NICU Services for Preterm Babies: Experiences of Aghem Women of Northwest Cameroon

The experiences of women with health care services continue to be a challenge for health care workers in providing quality care. Women’s poor impressions of health care services in sub-Saharan Africa stems from the negative behavior of health care workers during the provision of care to mothers and their preterm babies. The lack of data on women\u27s experience with health care services in Cameroon was the problem this study addressed. The study\u27s purpose was to understand Aghem women\u27s experience with health services provided for their preterm babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and how they perceived that their experience with health care services provided to their preterm babies influenced their preterm babies’ healthcare outcomes. Swanson’s caring theory was a guide for data collection and analysis. A qualitative approach was used, and data was collected through in-depth interviews with 10 Aghem women who had experienced health care services for their preterm babies in a NICU in Cameroon. The results showed that health care workers demonstrated the five tenets of Swanson\u27s caring process including knowing the mothers of preterm babies, spending time with them, teaching, and helping them to maintain hope during the care process. However, many aspects of the caring process challenged mothers’ experiences, including health care workers’ reluctance to provide health care and their contentious interactions with mothers of preterm babies. The results and recommendations from this study may help inform health stakeholders about the problem and design strategies to improve women\u27s experiences with health care services and the health outcome of preterm babies in Cameroon

Discrete Breathers

Nonlinear classical Hamiltonian lattices exhibit generic solutions in the form of discrete breathers. These solutions are time-periodic and (typically exponentially) localized in space. The lattices exhibit discrete translational symmetry. Discrete breathers are not confined to certain lattice dimensions. Necessary ingredients for their occurence are the existence of upper bounds on the phonon spectrum (of small fluctuations around the groundstate) of the system as well as the nonlinearity in the differential equations. We will present existence proofs, formulate necessary existence conditions, and discuss structural stability of discrete breathers. The following results will be also discussed: the creation of breathers through tangent bifurcation of band edge plane waves; dynamical stability; details of the spatial decay; numerical methods of obtaining breathers; interaction of breathers with phonons and electrons; movability; influence of the lattice dimension on discrete breather properties; quantum lattices - quantum breathers. Finally we will formulate a new conceptual aproach capable of predicting whether discrete breather exist for a given system or not, without actually solving for the breather. We discuss potential applications in lattice dynamics of solids (especially molecular crystals), selective bond excitations in large molecules, dynamical properties of coupled arrays of Josephson junctions, and localization of electromagnetic waves in photonic crystals with nonlinear response.Comment: 62 pages, LaTeX, 14 ps figures. Physics Reports, to be published; see also at http://www.mpipks-dresden.mpg.de/~flach/html/preprints.htm