Health Literacy Assessment and Chronic Disease: An Integrative Review

Health literacy is a matter of grave concern in health care today. Defined as more than the ability to read and write, it involves obtaining, processing, and understanding health information. Yet it is a concept often misunderstood and overlooked in the environment of professional care. Specifically, low health literacy in the setting of chronic disease has proven to be a challenging and costly phenomena. Given the high prevalence of chronic disease, there is a pressing need for health care providers to acknowledge this subject matter in care delivery. This integrative review provides a synthesis of published evidence identifying and clarifying the need for health care providers to address and support low health literacy in the setting of chronic disease via use of health literacy assessments. Recommendations for improved awareness among health care providers were devised as a result of this review. Analysis of the literature further supports the need to create a practice standard for the care continuum. The review lays the foundation to create change in chronic care delivery. Building upon nursing science, informing research, and facilitating policy initiatives, this review will serve as a call to action for health care providers

A λ = 1.3 Millimeter Aperture Synthesis Molecular Line Survey of Orion Kleinmann-Low

We present a 1".3 spatial resolution interferometric spectral line survey of the core of the Orion molecular cloud, obtained with the OVRO millimeter array. Covering 4 GHz bandwidth in total, the survey contains ~100 emission lines from 18 chemical species. The spatial distributions of a number of molecules point to source I near the IRc2 complex as the dominant energy source in the region but do not rule out the presence of additional lower luminosity objects. At arcsecond resolution, the offsets between dust emission and various molecular tracers suggest that the spectacular "hot core" emission in the Orion core arises via the heating and ablation of material from the surfaces of very high density clumps located ≳500 AU from source I and traced by the dust emission. We find no evidence for a strong internal heating source within the hot core condensation(s)

Academic Service Learning: Bridging the Theory/Practice Gap

This hybrid session/roundtable will provide insight regarding the integration of academic service learning in collegiate curriculum. Nursing and LUCOM faculty will showcase past ASL opportunities, which continue to be community staples. Further discussion will provide insight regarding how academic service learning (ASL) fits in curriculum, the implementation of experiential learning, the importance of working with community partners, and the value of reflection in support of sustainability

Bayesian inference for treatment effects under nested subsets of controls

When constructing a model to estimate the causal effect of a treatment, it is necessary to control for other factors which may have confounding effects. Because the ignorability assumption is not testable, however, it is usually unclear which set of controls is appropriate, and effect estimation is generally sensitive to this choice. A common approach in this case is to fit several models, each with a different set of controls, but it is difficult to reconcile inference under the multiple resulting posterior distributions for the treatment effect. Therefore we propose a two-stage approach to measure the sensitivity of effect estimation with respect to control specification. In the first stage, a model is fit with all available controls using a prior carefully selected to adjust for confounding. In the second stage, posterior distributions are calculated for the treatment effect under nested sets of controls by propagating posterior uncertainty in the original model. We demonstrate how our approach can be used to detect the most significant confounders in a dataset, and apply it in a sensitivity analysis of an observational study measuring the effect of legalized abortion on crime rates

The Owens Valley Millimeter Array

The present status and projected two year developments for the Owens Valley Millimeter Array are described and a brief summary of the astronomical research is presented