Australian coder workforce survey 2002 - managers’ responses

In 1994–5, the Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA) Ltd conducted a nation-wide survey of clinical coders working in Australian hospitals. The survey (National Coder Workforce Issues Project (NCWIP) funded by the then Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health) provided baseline data about the coder workforce in terms of its size, the educational backgrounds of coders, circumstances relating to their employment and their needs in terms of continuing support and training. Importantly, the survey was conducted before casemix-based classification and funding had been implemented by all states and territories. It has now been nearly eight years since the original survey was conducted and casemix is in use in some form in all states and territories

Correlates of undefined cause of injury coded mortality data in Australia

The objective of this research was to identify the level of detail regarding the external causes of death in Australia and ascertain problematic areas where data quality improvement efforts may be focused. The 2003 national mortality dataset of 12591 deaths with an external cause of injury as the underlying cause of death (UCOD) or multiple cause of death (MCOD) based on ICD-10 code assignment from death certificate information was obtained. Logistic regression models were used to examine the precision of coded external cause of injury data.---- It was found that overall, accidents were the most poorly defined of all intent code blocks with over 30% of accidents being undefined, representing 2314 deaths in 2003. More undefined codes were identified in MCOD data than for UCOD data. Deaths certified by doctors were more likely to use undefined codes than deaths certified by a coroner or government medical office.---- To improve the quality of external cause of injuries leading to or associated with death, certifiers need to be made aware of the importance of documenting all information pertaining to the cause of the injury and the intent behind the incident, either through education or more explicit instructions on the death certificate and accompanying instructional materials. It is important that researchers are aware of the validity of the data when they make interpretations as to the underlying causes of fatal injuries and causes of injury associated with deaths

Prognosis of hyponatremia in elderly patients with fragility fractures

Funding This work is supported by an NHS Research Scotland (NRS) Career Research Fellowship to Dr Soiza.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

The South African Commercial Advertiser and the making of middle class identity in early nineteenth-century Cape Town

Bibliography: pages 232-239.This project constitutes a close textual analysis of The South African Commercial Advertiser in the years 1824 and 1830 - 1831. It uses this text to explore issues around the making of colonial identity in Cape Town during the early nineteenth century, making use of post-structuralist theories about discourse and the textual nature of historical reality. It therefore hopes to build on already existing work which concerns this period, but which does not directly address issues of cultural change in this way. The study commences with an account of the Advertiser's conception of the place of the press in the reform agenda of the middle classes in Cape Town. It explores contemporary notions about the nature of the rational public sphere and its basis in a literate culture. The second chapter explores the reconstruction of social space in Cape Town and the way in which these middle class efforts were disrupted by troubling perceptions of the underclasses in the city. Chapters three and four address the notions of gender identity and labour organization which informed the Advertiser's conception of an appropriately civilized society, as well as exploring the way in which these perceptions were destabilized by their operation in the colonial context of the Cape. The final chapter looks at the importance of representative government in the aims of the paper, and draws together some threads on the nature of colonial identity at the Cape as expressed in the Advertiser

Vimentin Diversity in Health and Disease

Vimentin is a protein that has been linked to a large variety of pathophysiological conditions, including cataracts, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, HIV and cancer. Vimentin has also been shown to regulate a wide spectrum of basic cellular functions. In cells, vimentin assembles into a network of filaments that spans the cytoplasm. It can also be found in smaller, non-filamentous forms that can localise both within cells and within the extracellular microenvironment. The vimentin structure can be altered by subunit exchange, cleavage into different sizes, re-annealing, post-translational modifications and interacting proteins. Together with the observation that different domains of vimentin might have evolved under different selection pressures that defined distinct biological functions for different parts of the protein, the many diverse variants of vimentin might be the cause of its functional diversity. A number of review articles have focussed on the biology and medical aspects of intermediate filament proteins without particular commitment to vimentin, and other reviews have focussed on intermediate filaments in an in vitro context. In contrast, the present review focusses almost exclusively on vimentin, and covers both ex vivo and in vivo data from tissue culture and from living organisms, including a summary of the many phenotypes of vimentin knockout animals. Our aim is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current understanding of the many diverse aspects of vimentin, from biochemical, mechanical, cellular, systems biology and medical perspectives

Partition function for a singular background

We present a method for evaluating the partition function in a varying external field. Specifically, we look at the case of a non-interacting, charged, massive scalar field at finite temperature with an associated chemical potential in the background of a delta-function potential. Whilst we present a general method, valid at all temperatures, we only give the result for the leading order term in the high temperature limit. Although the derivative expansion breaks down for inhomogeneous backgrounds we are able to obtain the high temperature expansion, as well as an analytic expression for the zero point energy, by way of a different approximation scheme, which we call the {\it local Born approximation} (LBA).Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, revtex4, typos corrected. To appear in Phys. Lett.

Multisensory processing and proprioceptive plasticity during resizing illusions

Bodily resizing illusions typically use visual and/or tactile inputs to produce a vivid experience of one’s body changing size. Naturalistic auditory input (an input that reflects the natural sounds of a stimulus) has been used to increase illusory experience during the rubber hand illusion, whilst non-naturalistic auditory input can influence estimations of finger length. We aimed to use a non-naturalistic auditory input during a hand-based resizing illusion using augmented reality, to assess whether the addition of an auditory input would increase both subjective illusion strength and measures of performance-based tasks. Forty-four participants completed the following three conditions: no finger stretching, finger stretching without tactile feedback and finger stretching with tactile feedback. Half of the participants had an auditory input throughout all the conditions, whilst the other half did not. After each condition, the participants were given one of the following three performance tasks: stimulated (right) hand dot touch task, non-stimulated (left) hand dot touch task, and a ruler judgement task. Dot tasks involved participants reaching for the location of a virtual dot, whereas the ruler task concerned estimates of the participant’s own finger on a ruler whilst the hand was hidden from view. After all trials, the participants completed a questionnaire capturing subjective illusion strength. The addition of auditory input increased subjective illusion strength for manipulations without tactile feedback but not those with tactile feedback. No facilitatory effects of audio were found for any performance task. We conclude that adding auditory input to illusory finger stretching increased subjective illusory experience in the absence of tactile feedback but did not affect performance-based measures