Structural competence

BACKGROUND: We wished to examine the role of the district medical officer in five Norwegian municipalities to provide new knowledge of how the experience from the pandemic might have led to changes to the district medical officer's role. MATERIAL AND METHOD: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 persons who had held key positions in local crisis management teams during and after the pandemic. The informants were recruited from five municipalities within the same county, and they all held leadership roles in health care (district medical officers), local politics or administration...

BACKGROUND: The integration of Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) within the professional pharmacy program, contributes to assessing the readiness of pharmacy students for Advanced Pharmacy Practice Experiences (APPEs) and real-world practice. METHODS: In a study conducted at an Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE)-accredited Doctor of Pharmacy professional degree program, 69 students in their second professional year (P2) were engaged in OSCEs...

BACKGROUND: Work-integrated learning (WIL) is widely accepted and necessary to attain the essential competencies healthcare students need at their future workplaces. Yet, competency-based education (CBE) remains complex. There often is a focus on daily practice during WIL. Hereby, continuous competency development is at stake. Moreover, the fact that competencies need to continuously develop is often neglected. OBJECTIVES: To ultimately contribute to the optimization of CBE in healthcare education, this study aimed at examining how competency development during WIL in healthcare education could be optimized, before and after graduation...

The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered an escalation of the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic in many post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine. The main reasons for this situation include both the approach to TB care and the concentration of TB cases in prisons. The neoliberal approach to TB care system reform promises the optimization of treatment terms, "dehospitalization" and "despecialization" of the system of care, and a different type of control, established through digital technologies. One such technology is the "e-TB Manager", which was designated as a national TB registry, including in the prison system in 2012...

Cover crops, a soil conservation practice, can contribute to reducing disease pressure caused by Pseudomonas syringae, considered one of the most important bacterial plant pathogens. We recently demonstrated that phyllosphere (leaf surface) bacterial community structure changed when squash (Cucurbita pepo) was grown with a rye (Secale cereale) cover crop treatment, followed by a decrease of angular leaf spot (ALS) disease symptoms on squash caused by P. syringae pv. lachrymans. Application of biocontrol agents is a known agricultural practice to mitigate crop losses due to microbial disease...

BACKGROUND: Increasing regulations and requirements of advisory bodies, in particular the Joint Federal Committee and the Medical Service of the health insurance funds, make it necessary to employ only demonstrably well-trained perfusionists. The minimum requirement for this staff is EBCP certification. Currently there is limited availability of such specialists on the German market. Therefore, the qualification of young people in this area is of central importance. The aim of this paper is to strengthen the training of perfusionists at our centre, to standardise the process and to provide the respective student with a "roadmap" to their internship...

Community health workers (CHWs) are increasingly being required to perform complex health care activities, especially in community cardiovascular disease and stroke prevention. However, currently, there are no psychometrically validated instruments for assessing CHW competencies in these roles. This article describes the development and validation of the stroke literacy assessment test (SLAT)-pertaining to the Life's Simple Seven (LS7) risk factors for stroke-for evaluating CHWs' competencies in the context of education and training programs...

We discovered the first inhibitors of the m7G-RNA writer METTL1 by high-throughput docking and an enzymatic assay based on luminescence. Eleven compounds, which belong to three different chemotypes, show inhibitory activity in the range 40-300 μM. Two adenine derivatives identified by docking have very favorable ligand efficiency of 0.34 and 0.31 kcal/mol per non-hydrogen atom, respectively. Molecular dynamics simulations provide evidence that the inhibitors compete with the binding of the cosubstrate S -adenosyl methionine to METTL1...

Surface-catalyzed reactions have been used to synthesize carbon nanomaterials with atomically predefined structures. The recent discovery of a gold surface-catalyzed [3 + 3] cycloaromatization of isopropyl substituted arenes has enabled the on-surface synthesis of arylene-phenylene copolymers, where the surface activates the isopropyl substituents to form phenylene rings by intermolecular coupling. However, the resulting polymers suffered from undesired cross-linking when more than two molecules reacted at a single site...

AIMS: Identify the perceptions and experiences of how UK entry-level programs educationally prepared pediatric physiotherapists for their first clinical role. Review the extent programs taught essential, recommended, and additional content as per the International Organisation of Physical Therapists in Pediatrics (IOPTP). METHODS: Mixed methods design involving qualified UK pediatric physiotherapists. Forty-two physiotherapists completed an online questionnaire and nine (21%) completed a follow-up semi-structured interview...

