AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF COMPENSATION ON JOB PERFORMANCE AND WORK-FAMILY CONFLICT IN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA-“A CORRELATION MODEL”

The purpose of this paper is to find the impact of compensation on job performance and work-family conflict, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and subsequently present a model illustrating a relationship between them. The study is based on primary data collected from 400 employees working in Saudi Arabia. The researchers also do a comprehensive literature review of the past theories and research material available on the specified topic. The illustrated model indicates a relationship between compensation, job performance and work-family conflict by showing the impact of compensation, which is directly and indirectly linked to work-family conflict, through job performance of an employee in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The limitation of the study is that the model is based on data collected from employees working in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia only, which could have been collected from other regions of the Middle East countries as well. According to this model, compensation to the employees should be paid attention to, which would result in enhanced job performance and conflict free work-family environment

A Comparative Study of the Software Packages Used as HRIS by Organizations Operating in India: Human Resource Professionals’ Perspective.

The aim of the study was to do a comparative study to find the various software packages of human resource information system (HRIS) used by organizations operating in India. In this era of information explosion, in a developing country like India , human resources should be managed well and to do so, an integration of technology with the day today activities of employees should be the prime focus of organizations, operating in any domain. In the human resource management domain the technological solution is the implementation and use of human resource information system, which has in the last couple of decades become one of the most important pillar of modern human resource management. Thus for this study, a total of 71 companies across India were shortlisted across six different sectors namely information technology, real estate, business process outsourcing, financial services, manpower consulting and travel & tourism. The sample size of 385 respondents was decided, but only 355 questionnaires were found to be usable and were thus analyzed, which is a response rate of 96.25%. Chi-square results showed that organizations in the real estate sector and the service sector of India, differed significantly on the software packages  being used as human resource information system (HRIS) by organizations operating in India. This study also provided concrete insight about human resource professionals, perspective about the various features of human resource information system (HRIS) that the organization is currently using. Research Type: Research Paper Keywords: Human Resource Information System, Human resource Management, HRIS Software, Features of Human Resource Information System, India

Occupational Infection Prevention and Control Training for the Protection of Hospital Healthcare Workers

It has been suggested that when adherence to infection prevention control (IPC) protocols is in place, the risk of transmission of infectious diseases to patients and other healthcare workers (HCWs) appears low. Adherence to IPC recommendations and protocols depends on many factors including availability of resources, health priorities, staff ratios, workload allocation, and patient turnover. Lastly, HCWs may be unsure of how and when to adhere to local guidelines. Evidence to date has established that HCW feel there is a lack of training about infections, IPC and about how to use personal protective equipment. While guidelines often stipulate that HCWs should be trained, there is currently a gap in our understanding about how IPC training programs are being designed and implemented across low, middle- and high-income settings. This research program aimed to examine how the topic of training is framed and discussed in policies, as well as critically analyse the current landscape of IPC training and the factors impacting on delivery. Following a multi-method approach, four studies were undertaken to examine IPC training across a range of countries, with a focus on pandemic and non-pandemic recommendations. The first study, a scoping review of publicly available IPC guidelines, was conducted to examine recommendations around IPC training programs. This study highlighted that mode of delivery and IPC curriculum differed across guidelines. It also highlighted that there is a failure to acknowledge adult learning principles. The second study examined the current landscape around occupational IPC training of HCW, across six low/middle-income/high-income countries via in-depth interviews. This work identified policy variations, lack of dedicated funding, poor resource allocation and impact of COVID-19 as factors affecting the delivery of training. Focusing on pandemic relevant IPC training, the third study examined the discourse around IPC training from the pandemic plans and COVID-19 specific guidelines from countries across every WHO region. This study found omissions and inconsistencies in the way pandemic specific IPC training programs were considered within the documents. Based on an extensive literature review as well as the factors identified in the previous three studies, a modified Delphi approach was used in the final study, to develop best practice principles to optimize the provision of occupational IPC training programs for HCWs. The thesis contributes new knowledge regarding the framing of the topic of training across guidelines and policy documents, as well as an absence to recognise the need for dedicated resources and trained personnel. The recommendations offered can potentially support policy development and improvement in the delivery of occupational IPC training programs for HCWs in low-, middle- and high-income countries

Educational software for stress analysis of non-idealized closed thin-walled sections

