Assessing Unmet Needs of Caregivers after Stroke: Occupational Therapist Practices and Perspectives

Background: Family caregivers of stroke survivors often feel unprepared and overwhelmed post discharge with numerous unmet needs. Occupational therapists can play an integral role in addressing family caregivers’ needs. Limited research exists on assessment practices of occupational therapists in identifying caregivers’ needs poststroke. This study explores the practices and perspectives of occupational therapists in assessing unmet caregivers’ needs. Method: A cross-sectional, mixed methods research design was used to electronically survey 15 occupational therapists. Part 1 of the survey explored participant methods for identifying caregivers’ needs and their views on using formal caregiver assessment tools. Part 2 gathered participant perspectives on three selected caregiver assessments. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to interpret the data. Results: The participants perceive formal assessments as beneficial. However, they use informal strategies to assess the unmet needs of caregivers rather than formal assessment. Reimbursement challenges, productivity pressure, and questionable necessity are barriers to conducting formal assessments. Advantages and disadvantages of each assessment are discussed. Conclusion: Occupational therapists face barriers to conducting formal assessment across settings. Implementation of recent policies is needed to further support occupational therapy’s role in addressing caregivers’ needs. This study can inform future development of assessment tools tailored to occupational therapy

USING A MULTIPLE PRODUCT AND MULTIPLE INPUT APPROACH TO DAIRY PROFIT MAXIMIZATION: A SIMULATION USING OPERATIONS RESEARCH METHODS

Dairy producers generally take a single output/multiple input approach when making production decisions. Under component pricing, with large variance in individual component prices, a multiple output/multiple input approach maximizes profits. This paper applied our approach to the individual farm milk production decision.Livestock Production/Industries, Productivity Analysis,

Device-independent tests of classical and quantum dimensions

We address the problem of testing the dimensionality of classical and quantum systems in a `black-box' scenario. We develop a general formalism for tackling this problem. This allows us to derive lower bounds on the classical dimension necessary to reproduce given measurement data. Furthermore, we generalise the concept of quantum dimension witnesses to arbitrary quantum systems, allowing one to place a lower bound on the Hilbert space dimension necessary to reproduce certain data. Illustrating these ideas, we provide simple examples of classical and quantum dimension witnesses.Comment: To appear in PR

What and how: doing good research with young people, digital intimacies, and relationships and sex education

© 2020, © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. As part of a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, we held a one-day symposium, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, to discuss priorities for research on relationships and sex education (RSE) in a world where young people increasingly live, experience, and augment their relationships (whether sexual or not) within digital spaces. The introduction of statutory RSE in schools in England highlights the need to focus on improving understandings of young people and digital intimacies for its own sake, and to inform the development of learning resources. We call for more research that puts young people at its centre; foregrounds inclusivity; and allows a nuanced discussion of pleasures, harms, risks, and rewards, which can be used by those working with young people and those developing policy. Generating such research is likely to be facilitated by participation, collaboration, and communication with beneficiaries, between disciplines and across sectors. Taking such an approach, academic researchers, practitioners, and policymakers agree that we need a better understanding of RSE’s place in lifelong learning, which seeks to understand the needs of particular groups, is concerned with non-sexual relationships, and does not see digital intimacies as disconnected from offline everyday ‘reality’

Improving Internal Reliability of a Trauma-Informed Care Program Evaluation Instrument

The project has analyzed the recent changes to the trauma-informed care (TIC) curriculum evaluation instrument by assessing the changes in Cronbach’s Alpha scores and effect significance. Data was collected from pre-training and post-training surveys completed at the time of delivery of the TIC curriculum training. Participants included hospital staff and medical or nursing students at Nebraska Medicine, University of Nebraska Medicine Center, and Health Creighton University Medical Center. The three research questions are (1) Did the item edits change item subgroupings? (2) Did the item edits increase instrument reliability? (3) Did the item edits impact statistical significance? 3 subscales, working with trauma, confidence, and knowledge, were identified in factor analysis. The Cronbach alpha scores were 0.783, 0.843, and 0.701, respectively. These scores indicate acceptable internal reliability among subscale items and are an improvement from the reliability estimates of the previous instrument. A paired sample t-test was used to analyze significant differences between the pre and post-surveys. Participants reported feeling more confident understanding, recognizing, and treating patients with trauma (p\u3c0.001). Participants also reported having a better understanding of trauma-informed care (TIC), the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study, and the long-term neurobiological impact of trauma (p\u3c0.001)

Entanglement creation and distribution on a graph of exchange-coupled qutrits

We propose a protocol that allows both the creation and distribution of entanglement, resulting in two distant parties (Alice and Bob) conclusively sharing a bipartite Bell State. The system considered is a graph of three-level objects ("qutrits") coupled by SU(3) exchange operators. The protocol begins with a third party (Charlie) encoding two lattice sites in unentangled states, and allowing unitary evolution under time. Alice and Bob perform a projective measurement on their respective qutrits at a given time, and obtain a maximally-entangled Bell state with a certain probablility. We also consider two further protocols, one based on simple repetition and the other based on successive measurements and conditional resetting, and show that the cumulative probability of creating a Bell state between Alice and Bob tends to unity.Comment: Added seven references, clarified argument for eqn (16

Multi-level, multi-party singlets as ground states and their role in entanglement distribution

We show that a singlet of many multi-level quantum systems arises naturally as the ground state of a physically-motivated Hamiltonian. The Hamiltonian simply exchanges the states of nearest-neighbours in some network of qudits (d-level systems); the results are independent of the strength of the couplings or the network's topology. We show that local measurements on some of these qudits project the unmeasured qudits onto a smaller singlet, regardless of the choice of measurement basis at each measurement. It follows that the entanglement is highly persistent, and that through local measurements, a large amount of entanglement may be established between spatially-separated parties for subsequent use in distributed quantum computation.Comment: Corrected method for physical preparatio

Pulmonary artery location during microgravity activity: Potential impact for chest-mounted Doppler during space travel

Doppler, or ultrasonic, monitoring for pain manifestations of decompression sickness (the bends) is accomplished by placing a sensor on the chest over the pulmonary artery and listening for bubbles. Difficulties have arisen because the technician notes that the pulmonary artery seems to move with subject movement in a one-g field and because the sensor output is influenced by only slight degrees of sensor movement. This study used two subjects and mapped the position of the pulmonary artery in one-g, microgravity, and two-g environments using ultrasound. The results showed that the pulmonary artery is fixed in location in microgravity and not affected by subject position change. The optimal position corresponded to where the Doppler signal is best heard with the subject in a supine position in a one-g environment. The impact of this result is that a proposed multiple sensor array on the chest proposed for microgravity use may not be necessary to monitor an astronaut during extravehicular activities. Instead, a single sensor of approximately 1 inch diameter and mounted in the position described above may suffice