Promoting the consumer voice : the role of Healthwatch Salford's Enter and View programme

The daily business of running a care home means that, outside of regulatory inspections, assessing and improving the user experience can often be forgotten. Healthwatch Salford discuss their process of gaining constructive feedback using their innovative Enter and View programm

Student experiences of nursing on the front line during the COVID-19 pandemic

This article provides the reflections of three University of Salford student nurses. Two have experience of working on the front line during the COVID-19 pandemic. One has now qualified as a registered nurse. The crucial role of students' personal tutors is also presented

A report on the health and social care listening event

The purpose of the Listening Event was to enable a wide range of people, including professionals working in statutory, voluntary and other organisations and members of the public, to ‘have a say’ about health and social care and what we as a University can do for and with these partners and the public. We particularly wanted to hear about key concerns of the University such as: • Strengthening community engagement and partnerships • Health and social care training we should be providing, for whom, and how this is delivered • Ideas relating to the University themes including media, use of space and buildings, human rights, social justice and security • Research topics we should be addressing However the main strength of the Listening Event approach is that topics for discussion are mostly led by participants who attend. On this occasion, the discussion topics were very much focused on the concerns of participants and lots of information and ideas were generated. The task now is for the event planning team to review the discussion notes and identify what can be addressed and how, in the short, medium and long term. This planning will be taking place over the Autumn in 2011, and any participants or readers of this report are more than welcome to get in touch to work with us or add their views. The purpose of this report is to record all discussion summaries for sharing amongst participants and others. It is important that participants especially get to read what others had said at the event. The report will lead to changes in University practices such as the content of some of our courses and new business ideas and relationships will also be explored. The event itself provided a useful means of public engagement that others may wish to adopt

Decreasing spatial disorientation in care-home settings: How psychology can guide the development of dementia friendly design guidelines

Alzheimer’s disease results in marked declines in navigation skills that are particularly pronounced in unfamiliar environments. However, many people with Alzheimer’s disease eventually face the challenge of having to learn their way around unfamiliar environments when moving into assisted living or care-homes. People with Alzheimer’s disease would have an easier transition moving to new residences if these larger, and often more institutional, environments were designed to compensate for decreasing orientation skills. However, few existing dementia friendly design guidelines specifically address orientation and wayfinding. Those that do are often based on custom, practice or intuition and not well integrated with psychological and neuroscientific knowledge or navigation research, therefore often remaining unspecific. This paper discusses current dementia friendly design guidelines, reports findings from psychological and neuropsychological experiments on navigation and evaluates their potential for informing design guidelines that decrease spatial disorientation for people with dementia

Determination of muon momentum in the MicroBooNE LArTPC using an improved model of multiple Coulomb scattering

We discuss a technique for measuring a charged particle's momentum by means of multiple Coulomb scattering (MCS) in the MicroBooNE liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC). This method does not require the full particle ionization track to be contained inside of the detector volume as other track momentum reconstruction methods do (range-based momentum reconstruction and calorimetric momentum reconstruction). We motivate use of this technique, describe a tuning of the underlying phenomenological formula, quantify its performance on fully contained beam-neutrino-induced muon tracks both in simulation and in data, and quantify its performance on exiting muon tracks in simulation. Using simulation, we have shown that the standard Highland formula should be re-tuned specifically for scattering in liquid argon, which significantly improves the bias and resolution of the momentum measurement. With the tuned formula, we find agreement between data and simulation for contained tracks, with a small bias in the momentum reconstruction and with resolutions that vary as a function of track length, improving from about 10% for the shortest (one meter long) tracks to 5% for longer (several meter) tracks. For simulated exiting muons with at least one meter of track contained, we find a similarly small bias, and a resolution which is less than 15% for muons with momentum below 2 GeV/c. Above 2 GeV/c, results are given as a first estimate of the MCS momentum measurement capabilities of MicroBooNE for high momentum exiting tracks

Measurement of cosmic-ray reconstruction efficiencies in the MicroBooNE LArTPC using a small external cosmic-ray counter

The MicroBooNE detector is a liquid argon time projection chamber at Fermilab designed to study short-baseline neutrino oscillations and neutrino-argon interaction cross-section. Due to its location near the surface, a good understanding of cosmic muons as a source of backgrounds is of fundamental importance for the experiment. We present a method of using an external 0.5 m (L) x 0.5 m (W) muon counter stack, installed above the main detector, to determine the cosmic-ray reconstruction efficiency in MicroBooNE. Data are acquired with this external muon counter stack placed in three different positions, corresponding to cosmic rays intersecting different parts of the detector. The data reconstruction efficiency of tracks in the detector is found to be $\epsilon_{\mathrm{data}}=(97.1\pm0.1~(\mathrm{stat}) \pm 1.4~(\mathrm{sys}))\%$, in good agreement with the Monte Carlo reconstruction efficiency $\epsilon_{\mathrm{MC}} = (97.4\pm0.1)\%$. This analysis represents a small-scale demonstration of the method that can be used with future data coming from a recently installed cosmic-ray tagger system, which will be able to tag $\approx80\%$ of the cosmic rays passing through the MicroBooNE detector.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figure

The Pandora multi-algorithm approach to automated pattern recognition of cosmic-ray muon and neutrino events in the MicroBooNE detector

The development and operation of Liquid-Argon Time-Projection Chambers for neutrino physics has created a need for new approaches to pattern recognition in order to fully exploit the imaging capabilities offered by this technology. Whereas the human brain can excel at identifying features in the recorded events, it is a significant challenge to develop an automated, algorithmic solution. The Pandora Software Development Kit provides functionality to aid the design and implementation of pattern-recognition algorithms. It promotes the use of a multi-algorithm approach to pattern recognition, in which individual algorithms each address a specific task in a particular topology. Many tens of algorithms then carefully build up a picture of the event and, together, provide a robust automated pattern-recognition solution. This paper describes details of the chain of over one hundred Pandora algorithms and tools used to reconstruct cosmic-ray muon and neutrino events in the MicroBooNE detector. Metrics that assess the current pattern-recognition performance are presented for simulated MicroBooNE events, using a selection of final-state event topologies.Comment: Preprint to be submitted to The European Physical Journal