Aerospace structures such as fuselage and wings are made of typical thin-walled closed sections and the detailed stress analysis of such closed thin-walled structures can be tedious and time consuming due to its statically indeterminate nature of the problem. In the present work, an educational software for the stress analysis of such non-idealized thin-walled closed sections has been developed that complements tradi-tional methods of teaching and learning. The software developed is able to generate any given closed cross section which are subjected to bending, shear, and torsional loads and compute the resulting stresses on the cross section. Results from literature have been used to validate the results from the software. The software has been developed using Graphical User Interface (GUI) in MATLAB which makes the soft-ware very user friendly. The software is expected to be an effective teaching and learning tool of courses on thin-walled structures and air-craft/automotive structures

A clinical study to evaluate the effectiveness of the short proximal femoral nail in the management of unstable intertrochanteric fractures

Background: The objective was to study the effectiveness and drawbacks of short proximal femoral nail in the management of unstable intertrochanteric fractures.Methods: This prospective study was conducted in the department of orthopaedics Al-Ameen medical college, Vijayapura, Karnataka, India from July 2010 to June 2017. Total 175 patients (130 males and 45 females) aged between 41 to 80 years with unstable Intertrochantreric fracture (155 had type IV and 20 had type III according to Boyd and Griffin classification). All patients were operated using Short proximal femoral nail and followed at least for a minimum period of 6 months and were evaluated radiologically and clinically by Kyle’s Criteria.Results: Anatomical reduction was achieved in 125 patients, 105 (60%) had no complications post operatively. Complications included 5 cases of avascular necrosis and screw cut out, 5 cases of delayed union, 5 cases of Z-effect, 20 cases of varus malunion, 10 cases of antirotation screw breakage, 5 cases of distal bolt breakage and 15 cases with lateral thigh discomfort. 125 patients had No shortening and the average shortening was 0.34 cm, average time of union was 19.26 weeks (15-30 weeks) in 170 cases. At the end of 6 months, good to excellent results were seen in 71.5% of cases, 57% patients returned to their pre injury functional level.Conclusions: Short proximal femoral nail provides good fixation for unstable intertrochanteric fractures, if proper pre-operative planning, good reduction and surgical techniques are followed leading to high rate of bone union and minimal soft tissues damage especially for Asian patients with relatively small femora

Recurrent Thrombectomy in Patients with Prior Mechanical Endovascular Revascularization: A Single Center Experience

Background: Mechanical endovascular reperfusion therapy (MER) has become the standard of care for treatment of large vessel occlusion (LVO) acute ischemic strokes (AIS) with expansion of treatment window to 24 hours from LNW. Nearly 25% of all stroke patients have a recurrent event within 5 years. Intravenous alteplase use in AIS patients with recent ischemic stroke history is often restricted due to the risk of intracranial hemorrhage, however this may not apply for MER. Bouslama et al found no statistically significant differences in the reperfusion rates, hemorrhagic complications, clinical outcomes, and mortality between patients who underwent repeated thrombectomy (RT) and those who had a single thrombectomy. Methods:This was a retrospective case series study of the endovascular database for patients who underwent RT in our institution from March 2016 till March 2018. Demographic data, clinical presentation, imaging, procedural data and clinical outcomes were evaluated. Results:Of the total 145 patients with AIS that received MER, 8 (5.5%) RT occurred in 5 patients. Mean age was 67 ± 21 years. Four of the five patients were females. All five patients achieved successful reperfusion (TICI 2b-3). Three patients underwent one RT, one had two RT, and one had three RT. The average time between consecutive MER (8 total periods) was 106 days. The time between the first to last MER for each patient ranged from 3 days to 2 years. All patients were optimized on their medical therapy after the first stroke. Four of the five patients (80%) had RT in the same vascular territory. One patient had post-procedure focal high-grade stenosis after the 3rd intervention in the same artery that was treated later with elective angioplasty. One RT was complicated with fatal intracranial hemorrhage due to late presentation despite presence of large area of penumbra. 3 months MRS was 2. Conclusion: In patients presented with recurrent LVO, RT appears to be effective and relatively safe. Based on the available literature, prior MER should not discourage aggressive treatment that may potentially lead to a good clinical outcome. It is unclear if prior MER therapies cause endothelial injury leading to a predilection for local in-situ thrombus or denovo stenosis formation predisposing to re-occlusions. The risk of reperfusion injury in a recently infarcted territory should be weighted carefully when considering as hemorrhagic complications remain possible.https://scholarlycommons.henryford.com/merf2019clinres/1031/thumbnail.jp

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe