Work is now in place to further implement the tools and evaluate the longer term effects among a range of healthcare professionals and service user health outcomes

Forecasting basketball players’ performance using sparse functional data

Statistics and analytic methods are becoming increasingly important in basketball. In particular, predicting players’ performance using past observations is a considerable challenge. The purpose of this study is to forecast the future behavior of basketball players. The available data are sparse functional data, which are very common in sports. So far, however, no forecasting method designed for sparse functional data has been used in sports. A methodology based on two methods to handle sparse and irregular data, together with the analogous method and functional archetypoid analysis is proposed. Results in comparison with traditional methods show that our approach is competitive and additionally provides prediction intervals. The methodology can also be used in other sports when sparse longitudinal data are available

Preliminary Evaluation of Lectins as Fluorescent Probes of Seed Structure and Composition

Several commercially available fluoresceinisothiocyanate and rhodamine isothiocyanateconjugated plant lectins have been applied to cereal and oilseed tissues to permit identification and localization of specific structures and carbohydrates by fluorescence microscopy . Ulex europeaus Agglutinin I (UEAl) and Ricinis communis Agglutinin I (RCA I) showed specificity for the amyloids in rapeseed cotyledonary cell walls . Wheat Germ Agglutinin (WGA) bound to rapeseed coat mucilage, as well as fungal hyphae in infected wheat . Lens culinaris Agglutinin (LCA) bound only to starch in cereal sections, and at higher magnifications of isolated starch granules , the annular structure was clearly visible

Exploring the cultural aspects of compassion in nursing care: a comparative study of Greece and Cyprus

Introduction: It is important to consider the concept of compassionate care within a cultural context in terms of how it might be perceived and demonstrated in practice. People may vary in what constitutes suffering due to variations in their values, culture, needs and understanding. In this paper we report on the findings from data collected from Greek and Greek-Cypriot Nurses during a study which sought to explore similarities and differences between the two countries with regard to perceptions of compassion. Methods: This is an exploratory, cross-sectional descriptive study. The data discussed within this paper have been extracted from a large scale on-line survey involving 15 countries. Greek-Cypriot participants were recruited through local professional organizations and university/college student associations. In Greece, participants were recruited through university associations and social networks. Participants were emailed a link to the survey which was completed on-line. The research tool consisted of 10 open and closed questions. Results: Many similarities were identified between the two groups following their response to the survey, although some small differences were also identified. From the findings of the qualitative data, 3 main themes emerged for both groups of nurses: compassionate communication; awareness of needs; and kindness, whilst a fourth theme was also identified applying mostly to the Greek nurses with regard to factors which might hinder compassion and referring mainly to the effects of economic crisis. Discussion: A number of similarities were identified between the two countries and both countries reported feeling that compassion in nursing is very important, and also stating that they themselves received little compassion from management. However, despite similarities in the perceptions of Greek and Greek-Cypriot nurses, some differences were also identified. Furthermore, our study revealed a greater number of Greek nurses reporting effects of austerity. Conclusion: Greek and Greek Cypriot nurses may differ on how they define compassion but their practical expressions on compassion are very similar. Both countries felt that their own experiences of compassion were most likely to come from colleagues or patients, and most unlikely to come from their managers. There is an urgent need for compassionate leaders within their public health care systems, who will develop organizational cultures which nurture and sustain compassion. This is particularly evident in the case of Greece where we identified a larger number of nurses reporting restraints due to financial crisis

Three-body Interactions Improve the Prediction of Rate and Mechanism in Protein Folding Models

Here we study the effects of many-body interactions on rate and mechanism in protein folding, using the results of molecular dynamics simulations on numerous coarse-grained C-alpha-model single-domain proteins. After adding three-body interactions explicitly as a perturbation to a Go-like Hamiltonian with native pair-wise interactions only, we have found 1) a significantly increased correlation with experimental phi-values and folding rates, 2) a stronger correlation of folding rate with contact order, matching the experimental range in rates when the fraction of three-body energy in the native state is ~ 20%, and 3) a considerably larger amount of 3-body energy present in Chymotripsin inhibitor than other proteins studied.Comment: 9 pages, 2 tables and 5 figure

Fractal-like Distributions over the Rational Numbers in High-throughput Biological and Clinical Data

Recent developments in extracting and processing biological and clinical data are allowing quantitative approaches to studying living systems. High-throughput sequencing, expression profiles, proteomics, and electronic health records are some examples of such technologies. Extracting meaningful information from those technologies requires careful analysis of the large volumes of data they produce. In this note, we present a set of distributions that commonly appear in the analysis of such data. These distributions present some interesting features: they are discontinuous in the rational numbers, but continuous in the irrational numbers, and possess a certain self-similar (fractal-like) structure. The first set of examples which we present here are drawn from a high-throughput sequencing experiment. Here, the self-similar distributions appear as part of the evaluation of the error rate of the sequencing technology and the identification of tumorogenic genomic alterations. The other examples are obtained from risk factor evaluation and analysis of relative disease prevalence and co-mordbidity as these appear in electronic clinical data. The distributions are also relevant to identification of subclonal populations in tumors and the study of the evolution of infectious diseases, and more precisely the study of quasi-species and intrahost diversity of viral populations

A microbial detection array (MDA) for viral and bacterial detection

BACKGROUND: Identifying the bacteria and viruses present in a complex sample is useful in disease diagnostics, product safety, environmental characterization, and research. Array-based methods have proven utility to detect in a single assay at a reasonable cost any microbe from the thousands that have been sequenced. METHODS: We designed a pan-Microbial Detection Array (MDA) to detect all known viruses (including phages), bacteria and plasmids and developed a novel statistical analysis method to identify mixtures of organisms from complex samples hybridized to the array. The array has broader coverage of bacterial and viral targets and is based on more recent sequence data and more probes per target than other microbial detection/discovery arrays in the literature. Family-specific probes were selected for all sequenced viral and bacterial complete genomes, segments, and plasmids. Probes were designed to tolerate some sequence variation to enable detection of divergent species with homology to sequenced organisms, and to have no significant matches to the human genome sequence. RESULTS: In blinded testing on spiked samples with single or multiple viruses, the MDA was able to correctly identify species or strains. In clinical fecal, serum, and respiratory samples, the MDA was able to detect and characterize multiple viruses, phage, and bacteria in a sample to the family and species level, as confirmed by PCR. CONCLUSIONS: The MDA can be used to identify the suite of viruses and bacteria present in complex samples