Predictors of physical activity and barriers to exercise in nursing and medical students

Aims To investigate physical activity levels of nursing and medicine students; examine predictors of physical activity level; and examine the most influential benefits and barriers to exercise. Background Healthcare professionals have low levels of physical activity, which increases their health risk and may influence their health promotion practices with patients. Design We surveyed 361 nursing (n=193) and medicine (n=168) students studying at a UK medical school. Methods Questionnaire survey, active over 12 months in 2014-2015. Measures included physical activity level, benefits and barriers to exercise, social support, perceived stress and self-efficacy for exercise. Results Many nursing and medicine students did not achieve recommended levels of physical activity (nursing: 48%; medicine: 38%). Perceived benefits of exercise were health-related, with medicine students identifying additional benefits for stress-relief. Most notable barriers to exercise were: lack of time, facilities having inconvenient schedules and exercise not fitting around study or placement schedules. Nursing students were less active than medicine students; they perceived fewer benefits and more barriers to exercise and reported lower social support for exercise. Physical activity of nursing and medicine students was best predicted by self-efficacy and social support, explaining 35% of the variance. Conclusion Physical activity should be promoted in nursing and medicine students. Interventions should aim to build self-efficacy for exercise and increase social support. Interventions should be developed that are targeted specifically to shift-working frontline care staff, to reduce schedule-related barriers to exercise and increase accessibility to workplace health and wellbeing initiatives

Stability of grassland soil C and N pools despite 25years of an extreme climatic and disturbance regime

Citation: Wilcox, K. R., Blair, J. M., & Knapp, A. K. (2016). Stability of grassland soil C and N pools despite 25years of an extreme climatic and disturbance regime. Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, 121(7), 1934-1945. doi:10.1002/2016jg003370Global changes are altering many important drivers of ecosystem functioning, with precipitation amount and disturbance frequency being especially important. Carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools are key contemporary attributes of ecosystems that can also influence future C uptake via plant growth. Thus, understanding the impacts of altered precipitation amounts (through controls of primary production inputs) and disturbance regimes (through losses of C and N in biomass) is important to project how ecosystem services will respond to future global changes. A major difficulty inherent within this task is that drivers of ecosystem function and processes often interact, resulting in novel ecosystem responses. To examine how changes in precipitation affect grassland ecosystem responses under a frequent disturbance regime (annual fire), we assessed the biogeochemical and ecological consequences of more than two decades of irrigation in an annually burned mesic grassland in the central United States. In this experiment, precipitation amount was increased by 31% relative to ambient and 1 in 3years were statistically extreme relative to the long-term historical record. Despite evidence that irrigation decreased root:shoot ratios and increased rates of N cyclingeach expected to reduce soil C and N with annual burningwe detected no changes in these biogeochemical pools. This surprising biogeochemical resistance highlights the need to explore additional mechanisms within long-term experiments concerning the consequences of global change impacts on ecosystems

Writing in Britain and Ireland, c. 400 to c. 800

No abstract available

Contemporary Portuguese Theater

174 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1971.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD