Comparative genomics of Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Typhimurium in Norway

Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica serovar Typhimurium, referred to as S. Typhimurium in this master`s thesis, is one of the most common pathogenic serovariants of Salmonella spp. S. Typhimurium has been isolated in a wide range of hosts from the wild fauna. These hosts are believed to be responsible for several of the human cases of Salmonella infections in Norway. The main goal of this thesis is to test the hypothesis that wild animals are a potential source of infection from S. Typhimurium among production animals in Norway. In this project a totalt of 127 S. Typhimurium isolates taken between 2001 and 2021 from wild animals, production animals and sport- and family animals were selected from the laboratory inventory at the Norwegian Veterinary Institute. The information present in the genome sequences of the S. Typhimurium isolates were examined using whole genome sequencing (WGS). WGS of pathogens is an important tool to improve the understanding of how contagious diseases spread between hosts. Due to limitations in the sequencing technology, the DNA are fragmented and only up to 300 bp are sequenced, this is then called reads. Bioinformatic tools were used for quality check a large number of the raw data from the sequencing before the original genom was attempted reconstructed using de novo SPAdes assembly. ” Multilocus Sequence Typing” (MLST) were used in further analysis to determine allele- variations based on 7 housekeeping genes, and each bacterial isolate were assigned one sequence type where ST19 and ST34 were the most common. Then the evolutionary similarity between isolates within the same ST was assessed by SNP analysis. Using phylogenetic analysis we were able to observe clusters with evolutionary similarity between wild animals and production animals, which indicates that transmission of S. Typhimurium had taken place. Based on the results from the applied dataset we found several of these cases, which gives a strong indication that wild animals can be the source of infection for S. Typhimurium among production animals in Norway.Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica serovar Typhimurium, omtalt som S. Typhimurium i denne masteroppgaven, er en av de vanligste patogene serovariantene av Salmonella spp. S. Typhimurium har blitt isolert hos et bredt spekter av verter fra villfaunaen som er antatt ansvarlig for flere av de humane smittetilfellene av Salmonella i Norge. Hovedmålet med oppgaven var å teste hypotesen om at ville dyr er en potensiell smittekilde for S. Typhimurium blant produksjonsdyr i Norge. Det ble i dette prosjektet plukket ut totalt 127 S. Typhimurium isolater tatt mellom 2001 og 2021 fra ville dyr, produksjonsdyr og sport- og familiedyr fra laboratoriebeholdningen hos Veterinærinstituttet. Ved hjelp av helgenomsekvensering (WGS) ble informasjon som fantes i genomsekvensen til S. Typhimurium isolatene undersøkt. WGS av patogener er et viktig verktøy for å forbedre forståelsen av smittsomme sykdommer som sprer seg mellom verter. Begrensninger i sekvenseringsteknologien gjør at DNAet kuttes opp i kortere fragmenter, og kun korte fragmenter opp til 300 bp sekvenseres, også kalt reads. Ved hjelp av bioinformatiske verktøy ble store mengder rådata fra sekvenseringen kvalitetsjekket før det opprinnelige genomet ble forsøkt rekonstruert ved hjelp av de novo SPAdes assembly. For videre analyser ble ” Multilocus Sequence Typing” (MLST) brukt for bestemmelse av allele-variasjoner basert på 7 husholdningsgener, og hvert bakterieisolat fikk tildelt en sekvenstype der ST19 og ST34 var mest vanlige. Deretter ble evolusjonær likhet mellom isolatene innenfor samme ST vurdert ved SNP analyse. For fylogenetiske analyser ble det observert klustre med en evolusjonær likhet mellom ville dyr og produksjonsdyr som indikerer smitteoverføring. Basert på resultatene fra det brukte datasettet var det i flere tilfeller sterke indikasjoner på at ville dyr kan være smittekilden for S. Typhimurium blant produksjonsdyr i Norge.M-K

Welfare Technologies in Care Work

Welfare technologies have within the last few years become a new mantra for reforming the Nordic public health and social care, and are increasingly making their impact on working life of care professionals. Welfare technologies – a term exclusively used in a Nordic context – is a broad and loosely defined concept that covers a wide array of technologies such as tele-care solutions, automatic toilets, eating robots, GPS-trackers, and many others. They are envisioned as leading to a new and smarter form of retrenchment, promising better quality, empowerment of clients, and work that is smarter and more qualified (e.g., Danish government et al. 2013). Together with other reform initiatives like coproduction, rehabili- tation, and user-involvement, welfare technologies aim at enabling a change in the role of the clients/patients, stressing their resourcefulness and potentials and encouraging to self-responsibilization and self-care (Rose 1998; Triantafillou 2017). This implies a fundamental reorganization of care work, a transformation of what care and care work is about, and consequently of meaning and identity in work (see, e.g., Barnes & Cotterell 2012; Järvinen 2012; Kirkegaard & Andersen 2018; Meldgaard Hansen & Kamp 2018). More concretely, we may expect changes in work tasks, social relations and forms of cooperation between occupational groups, and new relations to clients/patients and their relatives. This may not only imply new challenges and strains in work but may also present new possibilities for employees to engage creatively in shaping work in ways that makes care work more meaningful and sustainable. (...

Achieving Enhanced Phasor POD Performance by Introducing a Control-Input Model

In this paper, an enhancement to the well known Phasor Power Oscillation Damper is proposed, aiming to improve its performance. Fundamental to the functioning of this controller is the estimation of a phasor representing oscillations at a particular frequency in a measured signal. The phasor is transformed to time domain and applied as a setpoint signal to a controllable device. The contribution in this paper specifically targets the estimation algorithm of the controller: It is found that improved estimation accuracy and thereby enhanced damping performance can be achieved by introducing a prediction-correction scheme for the estimator, in the form of a Kalman Filter. The prediction of the phasor at the next step is performed based on the control signal that is applied at the current step. This enables more precise damping of the targeted mode. The presented results, which are obtained from simulations on a Single-Machine Infinite Bus system and the IEEE 39-Bus system, indicate that the proposed enhancement improves the performance of this type of controller.Achieving Enhanced Phasor POD Performance by Introducing a Control-Input ModelacceptedVersio

Enacting citizenship through writing: an analysis of a diary written by a man with Alzheimer’s disease

Citizenship and dementia studies have, during the last 15 years, grown into a substantial body of research recognising the experiences and agentic powers of people living with dementia. This article aims to contribute to and extend this research field. We undertake the aim through a feminist posthumanist non-representational analysis of a diary written by a man with Alzheimer's disease to explore the diary's potential to enact citizenship. The first section of the article examines current approaches to democracy, citizenship and dementia, and advances the concept intra-active citizenship, an approach that extends the individual and understands citizenship as enacted in and through entanglements of human–more-than-human agents. The second section is a theory-informed analysis of the diary, in which events, relations, doings and affective resonances constitute the analytical categories. The third section discusses whether the diary and the writing of it might enact citizenship, and if so, what kind of citizenship. The article concludes with a reflection on how our posthumanist, non-representational approach might pave a new path for theorising and, hence, contribute to new understandings of dementia and citizenship

Ny generasjon - nye krav?

Denne bacheloroppgaven setter søkelys på generasjonsforståelse og generasjonsbeskrivelser, for å kartlegge om dette er godt egnet for å komme med påstander om arbeidstakere i ulike generasjoner. Vi har ønsket å se på om ulike publikasjoner og artikler som tar for seg generasjonsbeskrivelser som tema, har grunnlag for sine påstander. Temaet for avhandlingen er generasjonsforståelse, med hovedfokus på Generasjon Y i arbeidslivet. Basert på eksisterende forskning, empiri og teori har vi trukket ut det vi betrakter som tre av de mest sentrale og gjentagende påstandene om denne gruppen arbeidstakere; hyppig jobbskifte, stort behov for tilbakemeldinger og stort fokus på balanse mellom jobb- og privatliv. Videre har vi ønsket å avdekke om disse påstandene faktisk stemmer overens med vårt utvalg, og om generasjonsperspektivet er godt egnet til forstå unge arbeidstakere. Problemstillingen avhandlingen ønsker å besvare er; ”Hvilken nytte gir de dominerende beskrivelsene av Generasjon Y for å forstå unge arbeidstakere i Norge i dag?” Vi har videre valgt å dele formålet med oppgaven i to deler: !! Å vurdere om de valgte påstandene om Generasjon Y stemmer for utvalget !! Å vurdere om generasjonsperspektivet er en god forklaring på unge arbeidstakeres behov i dag Ved å benytte kvalitativ metode har vi gjennomført dybdeintervjuer, for å kunne drøfte våre funn opp mot eksisterende forskning, empiri og teori. Hensikten med dette var å kunne se om de dominerende beskrivelsene av Generasjon Y samstemte med våre egne funn. For å vurdere om generasjonsperspektivet kan forklare unge arbeidstakeres behov, har vi innhentet teori om tema, og drøftet dette. Vi konkluderte med at generasjonsbegrepet kan være egnet til å beskrive hvordan en generasjon er i en viss grad og at generasjonsbeskrivelser kan være nyttig for å forstå en generasjon. Vi har likevel poengtert at påstandene ikke kan generaliseres til en hel generasjon og at man ikke skal ta for gitt at det vil gjelde alle. På bakgrunn dette ønsker vi å trekke frem at man bør være forsiktig med å komme med beskrivelser som skal være gjeldene for en hel generasjon

Interprofessional Education: Students' Learning of Joint Patient Care

This study examines how patient care is developed in meetings between students of occupational therapy, physiotherapy, nursing and medicine who are allowed to shape their own interprofessional collaboration. We conduct a thematic interpretative analysis of audio recordings and observations from the meetings and informal talks with the students. The analysis draws on traditions in sociocultural learning theory that deal with interaction on something in common between actors with different knowledge bases and the consequences of this interaction. The analysis showed that the students developed collaboration in patient care by sharing, assessing and determining professional knowledge of patients’ health conditions collectively. In conclusion, we argue that the students learned to use a multiprofessional knowledge base in the design of patient treatment when they were given responsibility to create the collaboration themselves. This demonstrates that students can be encouraged to independently develop professional collaboration in patient care within interprofessional education

Integrating preparation for care trajectory management into nurse education: competencies and pedagogical strategies

Nurses make an important contribution to the organisation and coordination of patient care but receive little formal educational preparation for this work. This paper builds on Allen's care trajectory management framework to specify evidence‐based and theoretically informed competencies for this component of the nursing role and proposes how these might be incorporated into nursing curricula. This is necessary so that at the point of registration nurses have the expertise to realise their potential as both providers and organisers of patient care and are better able to articulate and develop this aspect of nursing practice

Tensions and paradoxes in electronic patient record research: a systematic literature review using the meta-narrative method

Background: The extensive and rapidly expanding research literature on electronic patient records (EPRs) presents challenges to systematic reviewers. This literature is heterogeneous and at times conflicting, not least because it covers multiple research traditions with different underlying philosophical assumptions and methodological approaches. Aim: To map, interpret and critique the range of concepts, theories, methods and empirical findings on EPRs, with a particular emphasis on the implementation and use of EPR systems. Method: Using the meta-narrative method of systematic review, and applying search strategies that took us beyond the Medline-indexed literature, we identified over 500 full-text sources. We used ‘conflicting’ findings to address higher-order questions about how the EPR and its implementation were differently conceptualised and studied by different communities of researchers. Main findings: Our final synthesis included 24 previous systematic reviews and 94 additional primary studies, most of the latter from outside the biomedical literature. A number of tensions were evident, particularly in relation to: [1] the EPR (‘container’ or ‘itinerary’); [2] the EPR user (‘information-processer’ or ‘member of socio-technical network’); [3] organizational context (‘the setting within which the EPR is implemented’ or ‘the EPR-in-use’); [4] clinical work (‘decision-making’ or ‘situated practice’); [5] the process of change (‘the logic of determinism’ or ‘the logic of opposition’); [6] implementation success (‘objectively defined’ or ‘socially negotiated’); and [7] complexity and scale (‘the bigger the better’ or ‘small is beautiful’). Findings suggest that integration of EPRs will always require human work to re-contextualize knowledge for different uses; that whilst secondary work (audit, research, billing) may be made more efficient by the EPR, primary clinical work may be made less efficient; that paper, far from being technologically obsolete, currently offers greater ecological flexibility than most forms of electronic record; and that smaller systems may sometimes be more efficient and effective than larger ones. Conclusions: The tensions and paradoxes revealed in this study extend and challenge previous reviews and suggest that the evidence base for some EPR programs is more limited than is often assumed. We offer this paper as a preliminary contribution to a much-needed debate on this evidence and its implications, and suggest avenues for new research

Characteristics of successfully implemented telemedical applications

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>There has been an increased interest in the use of telemedical applications in clinical practice in recent years. Considerable effort has been invested in trials and experimental services. Yet, surprisingly few applications have continued beyond the research and development phase. The aim of this study is to explore characteristics of successfully implemented telemedical applications.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>An extensive search of telemedicine literature was conducted in order to identify relevant articles. Following a defined selection process, a small number of articles were identified that described characteristics of successfully implemented telemedical applications. These articles were analysed qualitatively, drawing on central procedures from Grounded Theory (GT), including condensation and categorisation. The analysis resulted in a description of features found to be of importance for a successful implementation of telemedicine. Subsequently, these features were discussed in light of Science and Technology studies (STS) and the concept of 'social negotiation'.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Telemedical applications introduced into routine practice are typically characterised by the following six features: 1) local service delivery problems have been clearly stated, 2) telemedicine has been seen as a benefit, 3) telemedicine has been seen as a solution to political and medical issues, 4) there was collaboration between promoters and users, 5) issues regarding organizational and technological arrangements have been addressed, and 6) the future operation of the service has been considered.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our findings support research arguing that technologies are not fixed entities moving from invention through diffusion and into routine use. Rather, it is the interplay between technical and social factors that produces a particular outcome. The success of a technology depends on how this interplay is managed during the process of implementation.</p