Enhancing Teamwork and Collaboration in Nursing Students

Effective teamwork and collaboration are vital components in the healthcare team’s ability to deliver safe, patient-centered care. New graduate nurses play a crucial role in the healthcare team; however, research reveals that many students\u27 express anxieties when communicating with other healthcare personnel. The purpose of this project was to enhance students’ knowledge and understanding of the importance of effective teamwork and collaboration, ultimately influencing the delivery of high-quality and safe patient care. In an effort to promote better patient outcomes and limit failures, the integration of TeamSTEPPS® training and simulation into nursing curricula offers students an opportunity to build confidence while also instilling an understanding of the importance of their role in teamwork and collaboration

Covid-19 and Social Inequalities in Health in the UK

Shortly before the UK was struck by the Covid-19 pandemic, research was published which showed that since 2010 ‘inequalities in life expectancy have widened and life expectancy fell in the most deprived communities’.1 Such inequalities in health are mainly caused by wider social inequalities. Evidence of the demographics of those who died as a result of the virus, served to highlight how these inequalities disproportionately led to the elderly and BME communities contracting Covid-19 and succumbing to it. This article will discuss how the health and wellbeing of socially disadvantaged people were negatively impacted. It argues that these inequalities are a breach of Article 2 of the Human Rights Act 1988 - the right to life, in that this right cannot be equally accessed by all. Finally, the article explores the current and future practice implications for social workers, who work daily with some of the most vulnerable people in society

Flood Fatalities in the United States

This study compiles a nationwide database of flood fatalities for the contiguous United States from 1959 to 2005. Assembled data include the location of fatalities, age and gender of victims, activity and/or setting of fatalities, and the type of flood events responsible for each fatality report. Because of uncertainties in the number of flood deaths in Louisiana from Hurricane Katrina, these data are not included in the study. Analysis of these data reveals that a majority of fatalities are caused by flash floods. People between the ages of 10 and 29 and 60 yr of age are found to be more vulnerable to floods. Findings reveal that human behavior contributes to flood fatality occurrences. These results also suggest that future structural modifications of flood control designs (e.g., culverts and bridges) may not reduce the number of fatalities nationwide. Spatially, flood fatalities are distributed across the United States, with high-fatality regions observed along the northeast Interstate-95 corridor, the Ohio River valley, and near the Balcones Escarpment in south-central Texas. The unique distributions found are likely driven by both physical vulnerabilities for flooding as well as the social vulnerabilities

The Storm Morphology of Deadly Flooding Events in the United States

This study investigates the synoptic and mesoscale environments associated with deadly flooding events in the United States from 1996 to 2005. A manual environment classification scheme, which includes analyses of surface charts, 500 hPa maps, and composite radar data (where available), is utilized to ascertain the primary ascent mechanisms and storm types producing these fatal flood events. Of the ten classifications in the scheme, the two most dominant ascent mechanisms associated with deadly floods include frontal boundaries (45%) and tropical systems (22%). Findings illustrate that mesoscale convective systems were responsible for 36% of the total number of flood fatalities over the period. The ten classifications are spatially and temporally analysed in order to assess region-specific risks associated with deadly flooding events

Japanese Discourse and the Process of Centering

This paper has two aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of discourse processing called CENTERING and apply it to discourse processing in Japanese, and (2) to provide some insights on the effect of syntactic factors in Japanese on discourse interpretation. We argue that while discourse interpretation is an inferential process, the syntactic cues constrain this process, and demonstrate this argument with respect to the interpretation of ZEROS, unexpressed arguments of the verb, in Japanese. The syntactic cues in Japanese discourse that we investigate are the morphological markers for grammatical TOPIC, the post-position wa, as well as those for grammatical functions such as SUBJECT, ga, OBJECT, o and OBJECT2, ni. In addition, we investigate the role of speakers\u27 EMPATHY, which is the perspective from which an event is described. This is morphologically indicated through the use of verbal compounding, i.e. the auxiliary use of verbs such as kureta, kita. Our results are based on a survey of native speakers of their interpretation of short discourses, consisting of minimal pairs, varied by one of the above factors. We demonstrate that these syntactic cues do indeed affect the interpretation of ZEROS, but that having previously been the TOPIC and being realized as a ZERO also contribute to an entity being interpreted as the TOPIC. We propose a new notion of TOPIC AMBIGUITY, and show that CENTERING provides constraints on when a ZERO can be interpreted as the TOPIC