Supporting children and young people to assume responsibility from their parents for the self-management of their long-term condition: An integrative review

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd Background: Children and young people with long-term conditions (LTCs) are usually dependent on, or share management with, their families and are expected to develop self-management skills as they mature. However, during adolescence, young people can find it challenging to follow prescribed treatment regimens resulting in poor clinical outcomes. Though reviews have looked at children's and parents' experiences of self-management, none have explicitly examined the parent-to-child transfer of self-management responsibility. Methods: An integrative review was conducted with the aim of exploring the parent-to-child transfer of LTC self-management responsibility, through addressing two questions: (a) How do children assume responsibility from their parents for self-management of their LTC? (b) What influences the parent-to-child transfer of this responsibility? Eight databases were searched for papers published from 1995 to 2017. Methodological quality was assessed; included papers were synthesized to identify themes. Results: Twenty-nine papers were identified. Most papers used qualitative designs and focused on children with diabetes. Participants were predominantly children and/or parents; only two studies included health professionals. Assuming self-management responsibility was viewed as part of normal development but was rarely explored within the context of the child gaining independence in other areas of their life. Children and parents adopted strategies to help the transfer, but there was limited evidence around health professionals' roles and ambivalence around what was helpful. There was a lack of clarity over whether children and parents were aiming for shared management, or self-management, and whether this was a realistic or desired goal for families. Multiple factors such as the child, family, social networks, health professional, and LTC influenced how a child assumed responsibility. Conclusions: Evidence suggests that the parent-to-child transfer of self-management responsibility is a complex, individualized process. Further research across childhood LTCs is needed to explore children's, parents', and professionals' views on this process and what support families require as responsibilities change

A geometrical instability for ultra-light fields during inflation?

Westudythebehaviourofisocurvatureperturbationsinnon-linearsigmamodels which naturally emerge in supergravity and string inflationary scenarios. We focus on the case of negatively curved field manifolds which can potentially lead to a geometrical destabilisation of isocurvature modes. We find however that heavy fields are stable when their effective mass is computed on the attractor background solution. On the other hand, we show that ultra-light fields can potentially suffer from a geometrical instability when the background trajectory is a geodesic in field space. In this case a full understanding of the system is likely to require the use of non-perturbative methods.Comment: Matches published version, 5 pages, 2 figure

Adelante! From high school to higher education: an analysis of the academic success and persistence of Hispanic students through an expectancy-value framework

2016 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.The purpose of this study was to examine relationships between student pre-college academic perceptions with first-year in college academic experiences, specifically in the areas of academic self-efficacy, academic perseverance, and academic engagement, to identify predictors for academic success and persistence in college of Hispanic students. An abbreviated version of the expectancy-value model was utilized as the framework for this study. The guiding question for this study was: Do pre-college experiences and beliefs (expectancies for success) as well as academic engagement (subjective task values) contribute to the academic success (achievement related performance) and persistence to second year (achievement related choice) for first-year Hispanic students? The study sample (n = 271) included students at a public Hispanic-serving institution who completed both the BCSSE and NSSE surveys in the given years of the study. Findings identified several variables as predictors of achievement-related performance and choice. The variables identified for achievement-related performance (academic success) were writing skills, speaking skills, quantitative skills, participation in class discussions, finishing tasks, gender and type of school attended. The variables identified for achievement-related choice (persistence) were writing skills and quantitative skills. Additionally, significant differences were identified by gender for academic self-efficacy and by generation-status and by type of school attended for academic engagement

The Healing Powers of Mathematics in the Age of #metoo

The ideas of mathematics can provide metaphors to help people handle traumatic situations, or to better understand life experiences. In this short note, the author describes three ways in which the study of mathematics has given her ways to cope with her own difficult experiences

Asthma Education and Care Coordination in the Medical Home

Asthma is the most common chronic disease in childhood. In spite of the many advances in the medical management of asthma, families frequently seek treatment for acute exacerbations of asthma in the emergency department. The purpose of this project was to evaluate asthma care provided to pediatric patients at a community health center in New England through scheduled nursing visits for asthma education and care coordination. The asthma education and care coordination program was developed based on both the NHLBI, NAEPP, Expert Panel 3, 2007 guidelines and ANA White Paper and Agency for Health Care Quality (AHRQ) value of nursing care coordination. The evaluation phase of the Ottawa Model for Research Utilization Model using data gathered from patients, practitioners, and systems was used to assess the effectiveness of the intervention. Results of this evaluation reveal that although all of the nurses received education and training at each of twelve clinic sites the results from the three sites identify that the nurses were not providing the asthma education and care coordination visits. Recommendations include further education, training, and a change in clinic nurse role to fully implement the program

Entanglement transfer from electron spins to photons in spin light-emitting diodes containing quantum dots

We show that electron recombination using positively charged excitons in single quantum dots provides an efficient method to transfer entanglement from electron spins onto photon polarizations. We propose a scheme for the production of entangled four-photon states of GHZ type. From the GHZ state, two fully entangled photons can be obtained by a measurement of two photons in the linear polarization basis, even for quantum dots with observable fine structure splitting for neutral excitons and significant exciton spin decoherence. Because of the interplay of quantum mechanical selection rules and interference, maximally entangled electron pairs are converted into maximally entangled photon pairs with unity fidelity for a continuous set of observation directions. We describe the dynamics of the conversion process using a master-equation approach and show that the implementation of our scheme is feasible with current experimental techniques.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. v2: Extended scheme, revised version. v3: Minor additions and extended title, published versio