Commonwealth Games: How could sport tourism benefit Birmingham?

Regeneration is about change. Whencities and regions prepare to host large-scale sporting events, much of the change comes as an investment in new infrastructures for the purpose of image renewal and economic benefit. Regeneration has been a part of urban policy agendas for decades now inthe UK and cities have continually invested as a way to maintain their competitiveness, attract visitors and recreate an image to overcome and negative burdens associated with the past

Foreign tour operators and travel agents knowledge of a potential tourism destination

Vojvodina is an autonomous region of Serbia, and has the potential to become a successful tourism destination. Twenty years of changes have elapsed since the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and destination planners in Vojvodina are now looking to accommodate visitors and generate service related jobs. The method for collecting data was through survey responses from those in the travel industry. The objective for conducting this research is to analyze the knowledge and awareness of the developing destination of Vojvodina. From here, it is possible to get a sense of the regionʼs awareness, and role tour operators and travel agents act as opinion makers in promoting destinations to their clientele. Results suggest that Vojvodina is not known as a tourism destination among foreign travel expertsfurthermore, this would suggest that their clientele base is not informed of this region of Serbia as a tourism destination. Although not known, this is better than having a negative image. With a non-image, tour operators and travel agents then have the ability to creatively market and promote an image that will generate further awareness of the Vojvodina region as an emerging tourism destination

Development and Implementation of an Ultrasound-Guided Peripheral Intravenous Catheter Insertion Training Program for Student Registered Nurse Anesthetists

The American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA) has defined the scope of nurse anesthesia practice to include services in acute, chronic, and interventional pain management, as well as the use of ultrasound (U/S) and other diagnostic technologies. However, there are no standard curriculum requirements in place that mandate graduate programs to educate student nurse anesthetists in U/S-related modalities. In addition to the AANA, the use of U/S in nurse anesthesia practice has recently been adopted by The Council on Accreditation of Nurse Anesthesia Educational Programs (COA), which characterizes U/S use by its clinical impact on the reduction in complications, increased effectiveness of regional anesthesia, and enhanced quality of vascular catheter placement. The COA has strongly recommended that student registered nurse anesthetists (SRNA) have U/S education incorporated into their curriculum for its use both in regional anesthesia and vascular access. Currently, a Nurse Anesthesia Program (NAP) at a private university in the Midwest incorporates both didactic and simulation-based experiences into the education and training of SRNAs to establish a strong foundation of knowledge and proficiency upon which a safe and effective nurse anesthesia practice can be built. However, despite the COA recommendations and surmounting evidence supporting the use of simulation-based education in improving U/S knowledge and skill proficiency, the NAP did not have a formal ultrasound training course within its curriculum to prepare its SRNAs for the clinical setting. Consequently, a recent audit report conducted by the Director of the NAP revealed that 54.7 percent of the program’s SRNAs (N = 64) have never received any U/S training prior to entering the NAP (B. Garrett, personal communication, August 1, 2021). Given the recent data and the COA recommendations, the NAP recognized a critical need to educate SRNAs in the utilization of U/S in a simulation-based DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ULTRASOUND PROGRAM 3 environment prior to entering their clinical practice rotations. Therefore, the purpose of the quality improvement project was to determine whether the implementation of a simulation-based U/S-guided peripheral intravenous catheter placement (U/SGPIV) training workshop would improve clinical knowledge and skill proficiency among the NAP SRNAs. The following objectives and methods were framed using the quality improvement Plan- Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Model and were established to achieve the project’s overall aim: 1) review and synthesize the evidence from the literature, AANA guidelines, and COA recommendations towards the development of an U/S training workshop using simulation-based techniques; 2) develop and implement a simulation-based U/SGPIV course; 3) evaluate the effects of the workshop on SRNA’s clinical knowledge and proficiency related to U/S and U/SGPIV; 4) develop plan for sustainability and present project findings (e.g., pre- and post- intervention observational clinical audit data and identified compliance barriers/lessons learned), evidence-based recommendations, and a sustainment plan to the key program faculty stakeholders as well as NAP executive leaders. The project was significant as it helped the NAP in its efforts to comply with the AANA guidelines and COA requirements for education programs to incorporate U/S training into their program curriculums in preparing its SRNAs for the clinical settings

Spectral Speckle Customization

Speckle patterns are used in a broad range of applications including microscopy, imaging, and light-matter interactions. Tailoring speckles' statistics can dramatically enhance their performance in applications. We present an experimental technique for customizing the spatio-spectral speckled intensity statistics of optical pulses at the output of a complex medium (a disordered multimode fiber) by controlling the spatial profile of the input light. We demonstrate that it is possible to create ensembles of independent speckle patterns with arbitrary statistics at a single wavelength, simultaneously at decorrelated wavelengths, and even tailored statistics across an entire pulse spectrum

Prostate cancer, PI3K, PTEN and prognosis

Loss of function of the PTEN tumour suppressor, resulting in dysregulated activation of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) signalling network, is recognized as one of the most common driving events in prostate cancer development. The observed mechanisms of PTEN loss are diverse, but both homozygous and heterozygous genomic deletions including PTEN are frequent, and often accompanied by loss of detectable protein as assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC). The occurrence of PTEN loss is highest in aggressive metastatic disease and this has driven the development of PTEN as a prognostic biomarker, either alone or in combination with other factors, to distinguish indolent tumours from those likely to progress. Here, we discuss these factors and the consequences of PTEN loss, in the context of its role as a lipid phosphatase, as well as current efforts to use available inhibitors of specific components of the PI3K/PTEN/TOR signalling network in prostate cancer treatment.</jats:p

Getting back to the event: COVID-19, attendance and perceived importance of protective measures

Current COVID-19 realities impose additional challenges to sporting event organisers who now have to consider and include new protective measures for the safety and security of both active and passive participants. This study focuses on event consumers and issues related to their intention to attend future sporting events and their perception of how important they find some of the safety-related protective measures when attending sporting events following the COVID-19 crisis. Based on the empirical study of residents from one Middle East and two European countries, the results suggest that, once all restrictions on movement and sporting event attendance is allowed to resume, most of the respondents will attend events in their home country within few weeks. In addition, the respondents from a country that experienced more severe consequences of the pandemic perceive all protective measures as more important than respondents from countries that were less affected

Mechanisms of PTEN loss in cancer: it’s all about diversity

PTEN is a phosphatase which metabolises PIP₃, the lipid product of PI 3-Kinase, directly opposing the activation of the oncogenic PI3K/AKT/mTOR signalling network. Accordingly, loss of function of the PTEN tumour suppressor is one of the most common events observed in many types of cancer. Although the mechanisms by which PTEN function is disrupted are diverse, the most frequently observed events are deletion of a single gene copy of PTEN and gene silencing, usually observed in tumours with little or no PTEN protein detectable by immunohistochemistry. Accordingly, with the exceptions of glioblastoma and endometrial cancer, mutations of the PTEN coding sequence are uncommon (<10%) in most types of cancer. Here we review the data relating to PTEN loss in seven common tumour types and discuss mechanisms of PTEN regulation, some of which appear to contribute to reduced PTEN protein levels in cancers.The authors declare they have no conflict of interest with publication of this manuscript. Work in the NRL laboratory is funded by Medical Research Scotland (Grant number: 1034-2016), Prostate Cancer UK (PG14-006), CRUK (C50604/A28050) and PTEN Research