The nature of social work research by Dutch universities of applied sciences:An overview

The knowledge base for Social Work is strengthening. Underpinning of Social Work deriving from scientific research is necessary given the growing complexity of the work and its context. How this research should be conducted and to what type of outcomes it must lead, is part of an ongoing debate. In the Netherlands, practice-based research at Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS) is a relative new approach. Social Work research groups at UAS assert to conduct practice-based research in order to contribute to knowledge and support the objectives of Social Work. The current study was carried out to obtain insight into the characteristics of this research approach. A sample of publications was analysed in terms of knowledge purpose, methodology, and level and type of participation. Results show a strong focus on producing descriptive knowledge and to a lesser extent on control knowledge, using primarily qualitative research methods, and with limited direct participation by stakeholders. In order to practice more what they preach the research can strengthen by doing more empirical research, by diversifying the research in terms of design and methods and increasing the level of participation of stakeholder

Actively coping with violation:Exploring upward dissent patterns in functional, dysfunctional, and deserted psychological contract end states

Recently, scholars have emphasized the importance of examining how employees cope with psychological contract violation and how the coping process contributes to psychological contract violation resolution and post-violation psychological contracts. Recent work points to the important role of problem-focused coping. Yet, to date, problem-focused coping strategies have not been conceptualized on a continuum from constructive to destructive strategies. Consequently, potential differences in the use of specific types of problem-focused coping strategies and the role these different strategies play in the violation resolution process has not been explored. In this study, we stress the importance of focusing on different types of problem-focused coping strategies. We explore how employee upward dissent strategies, conceptualized as different forms of problem-focused coping, contribute to violation resolution and post-violation psychological contracts. Two sources of data were used. In-depth interviews with supervisors of a Dutch car lease company provided 23 case descriptions of employee-supervisor interactions after a psychological contract violation. Moreover, a database with descriptions of Dutch court sentences provided eight case descriptions of employee-organization interactions following a perceived violation. Based on these data sources, we explored the pattern of upward dissent strategies employees used over time following a perceived violation. We distinguished between functional (thriving and reactivation), dysfunctional (impairment and dissolution) and deserted psychological contract end states and explored whether different dissent patterns over time differentially contributed to the dissent outcome (i.e., psychological contract end state). The results of our study showed that the use of problem-focused coping is not as straightforward as suggested by the post-violation model. While the post-violation model suggests that problem-focused coping will most likely contribute positively to violation resolution, we found that this also depends on the type of problem-focused coping strategy used. That is, more threatening forms of problem-focused coping (i.e., threatening resignation as a way to trigger one's manager/organization to resolve the violation) mainly contributed to dysfunctional and deserted PC end states. Yet, in some instances the use of these types of active coping strategies also contributed to functional violation resolution. These findings have important implications for the literature on upward dissent strategies and psychological contract violation repair

Validation of less-invasive hemodynamic monitoring with Pulsioflex in critically ill patients

status: publishe

Prediction of conformational B-cell epitopes from 3D structures by random forests with a distance-based feature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Antigen-antibody interactions are key events in immune system, which provide important clues to the immune processes and responses. In Antigen-antibody interactions, the specific sites on the antigens that are directly bound by the B-cell produced antibodies are well known as B-cell epitopes. The identification of epitopes is a hot topic in bioinformatics because of their potential use in the epitope-based drug design. Although most B-cell epitopes are discontinuous (or conformational), insufficient effort has been put into the conformational epitope prediction, and the performance of existing methods is far from satisfaction.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In order to develop the high-accuracy model, we focus on some possible aspects concerning the prediction performance, including the impact of interior residues, different contributions of adjacent residues, and the imbalanced data which contain much more non-epitope residues than epitope residues. In order to address above issues, we take following strategies. Firstly, a concept of 'thick surface patch' instead of 'surface patch' is introduced to describe the local spatial context of each surface residue, which considers the impact of interior residue. The comparison between the thick surface patch and the surface patch shows that interior residues contribute to the recognition of epitopes. Secondly, statistical significance of the distance distribution difference between non-epitope patches and epitope patches is observed, thus an adjacent residue distance feature is presented, which reflects the unequal contributions of adjacent residues to the location of binding sites. Thirdly, a bootstrapping and voting procedure is adopted to deal with the imbalanced dataset. Based on the above ideas, we propose a new method to identify the B-cell conformational epitopes from 3D structures by combining conventional features and the proposed feature, and the random forest (RF) algorithm is used as the classification engine. The experiments show that our method can predict conformational B-cell epitopes with high accuracy. Evaluated by leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV), our method achieves the mean AUC value of 0.633 for the benchmark bound dataset, and the mean AUC value of 0.654 for the benchmark unbound dataset. When compared with the state-of-the-art prediction models in the independent test, our method demonstrates comparable or better performance.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our method is demonstrated to be effective for the prediction of conformational epitopes. Based on the study, we develop a tool to predict the conformational epitopes from 3D structures, available at <url>http://code.google.com/p/my-project-bpredictor/downloads/list</url>.</p

Principles of fluid management and stewardship in septic shock: it is time to consider the four D's and the four phases of fluid therapy

In patients with septic shock, the administration of fluids during initial hemodynamic resuscitation remains a major therapeutic challenge. We are faced with many open questions regarding the type, dose and timing of intravenous fluid administration. There are only four major indications for intravenous fluid administration: aside from resuscitation, intravenous fluids have many other uses including maintenance and replacement of total body water and electrolytes, as carriers for medications and for parenteral nutrition. In this paradigm-shifting review, we discuss different fluid management strategies including early adequate goal-directed fluid management, late conservative fluid management and late goal-directed fluid removal. In addition, we expand on the concept of the "four D's" of fluid therapy, namely drug, dosing, duration and de-escalation. During the treatment of patients with septic shock, four phases of fluid therapy should be considered in order to provide answers to four basic questions. These four phases are the resuscitation phase, the optimization phase, the stabilization phase and the evacuation phase. The four questions are "When to start intravenous fluids?", "When to stop intravenous fluids?", "When to start de-resuscitation or active fluid removal?" and finally "When to stop de-resuscitation?" In analogy to the way we handle antibiotics in critically ill patients, it is time for fluid stewardship