The Feedback Intervention Trial (FIT)--improving hand-hygiene compliance in UK healthcare workers: a stepped wedge cluster randomised controlled trial.

Achieving a sustained improvement in hand-hygiene compliance is the WHO's first global patient safety challenge. There is no RCT evidence showing how to do this. Systematic reviews suggest feedback is most effective and call for long term well designed RCTs, applying behavioural theory to intervention design to optimise effectiveness

Emily Dickinson's fascicles: a study of her psychodynamic poetry

The fascicle is Emily Dickinson's highly original poetic creation which acts as a psychodynamic poem. In each of her mature fascicles composed after 1861 Dickinson presents a unified psychological experience by selecting and arranging disparate poems into mental progressions. Each poem within a particular fascicle presents a mental state, psychic situation, or tentative belief momentarily held by the poetic speaker of the gathering, and each provokes a further psychological situation or commentary; the subsequent poem then portrays the ensuing mental response of the speaker. In this manner Dickinson endows the gathering of diverse poems with psychological cohesion and self-propelling mental movement in a purposeful direction whereby the fascicle portrays a unified experience within the consciousness of the poetic "I." Thus, by means of fascicle structure she simulates the mental activity of the fictive speaker in the fascicle. This acute interest in psychodynamics apparent in fascicle construction is obtrusively reflected as well in Dickinson's methods of organization, employment of image series, and choice of content. In essence, Emily Dickinson develops and refines the fascicle as her poetic mode of expressing the subject she most values in life and art: man's profound psychological struggle to find meaning and purpose in life.English, Department o

Serologic Testing for Trypanosoma cruzi: Comparison of Radioimmunoprecipitation Assay with Commercially Available Indirect Immunofluorescence Assay, Indirect Hemagglutination Assay, and Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay Kits

The radioimmunoprecipitation assay (RIPA) has been used as a confirmatory test in several ongoing and published studies of Trypanosoma cruzi in blood donors in the United States. Despite its use as a confirmatory test, few studies are available comparing RIPA to commercially available serologic test methods. Thus, we compared RIPA with two indirect hemagglutination assays (Biolab Diagnostica SA, São Paulo, Brazil; Hemagen Diagnostics, Inc., Waltham, Mass.) and four different enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (Abbott Laboratories, Abbott Park, Ill.; Embrabio, São Paulo, Brazil; Organon Teknika, São Paulo, Brazil; and Gull Laboratories, Salt Lake City, Utah) using a panel of 220 serum specimens from Brazilian blood donors with a range of T. cruzi antibody titers as determined by indirect immunofluorescence assay (IFA). A titer of 1:20 was used as the baseline for seropositivity. All IFA-negative serum specimens (n = 19) were nonreactive on all tests. At a titer of 1:20 (n = 9), reactivity rates varied considerably among the tests, with only the RIPA and the Organon and Gull assays identifying reactive specimens. For specimens at a 1:40 titer (n = 35), most assays identified at least 32 of 35 (91%) specimens as reactive, but the Biolab assay only identified 24 (69%). At higher titers (1:80, n = 56; 1:160, n = 101) the assays were comparable, with the exception of the Biolab assay, demonstrating rates of agreement with IFA of ≥98%. Overall, when compared with several other test formats, RIPA demonstrated equivalent or superior rates of agreement with IFA-positive specimens across all titers examined. In particular, at titers of >1:40, the RIPA compared favorably with other test methods currently in use, supporting its application as a confirmatory test, particularly in a research setting

Time Scale for Proton Emission from Highly Excited Projectiles

Highly fragmented exit channels produced by the decay of excited 24Mg projectiles were detected. The longitudinal velocity spectra of protons and alpha particles from such channels are offset. This offset is consistent with post-breakup Coulomb accelerations from the 197Au target nuclei implying that the protons were emitted within 3 X 10−22 s after the target-projectile separation