Experimental and theoretical studies of nanofluid thermal conductivity enhancement: a review

Nanofluids, i.e., well-dispersed (metallic) nanoparticles at low- volume fractions in liquids, may enhance the mixture's thermal conductivity, knf, over the base-fluid values. Thus, they are potentially useful for advanced cooling of micro-systems. Focusing mainly on dilute suspensions of well-dispersed spherical nanoparticles in water or ethylene glycol, recent experimental observations, associated measurement techniques, and new theories as well as useful correlations have been reviewed

Improving nurse-physician teamwork through interprofessional bedside rounding

Stanislav Henkin,1 Tony Y Chon,2 Marie L Christopherson,3 Andrew J Halvorsen,1,4 Lindsey M Worden,3 John T Ratelle51Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, 2Division of General Internal Medicine, Mayo Clinic, 3Department of Nursing, Mayo Clinic, 4Department of Medicine, Internal Medicine Residency Office of Educational Innovations, Mayo Clinic, 5Division of Hospital Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA Background: Teamwork between physicians and nurses has a positive association with patient satisfaction and outcomes, but perceptions of physician–nurse teamwork are often suboptimal.Objective: To improve nurse–physician teamwork in a general medicine inpatient teaching unit by increasing face-to-face communication through interprofessional bedside rounds.Intervention: From July 2013 through October 2013, physicians (attendings and residents) and nurses from four general medicine teams in a single nursing unit participated in bedside rounding, which involved the inclusion of nurses in morning rounds with the medicine teams at the patients’ bedside. Based on stakeholder analysis and feedback, a checklist for key patient care issues was created and utilized during bedside rounds.Assessment: To assess the effect of bedside rounding on nurse–physician teamwork, a survey of selected items from the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ) was administered to participants before and after the implementation of bedside rounds. The number of pages to the general medicine teams was also measured as a marker of physician–nurse communication.Results: Participation rate in bedside rounds across the four medicine teams was 58%. SAQ response rates for attendings, residents, and nurses were 36/36 (100%), 73/73 (100%), and 32/73 (44%) prior to implementation of bedside rounding and 36 attendings (100%), 72 residents (100%), and 14 (19%) nurses after the implementation of bedside rounding, respectively. Prior to bedside rounding, nurses provided lower teamwork ratings (percent agree) than residents and attendings on all SAQ items; but after the intervention, the difference remained significant only on SAQ item 2 (“In this clinical area, it is not difficult to speak up if I perceive a problem with patient care”, 64% for nurses vs 79% for residents vs 94% for attendings, P=0.02). Also, resident responses improved on SAQ item 1 (“Nurse input is well received in this area”, 62% vs 82%, P=0.01).Conclusion: Increasing face-to-face communication through interprofessional bedside rounding can improve the perceptions of nurse–physician teamwork, particularly among residents and nurses. Keywords: interprofessional care, teamwork, graduate medical education, hospital medicin

Determinants to Gain More Effective Meetings in the Context of Vietnamese Organizations

Meetings are the primary communicative practice in every organization in order to fulfill the vital consensus, make changes and exchange ideas. Much time and effort are devoted to meetings aiming at information sharing, decision making, and problem solving. Therefore, finding out how voice and leadership power affect meeting effectiveness becomes essential, especially in Vietnamese organizations. First, the paper reviews factors affecting meeting effectiveness including leadership, agenda, substantive conflicts and internal communication. Next, a structured questionnaire was completed by a sample of 157 participants who are working at 31 Vietnamese organizations from a variety of sectors such as tax, banking, health service, airlines, education and business. Finally, the results reveal two antecedents affecting meeting effectiveness: Leadership and Substantive conflict. Leaders play the vital role in formulating an organization vision, making effective plans for vision implementation in reality as well as creating a healthy environment and organizational culture to grow ethical behaviors inside the organization. Their subordinates surely become more committed to the organization when they are working with inspirational leaders who willingly instruct them in uncertainty and encourage their abilities and talents. In addition, it is obvious that during the process of interaction, conflicts may exist and therefore how to resolve conflicts needs to be concerned. At any circumstances, most authors from previous studies believe that when conflicts occur in the meeting, if they are resolved in a constructive way, they will surely bring more benefits for the organizations

Synthesis of nanoscale composites of exchange biased MnFe2O4 and Mn-doped BiFeO3

Exchange bias may be used to couple a normal ferromagnet to a ferroelectric antiferromagnet and thus create a multiferroic system with nonzero magnetization. In implementing this idea the authors developed a synthesis method for composite films of nanoscale clusters of ferromagnetic MnFe2O4 embedded in multiferroic Mn-doped BiFeO3. The method utilizes the Bi volatility to obtain the composite films via thermal annealing of multilayers composed of BiFeO3 and BiMnO3. The cluster size varies from 20 to 80 nm depending on the film thickness. The composite films possess both ferroelectric and ferromagnetic properties; the magnetic hysteresis curves, in particular, manifest exchange bias. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.open111214sciescopu