Financing Ohio Supreme Court Elections 1992-2002: Campaign Finance and Judicial Selection

The 2000 Ohio Supreme Court election renewed interest in judicial selection reform. The election was noted for interest group issue advocacy and undisclosed campaign spending. Advocacy groups spent millions attempting to unseat incumbent Justice Alice Robie Resnick, leaving the impression that Ohio justice is controlled by special interests and trial lawyers. The uses of negative campaigning and issue advocacy seemed to confirm suspicions that the Ohio Supreme Court had become dependent on campaign contributions from those with cases before the court. After the election, legal academics and public interest organizations began discussing changes to Ohio’s semi-partisan system. Legal scholarship focused on the appearance of corruption and loss of judicial independence, and public interest organizations began discussing merit selection and campaign finance reform

Patient empowerment: The need to consider it as a measurable patient-reported outcome for chronic conditions

Background: Health policy in the UK and elsewhere is prioritising patient empowerment and patient evaluations of healthcare. Patient reported outcome measures now take centre-stage in implementing strategies to increase patient empowerment. This article argues for consideration of patient empowerment itself as a directly measurable patient reported outcome for chronic conditions, highlights some issues in adopting this approach, and outlines a research agenda to enable healthcare evaluation on the basis of patient empowerment. Discussion: Patient empowerment is not a well-defined construct. A range of condition-specific and generic patient empowerment questionnaires have been developed; each captures a different construct e.g. personal control, self-efficacy/self-mastery, and each is informed by a different implicit or explicit theoretical framework. This makes it currently problematic to conduct comparative evaluations of healthcare services on the basis of patient empowerment. A case study (clinical genetics) is used to (1) illustrate that patient empowerment can be a valued healthcare outcome, even if patients do not obtain health status benefits, (2) provide a rationale for conducting work necessary to tighten up the patient empowerment construct (3) provide an exemplar to inform design of interventions to increase patient empowerment in chronic disease. Such initiatives could be evaluated on the basis of measurable changes in patient empowerment, if the construct were properly operationalised as a patient reported outcome measure. To facilitate this, research is needed to develop an appropriate and widely applicable generic theoretical framework of patient empowerment to inform (re)development of a generic measure. This research should include developing consensus between patients, clinicians and policymakers about the content and boundaries of the construct before operationalisation. This article also considers a number of issues for society and for healthcare providers raised by adopting the patient empowerment paradigm. Summary: Healthcare policy is driving the need to consider patient empowerment as a measurable patient outcome from healthcare services. Research is needed to (1) tighten up the construct (2) develop consensus about what is important to include (3) (re)develop a generic measure of patient empowerment for use in evaluating healthcare (4) understand if/how people make trade-offs between empowerment and gain in health status

What Are the Stages of the Creative Process? What Visual Art Students Are Saying.

Within the literature on creativity in the arts, some authors have focused on the description of the artistic process (Patrick, 1937; Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi, 1976; Mace and Ward, 2002; Yokochi and Okada, 2005) whereas others have focused on the creative process (Wallas, 1926; Osborn, 1953/1963; Runco and Dow, 1999; Howard et al., 2008). These two types of processes may be, however, somewhat distinct from each other because the creative process is not always dedicated to artistic creation, and productive work in the arts may not always involve creativity, in terms of specifically original thinking. Our goal is to identify the specific nature of the artistic creative process, to determine what are the basic stages of this kind of process. This description can then be integrated in a Creative process Report Diary (CRD; Botella et al., 2017) which allows self-observations in situ when participants are creating

Clinical stakeholders' opinions on the use of selective decontamination of the digestive tract in critically ill patients in intensive care units : an international Delphi study

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Left-Dominant Temporal-Frontal Hypercoupling in Schizophrenia Patients With Hallucinations During Speech Perception

International audienceBackground: Task-based functional neuroimaging studies of schizophrenia have not yet replicated the increased coordinated hyperactivity in speech-related brain regions that is reported with symptom-capture and resting-state studies of hallucinations. This may be due to suboptimal selection of cognitive tasks. Methods: In the current study, we used a task that allowed experimental manipulation of control over verbal material and compared brain activity between 23 schizophrenia patients (10 hallucinators, 13 nonhallucinators), 22 psychiatric (bipolar), and 27 healthy controls. Two conditions were presented, one involving inner verbal thought (in which control over verbal material was required) and another involving speech perception (SP; in which control verbal material was not required). Results: A functional connectivity analysis resulted in a left-dominant temporal-frontal network that included speech-related auditory and motor regions and showed hypercoupling in past-week hallucinating schizophrenia patients (relative to nonhallucinating patients) during SP only. Conclusions: These findings replicate our previous work showing generalized speech-related functional network hypercoupling in schizophrenia during inner verbal thought and SP, but extend them by suggesting that hypercoupling is related to past-week hallucination severity scores during SP only, when control over verbal material is not required. This result opens the possibility that practicing control over inner verbal thought processes may decrease the likelihood or severity of hallucinations

Medication Exposure Patterns in Primary Care Patients Prescribed Pharmacogenetically Actionable Opioids

Current approaches to assessing medication exposure fail to capture the complexity of the phenomenon and the context in which it occurs. This study’s purpose was to develop a typology of subgroups of patients who share common patterns of medication exposure. To create the typology, we used an exemplar sample of 30 patients in a large public healthcare system who had been prescribed the pharmacogenetically actionable opioids codeine or tramadol. Data related to medication exposure were drawn from large data repositories. Using a person-oriented qualitative approach, eight subgroups of patients who shared common patterns of medication exposure were identified. The subgroups had one of five opioid prescription patterns (i.e., singular, episodic, switching, sustained, multiplex), and one of three types of primary foci of medical care (i.e., pain, comorbidities, both). The findings reveal medication exposure patterns that are dynamic, multidimensional, and complex, and the typology offers an innovative approach to assessing medication exposure