Healthcare professionals' intentions to use wiki-based reminders to promote best practices in trauma care: a survey protocol

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Healthcare professionals are increasingly using wikis as collaborative tools to create, synthesize, share, and disseminate knowledge in healthcare. Because wikis depend on collaborators to keep content up-to-date, healthcare professionals who use wikis must adopt behaviors that foster this collaboration. This protocol describes the methods we will use to develop and test the metrological qualities of a questionnaire that will assess healthcare professionals' intentions and the determinants of those intentions to use wiki-based reminders that promote best practices in trauma care.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Using the Theory of Planned Behavior, we will conduct semi-structured interviews of healthcare professionals to identify salient beliefs that may affect their future use of wikis. These beliefs will inform our questionnaire on intended behavior. A test-retest of the survey will verify the questionnaire's stability over time. We will interview 50 healthcare professionals (25 physicians and 25 allied health professionals) working in the emergency departments of three trauma centers in Quebec, Canada. We will analyze the content of the interviews and construct and pilot a questionnaire. We will then test the revised questionnaire with 30 healthcare professionals (15 physicians and 15 allied health professionals) and retest it two weeks later. We will assess the internal consistency of the questionnaire constructs using Cronbach's alpha coefficients and determine their stability with the intra-class correlation (ICC).</p> <p>Discussion</p> <p>To our knowledge, this study will be the first to develop and test a theory-based survey that measures healthcare professionals' intentions to use a wiki-based intervention. This study will identify professionals' salient beliefs qualitatively and will quantify the psychometric capacities of the questionnaire based on those beliefs.</p

Le système CRISPR-Cas

CRISPR-Cas est un système immunitaire adaptatif utilisé par de nombreux microbes pour se défendre contre l’invasion d’acides nucléiques tels que les génomes viraux et autres éléments génétiques mobiles. Le système microbien utilise son locus CRISPR pour stocker de l’information génétique afin de produire des ARN guides. Ces derniers, de concert avec des endonucléases (Cas), empêchent des invasions futures. Des parties de ce système microbien ont été exploitées pour développer un puissant outil d’édition des génomes dans une panoplie d’organismes. La capacité de CRISPR-Cas9 à couper efficacement et à des endroits très précis de l’ADN pourrait peut-être permettre un jour de guérir certaines maladies génétiques humaines. La malléabilité de cet outil d’édition rend possible une variété d’applications allant de la modulation de l’expression de gènes à des modifications épigénétiques. Les locus CRISPR représentent également une mine d’informations pouvant servir de méthode de typage de souches microbiennes ou encore une façon d’étudier les interactions entre les bactéries et leurs habitats

Adsorption of Aromatic Hydrocarbon Molecules at the Surface of Ice, As Seen by Grand Canonical Monte Carlo Simulation

The adsorption of four aromatic hydrocarbon compounds, benzene, naphthalene, anthracene, and phenanthrene, at the surface of I-h ice is investigated by grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) computer simulation under tropospheric conditions at 200 K. By systematic variation of the value of adsorbate chemical potential in the simulations, the adsorption isotherms are determined, It is found that adsorption follows the Langmuir mechanism only up to a rather low relative pressure value in every case. In this range specific surface sites, called alpha sites, to which adsorbate molecules can be bound particularly strongly in specific orientation, are occupied. In these alpha sites, presumably the dangling OH bonds of the ice surface form O-H-center dot center dot center dot center dot pi-type hydrogen bonds with the delocalized pi electrons of the adsorbed aromatic molecule lying parallel with the ice surface. Once these alpha sites are saturated, lateral interactions become increasingly important, leading to large fluctuations of the lateral density of the adsorption layer and an increasing deviation of the adsorption isotherm from the Langmuir shape. The adsorption layer is found to be strictly monomolecular and even unsaturated in every case, as condensation well precedes the saturation of this monolayer for all four aromatic adsorbates considered in this study