Cancer Care Coordinators: Realising the Potential for Improving the Patient Journey

A person diagnosed with cancer can receive multiple treatments in a variety of different health care settings over extended periods of time1. During this time, they come into contact with multiple health care providers. For example, one recent UK study reported that cancer patients with a diagnosis of less than one year had met 28 doctors on average since their diagnosis2. Add to this the many other health professionals with whom the patient will come into contact during their illness and the complex maze that can characterise the patient’s cancer journey is obvious. The Optimising Cancer Care in Australia report3 published in 2003 by the peak cancer organisations in Australia concluded that there are many places for the person with cancer to get lost in the system, causing unnecessary morbidity and undue distress. The lack of an integrated care system for people with cancer was identified as a major failing of today’s health system3. A number of states in Australia have moved to appoint cancer care coordinators as a strategy to address such problems. In Queensland, cancer coordination positions have been established in a number of Health Service Districts in the Southern and Central Zone of the State, initially to scope patterns of care, referral pathways and to define a cancer coordination model for their regions that is consistent across the state, but able to meet the local needs of the population. To support its Cancer Clinical Service Framework, the NSW Health Department plans to recruit up to 50 cancer nurse coordinators. Cancer nurse coordinators in NSW will work through Lead Clinicians and Directors of Area Cancer Services to support oncology team meetings, develop care pathways and protocols, and provide a direct source of contact for patients and primary care physicians accessing cancer services4. In Victoria, a number of program coordinators and regional nurse coordinators have been introduced as part of the breast services enhancement program. Individual institutions have also established nurse coordinator roles for specific tumour streams. The cancer care coordinator role is a rapidly emerging one with a mandate to achieve some potentially far-reaching reforms to systems of care. To ensure these developments realise their potential, it is timely to consider the most effective ways to design and implement models of care coordination thatachieve the improvements being sought for the Australian cancer care system

Capitalism with a conscience : SMEs and community engagement : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Management in Management at Massey University

It is commonly acknowledged that business organisations are expected to demonstrate ethical and moral conduct, yet throughout the last half century the bar has been raised. Not only are organisations expected to behave ethically; they are being summoned to exercise Business Social Responsibility (BSR). While there is a growing amount of literature on BSR, research in this field has largely confined itself to corporations. As such, especially in the New Zealand space, it has neglected prolific Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The aim of this study was to explore SME owner-managers' perceptions of community engagement. To accomplish this aim an exploratory, qualitative study involving semi-structured interviews with 10 SME owner-managers was conducted. SME owner-managers interviewed perceive business as having a highly integrated function in society. The owner-managers engage with their communities in significantly diverse ways, covering an extensive range of stakeholders. Primarily influenced by values pertaining to religion, family, and moral orientation, many owner-managers overlook economic gain, yet consider peripheral benefits to accrue nonetheless

Catalytic reaction between adsorbed oxygen and hydrogen on Rh(111)

Abstract unavailable

Density-functional investigation of the rhombohedral to simple cubic phase transition of arsenic

We report on our investigation of the crystal structure of arsenic under compression, focusing primarily on the pressure-induced A7 to simple cubic (sc) phase transition. The two-atom rhombohedral unit cell is subjected to pressures ranging from 0 GPa to 200 GPa; for each given pressure, cell lengths and angles, as well as atomic positions, are allowed to vary until the fully relaxed structure is obtained. We find that the nearest and next-nearest neighbor distances give the clearest indication of the occurrence of a structural phase transition. Calculations are performed using the local density approximation (LDA) and the PBE and PW91 generalized gradient approximations (GGA-PBE and GGA-PW91) for the exchange-correlation functional. The A7 to sc transition is found to occur at 21+/-1 GPa in the LDA, at 28+/-1 GPa in the GGA-PBE and at 29+/-1 GPa in the GGA-PW91; no volume discontinuity is observed across the transition in any of the three cases. We use k-point grids as dense as 66X66X66 to enable us to present reliably converged results for the A7 to sc transition of arsenic.Comment: To be published in Physical Review B; material supplementary to this article is available at arXiv:0810.169

A Cost-Effective Study of Police Mounted Patrol Units

Examines the usefulness of mounted police

Investigating the Origin of Observed Central Dips in Radial Metallicity Profiles

Radial metallicity trends provide a key indicator of physical processes such as star formation and radial gas migration within a galaxy. Large IFU surveys allow for detailed studies of these radial variations, with recent observations detecting central dips in the metallicity, which may trace the impact of various evolutionary processes. However, the origin of these dips has not been conclusively determined, with suggestions that they may be diagnostic dependent. In this paper, we use the SDSS-IV MaNGA survey to investigate whether the observed dips represent genuine decreases in the central metallicity, or if they could be an artefact of the diagnostic used. Using a sub-sample of 758 local star-forming galaxies at low inclinations, we investigate in detail the impact of using different strong line diagnostics on the shapes of the returned profiles, and the prevalence of dips. We find no clear evidence of the dips being caused by changing values of the ionisation parameter within galaxies. To investigate physical causes, we explore both global and spatially-resolved parameters, finding that galaxies exhibiting central dips in the O3N2 metallicity profile have on average lower H$\alpha$EW values out to R/R_\rm{e} \sim 1.5, and higher values of D$_N$(4000) in the central regions. We additionally find a higher prevalence of dips in galaxies with high stellar mass, and lower values of global specific star formation rate, suggesting a possible link to central quenching. Nevertheless, these results are dependent on the diagnostic used, suggesting caution should be taken when interpreting observed features in galaxy metallicity gradients.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 23 pages; 21 figure

Optimal metallicity diagnostics for MUSE observations of low-z galaxies

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/The relatively red wavelength range (4800-9300 Å) of the VLT Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) limits which metallicity diagnostics can be used; in particular excluding those requiring the []λλ3726,29 doublet. We assess various strong line diagnostics by comparing to sulphur -based metallicity measurements for a sample of 671 H ii regions from 36 nearby galaxies from the MUSE Atlas of Disks (MAD) survey. We find that the O3N2 and N2 diagnostics return a narrower range of metallicities that lie up to ∼0.3 dex below -based measurements, with a clear dependence on both metallicity and ionization parameter. The N2S2H α diagnostic shows a near-linear relation with the -based metallicities, although with a systematic downward offset of ∼0.2 dex, but no clear dependence on ionization parameter. These results imply that the N2S2H α diagnostic produces the most reliable results when studying the distribution of metals within galaxies with MUSE. On sub-H ii region scales, the O3N2 and N2 diagnostics measure metallicity decreasing towards the centres of H ii regions, contrary to expectations. The S-calibration and N2S2H α diagnostics show no evidence of this, and show a positive relationship between ionization parameter and metallicity at > 8.4, implying the relationship between ionization parameter and metallicity differs on local and global scales. We also present hiidentify, a python tool developed to identify H ii regions within galaxies from H α emission maps. All segmentation maps and measured emission line strengths for the 4408 H ii regions identified within the MAD sample are available to download.Peer reviewe