Applaus is niet genoeg: anders waarderen en erkennen van zorgverleners

The politics and administration of institutional chang

The essential elements for a nursing home according to stakeholders from healthcare and technology:perspectives from multiple simultaneous monodisciplinary workshops

Technology and architectural solutions are needed as a means of support in future nursing homes. This study investigated how various monodisciplinary groups of stakeholders from healthcare and technology envision the nursing home of the future and which elements are necessary for its creation. Moreover, differences in needs and interests between the various stakeholders were considered. This qualitative study gathered data via 10 simultaneous sticky note brainstorm sessions with 95 professional stakeholders, which resulted in 1459 quotes in five categories that were clustered into themes and processed into word clouds. The stakeholders prioritized the needs of the resident and placed the most importance on the fact that a nursing home is primarily a place to live in the final stages of one's life. A mix of factors related to the quality of care and the quality of the built environment and technology is needed. Given the fact that there are differences in what monodisciplinary groups of stakeholders see as an ideal nursing home, multidisciplinary approaches should be pursued in practice to incorporate as many new views and stakeholder needs as possible.</p

Cost-effectiveness of replacing versus discarding the nail in children with nail bed injury

Every year in the UK, around 10 000 children need to have operations to mend injuries to the bed of their fingernails. Currently, most children have their fingernail placed back on the injured nail bed after the operation. The NINJA trial found that children were slightly less likely to have an infection if the nail was thrown away rather than being put back, but the difference between groups was small and could have be due to chance. This study looked at whether replacing the nail is cost-effective compared with throwing it away. Using data from the NINJA trial, we compared costs, healthcare use, and quality of life and assessed the cost-effectiveness of replacing the nail. It was found that throwing the nail away after surgery would save the National Health Service (NHS) £75 (€85) per operation compared with placing the nail back on the nail bed. Changing clinical practice could save the NHS in England £720 000 (€819 000) per year

The role of selective attention in short-term memory and goal-directed behavior

Selective attention enables the prioritization of goal-relevant aspects of our sensory environment in order to guide our actions, or to store goal-relevant information in short-term memory. Yet, it remains largely unclear how attention prioritizes goal-relevant information. For example, selective attention may enhance processing of goal-relevant information, suppress processing of distracting information, or both. The research presented in this dissertation examined the neurophysiological mechanisms through which selective attention supports visual short-term memory and action selection using electroencephalography, focusing on the role of brain oscillations and modulations of sensory activity. A first question concerned if selective attention predominantly modulates sensory processing during perception, or may also support maintenance of stored representations to optimize behavior. A second question concerned whether attentional modulation of anticipated and unanticipated irrelevant information rely on similar neurophysiological mechanisms. Thirdly, we addressed whether these mechanisms generalize across different sensory dimensions during action selection. Results provided supporting evidence for an important role of selective attention in action selection, and during both short-term memory encoding and maintenance. However, they also revealed that attentional selection is often imperfect, especially when irrelevant information cannot be anticipated. Whereas interregional modulation of alpha oscillations was associated with filtering of anticipated irrelevant information, filtering of unanticipated distraction relied, at least partly, on representation-specific sensory modulations. Furthermore, individuals differed markedly in the degree to which they exhibited attentional modulation of irrelevant information for different sources of interference, demonstrating the importance of an individual differences approach to increase our understanding of the neural mechanisms that enable selective processing of goal-relevant information

Proactive, but Not Reactive, Distractor Filtering Relies on Local Modulation of Alpha Oscillatory Activity

Filter mechanisms that prevent irrelevant information from consuming the limited storage capacity of visual STM are critical for goal-directed behavior. Alpha oscillatory activity has been related to proactive filtering of anticipated distraction. Yet, distraction in everyday life is not always anticipated, necessitating rapid, reactive filtering mechanisms. Currently, the oscillatory mechanisms underlying reactive distractor filtering remain unclear. In the current EEG study, we investigated whether reactive filtering of distractors also relies on alpha-band oscillatory mechanisms and explored possible contributions by oscillations in other frequency bands. To this end, participants performed a lateralized change detection task in which a varying and unpredicted number of distractors were presented both in the relevant hemifield, among targets, and in the irrelevant hemifield. Results showed that, whereas proactive distractor filtering was accompanied by lateralization of alpha-band activity over posterior scalp regions, reactive distractor filtering was not associated with modulations of oscillatory power in any frequency band. Yet, behavioral and post hoc ERP analyses clearly showed that participants selectively encoded relevant information. On the basis of these results, we conclude that reactive distractor filtering may not be realized through local modulation of alpha-band oscillatory activity. </jats:p