Ecological similarity plays an important role in biotic interactions. Increased body size similarity of competing species, for example, increases the strength of their biotic interactions. Body sizes of many exothermic species are forecast to be altered under global warming, mediating shifts in existing trophic interactions among species, in particular for species with different thermal niches. Temperate rocky reefs along the southeast coast of Australia are located in a climate warming hotspot and now house a mixture of temperate native fish species and poleward range-extending tropical fishes (vagrants), creating novel species assemblages...

Simulation is a technique used in healthcare to replicate clinical scenarios and improve patient safety, efficacy, and efficiency. Simulation-based medical education facilitates training and assessment in healthcare without increasing risk to patients, supported by ample evidence from surgical/procedural specialties. Simulation in radiation oncology has been leveraged to an extent, with successful examples of both screen-based and hands-on simulators that have improved confidence and performance in trainees...

INTRODUCTION: Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) assess professional performance in a simulated environment. Following their integration into the reform of the 2nd cycle of medical studies (R2C), this pedagogical modality was implemented in France. This study investigates the variability of students' OSCE scores, as well as their inter-rater reproducibility. METHODS: This single-center retrospective study covered several sessions of evaluative OSCE circuits conducted between January 2022 and June 2023...

BACKGROUND: Women's childbirth experiences provide a unique understanding of care received in health facilities from their voices as they describe their needs, what they consider good and what should be changed. Quality Improvement interventions in healthcare are often designed without inputs from women as end-users, leading to a lack of consideration for their needs and expectations. Recently, quality improvement interventions that incorporate women's childbirth experiences are thought to result in healthcare services that are more responsive and grounded in the end-user's needs...

Human heavy-chain ferritin is a naturally occurring protein with high stability and multifunctionality in biological systems. This study aims to utilize a prokaryotic expression system to produce recombinant human heavy-chain ferritin nanoparticles and investigate their targeting ability in brain tissue. The human heavy-chain ferritin gene was cloned into the prokaryotic expression vector pET28a and transformed into Escherichia coli BL21 (DE3) competent cells to explore optimal expression conditions. The recombinant protein was then purified to evaluate its immunoreactivity and characteristics...

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is an ideal candidate material for drug delivery, but the disbalance between the swelling behavior and mechanical properties limits its application. In this work, covalent crosslinking of γ-polyglutamic acid (γ-PGA) with the chitosan oligosaccharide (COS) embedded in BC was designed to remove the limitation. As a result, the dosage, time, and batch of COS addition significantly affected the mechanical properties and the yield of bacterial cellulose complex film (BCCF). The addition of 2...

The pharmaceutical literacy is a necessary element of ensuring quality of human life that is to be formed at early age. The article demonstrates that key direction of development of health literacy is pharmaceutical education involving pharmaceutical workers. The necessity of development of pharmaceutical literacy in children through involvement into process of pharmaceutical education pedagogues and parents/legal representatives of child. The article presents analysis of normative legal documents regulating strategic directions of state and international policy in the field of protection of health and rights of minor citizen/children that regulate organization of pharmaceutical and educational activities and requirements to pharmaceutical and pedagogical workers within the framework of their professional role...

BACKGROUND: Projection Domain Decomposition (PDD) is a dual energy reconstruction method which implements the decomposition process before image reconstruction. The advantage of PDD is that it can alleviate beam hardening artifacts and metal artifacts effectively as energy spectra estimation is considered in PDD. However, noise amplification occurs during the decomposition process, which significantly impacts the accuracy of effective atomic number and electron density. Therefore, effective noise reduction techniques are required in PDD...

BACKGROUND: Over the past decade, artificial intelligence (AI) has expanded significantly with increased adoption across various industries, including medicine. Recently, AI-based large language models such as Generative Pretrained Transformer-3 (GPT-3), Bard, and Generative Pretrained Transformer-3 (GPT-4) have demonstrated remarkable language capabilities. While previous studies have explored their potential in general medical knowledge tasks, here we assess their clinical knowledge and reasoning abilities in a specialized medical context...

Two-dimensional conjugated organogold networks with anthra-tetrathiophene repeat units are synthesized by thermally activated debrominative coupling of 2,5,9,12-tetrabromoanthra[1,2- b :4,3- b ':5,6- b '':8,7- b ''']tetrathiophene (TBATT) precursor molecules on Au(111) surfaces under ultra-high vacuum (UHV) conditions. Performing the reaction on iodine-passivated Au(111) surfaces promotes formation of highly regular structures, as revealed by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). In contrast, coupling on bare Au(111) surfaces results in less regular networks due to the simultaneous expression of competing intermolecular binding motifs in the absence of error correction...