Analysis of Risk Factors Contributing to Home–Based Direct Care Workers (DCWS) Occupational Injury in Long–Term Care

Home–based direct care workers (DCWs) provide care in a unique workplace environment: the patient’s home. The high rate of injuries experienced by this subcategory of healthcare workers compared to other industries and occupations make the need to understand the risk factors for these injuries vital. This study builds on prior research and specifically profiles occupational injury patterns among home–based DCWs who deliver care primarily in patient homes and the association of individual, perceived environmental and ergonomic characteristics on predicting occupational injury. The study used a cross–sectional analysis of secondary data from the 2007 National Home Health Aide Survey (NHHAS), sampling six eligible DCWs across the United States in home health, hospice, and mixed agencies. All analyses were conducted using STATA 12.0. Multivariable logistic regression was used to determine if perceived training, work environment and ergonomic factors predict workers risk for occupational injury. The findings Holding other variables constant race, hours worked per week, and number of current employers were found to be risk factors for occupational injury. The prevalence of injury reporting was lower in non–White and part time employed HHAs consistent with findings of previous studies. In addition, race, education level, hourly pay rate and agency location, type, and ownership status were found to be risk factors for injury severity. Overall, HHAs were satisfied with their perceived training topic areas, work environment and availability of safety devices. Multivariate adjusted analyses revealed perceived training was not a risk factor for injury or its severity. Perceived poor organizational culture was found to increase the risk for work–related injury by three folds and the lack of needed devices to perform job duties safely increased HHAs risk for occupational injury. Thus, addressing modifiable risk factors for occupational injury may reduce preventable injuries and improve worker safety

Using Local Search with adaptive operator selection to solve the Progressive Party Problem

This paper investigates the use of adaptive operator selection in the context of Local Search to solve a constraint satisfaction problem, namely the Progressive Party Problem. Operators are selected according to a utility value which is computed, for each operator, from the solution quality and from the distance of the candidate solution to recently visited solutions in the search trajectory. We show that using several non-problem-specific operators gives comparable successful resolution rates to an algorithm customized for the problem, albeit with slower run times

Disordered Eating and Risky Sexual Behaviors in College Women

Disordered eating (DE) can negatively impact college students’ psychological and physical health; it is crucial to understand DE and its connection to other disruptive and co-occurring disorders. This study investigated if DE behaviors increase the probability of one such issue, risky sexual behaviors (RSB). Participants included 240 single female college students. Multivariable logistic regression analysis indicated a positive correlation between DE and RSB, wherein 44.65% engaged in both DE and RSB (p≤0.001). Compared to students who did not engage in DE, those who did had 3.42 times higher odds of engaging in RSB. Implications are provided for college campuses

Embarrassingly Parallel Search

International audienceWe propose the Embarrassingly Parallel Search, a simple and efficient method for solving constraint programming problems in parallel. We split the initial problem into a huge number of independent subproblems and solve them with available workers (i.e., cores of machines). The decomposition into subproblems is computed by selecting a subset of variables and by enumerating the combinations of values of these variables that are not detected inconsistent by the propagation mechanism of a CP Solver. The experiments on satisfaction problems and on optimization problems suggest that generating between thirty and one hundred subproblems per worker leads to a good scalability. We show that our method is quite competitive with the work stealing approach and able to solve some classical problems at the maximum capacity of the multi-core machines. Thanks to it, a user can parallelize the resolution of its problem without modifying the solver or writing any parallel source code and can easily replay the resolution of a problem

Prescreening and efficiency in the evaluation of integrals over ab initio effective core potentials

New, efficient schemes for the prescreening and evaluation of integrals over effective core potentials (ECPs) are presented. The screening is shown to give a rigorous, and close bound, to within on average 10% of the true value. A systematic rescaling procedure is given to reduce this error to approximately 0.1%. This is then used to devise a numerically stable recursive integration routine that avoids expensive quadratures. Tests with CCSD(T) calculations on small silver clusters demonstrate that the new schemes show no loss in accuracy, while reducing both the power and prefactor of the scaling with system size. In particular, speedups of roughly 40 times can be achieved compared to quadrature-based methods

