Understanding Job Stress among Healthcare Staff

Introduction: Job life is an important part of a person’s daily life. There are many aspects of a job. A person may be satisfied with one or more aspects of his/her job but at the same time may be unhappy with other things related to the job. Objective: To evaluate the sources of job stress (stressful aspects of work) among the staff of a super specialty hospital & to suggest measures to decrease level of job stress. Methodology: Descriptive study employing 381 staff members of a super specialty hospital using a structured personal interview questionnaire consisting of 21 sources of stress. The hospital staff was asked to rate each item according to the extent to which it had contributed to their stress as experienced in their jobs in the past few months on a scale of 0 (not at all),1(a little), 2(quite a bit), 3 (a lot). A global rating of stress was also obtained. Result: The prime sources of stress were found to be underpayment (76%), excessive workload (70.3%), inadequate staff (48.6), & being involved in the emotional distress of patients (46.7%). Conclusion: The staffs of the hospital were in moderate stress due to the prime stressors so adequate measures should be taken to alleviate these stressors. This could be achieved through workload management, job redesign, & by offering occupational health education

Superfluid-Insulator transition of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice in the presence of a synthetic magnetic field

We study the Mott insulator-superfluid transition of ultracold bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional square optical lattice in the presence of a synthetic magnetic field with p/q (p and q being co-prime integers) flux quanta passing through each lattice plaquette. We show that on approach to the transition from the Mott side, the momentum distribution of the bosons exhibits q precursor peaks within the first magnetic Brillouin zone. We also provide an effective theory for the transition and show that it involves q interacting boson fields. We construct, from a mean-field analysis of this effective theory, the superfluid ground states near the transition and compute, for q=2,3, both the gapped and the gapless collective modes of these states. We suggest experiments to test our theory.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figs; v

Thermal photon to dilepton ratio in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions

The ratio of transverse momentum distribution of thermal photons to dilepton has been evaluated. It is observed that this ratio reaches a plateau beyond a certain value of transverse momentum. We argue that this ratio can be used to estimate the initial temperature of the system by selecting the transverse momentum and invariance mass windows judiciously. It is demonstrated that if the radial flow is large then the plateau disappear and hence a deviation from the plateau can be used as an indicator of large radial flow. The sensitivity of the results on various input parameters has been studied.Comment: 9 pages with 11 eps figure