Satisfiability by Maxwell-Boltzmann and Bose-Einstein Statistical Distributions

Recent studies in theoretical computer science have exploited new algorithms and methodologies based on statistical physics for investigating the structure and the properties of the Satisfiability (SAT) problem. We propose a characterization of the SAT problem as a physical system, using both quantum and classi-cal statistical-physical models. We associate a graph to an SAT instance and we prove that a Bose-Einstein condensation occurs in the instance with higher probability if the quantum distribution is adopted in the gen-eration of the graph. Conversely, the fit-get-rich behavior is more likely if we adopt the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. Our method allows a comprehensive analysis of the SAT problem based on a new definition of entropy of an instance, without requiring the computation of its truth assignments. The entropy of an SAT instance increases in the satisfiability region as the number of free variables in the instance increases. Finally, we develop six new solvers for the MaxSAT problem based on quantum and classical statistical dis-tributions, and we test them on random SAT instances, with competitive results. We experimentally prove that the performance of the solvers based on the two distributions depends on the criterion used to flag clauses as satisfied in the SAT solving process

Healthcare Professionals and Telehealth Usability during COVID-19

Objective: During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, many other health providers needed to rapidly adopt telehealth services to ensure continuity of patient care, without the opportunity to extensively evaluate the usability of the adopted technology. Therefore, this study aims to examine health professionals’ telehealth usability during COVID-19 in Florida. Design: This cross-sectional study employed the Telehealth Usability Questionnaire (TUQ) to licensed healthcare providers in Florida in June 2020. Setting and Participants: A total of 399,660 selected health professionals with Florida licensure were recruited from open-access Florida healthcare to participate in a Qualtrics web-based survey. A total of 1,868 health professionals completed the survey. Multiple linear and mixed regression models were applied to analyze the overall and subdomain scores from TUQ. Results: The analysis of the overall TUQ score showed younger, female healthcare professionals, and participants who reported an increase in telehealth usage during pandemic had a significantly higher overall TUQ score. Compared with the score from physicians and nurses, the scores from the mental health group and social work group were significantly higher, while the score rehabilitation group was significantly lower. Analysis of the subdomain scores was consistent with the overall scores. Conclusion: The findings from this study indicate that the health professionals’ telehealth usability is related to age, gender, and the change of telehealth usage during the COVID-19 Page 2 of 12 Telehealth and Medicine Today® ISSN 2471-6960 https://doi.org/10.30953/tmt.v6.270 pandemic. While pandemics represent only one possible impetus for the healthcare system to swiftly switch to telehealth platforms, each profession should consider providing adequate resources to accommodate the need for change

Synthesis of 6-Aziridineyl and 6-Triazol-yl of D- Glucitol Derivatives

1,3 : 2,4 - Di - 0 -ethylidene - 5 -O - tosyl - 6 - ( 2 - cyano -1- aziridineyl ) -6- deoxy-‌D- glucitol (4) , 6- ( 2- acetate -1- aziridineyl ) derivative ( 5 ) and 6- ( 4- bromo methyl - 1,2,3- triazol -1-y1 ) ( 6 ) and the isomer ( 5- bromo methyl -1,2,3 - triazol-1-y1 ) derivative ( 7 ) were prepared from the mono tosylate mono azido derivative ( 3 ).Compound ( 3 ) underwent 1,3 - dipolar cycloaddition reactions with acrylonitrile and vinylacetate to give, the aziridine derivatives ( 4 ) and ( 5 ) via triazoline themolysis respectively, and with proprgyl bromide gave mixtuyre 1,2,3- triazol derivatives ( 6 ) and isomer ( 7 )