Day In Question Research Articles

Design of daily load profiles in environmentally friendly commercial and industrial microgrids

The purpose of the study is to solve the problem of design of daily load profiles for optimal control of an environmentally friendly commercial and industrial microgrid (CIM) (power is generated only by renewable energy sources) connected to the power system by a power transmission line. This goal is achieved by adjusting the planned daily load profiles of consumers located on the territory of the CIM. The adjustment means shifting power consumption to another time of the day in question (power consumption is delayed). The problem of the delayed power allocation is represented as an optimization multiple knapsack problem that adapts to the problem-solving process. The proposed algorithm was tested on a 6-node system according to the scenario that involved adjustment of the load profile in the CIM to ensure that the power flow from the power system remains within specified limits. Compliance with the limits guarantees uninterrupted power supply from the power system, which is a fundamental requirement when developing load profiles. Experiments were carried out to evaluate the delivery of uninterrupted power supply to CIM consumers depending on the initial data. The findings indicate that the disruptions in power supply to CIM consumers are completely eliminated if the load can be divided to shift it to other hours of the day and when the load of 0.151 MW is disconnected in operating state 7. The total load should be divided into at least three parts. Disconnection of 0.151 MW is performed to prevent disconnection of the commercial and industrial microgrid from the power system, which would result in a power deficit of 4.652 MW.

Transformasi Digital Sistem Pelayanan Pembuatan Surat Keterangan di Desa Cileunyi Wetan

The Cileunyi Wetan Village Office is a village service center in activities such as governance, empowerment, development and counseling. The Certificate Making Service System in Cileunyi Wetan Village is currently still done manually, that is, people have to come directly to the village office on working days and hours. A system like this is not only very inconvenient for officers because they have to input data every time an application is made, it is also inconvenient for residents because they have to queue and wait for a long time. Moreover, if on the day in question the village head is unable to attend/is away on duty, then the service will be delayed. The digital transformation of the certificate making service system is carried out using the object oriented analysis design model Rational Unified Process (RUP) method with the stages of Inception, Elaboration, Construction and Transition. This system was built using website-based PHP language so that it is easily accessed by village residents from wherever they are provided there is internet access. This digital transformation of the certificate making service system was carried out with the aim of optimizing the village service system for the community in the Cileunyi Wetan Village environment who need a certificate from the village according to the requirements mentioned above. The results showed that with this digital system, apart from being able to help make the work of village officials more effective, it can also increase effectiveness and make it easier for the community to submit the certificates they need.

К творчеству Мухадина Кандура (1935–2023 гг.)

The article examines the work of the Adyghe writer of the last century, Mukhadin Izzat Kandur, who have turned 85 years old last year. The authoritative Adyghe hero of the day, who passed away in the same year, 2023, was an active word creator throughout his entire career, which is explored in the article based on his biography and works of art. The Introduction of the article clarifies the points of study in the scientific world of the creative achievements of Mukhadin Kandur, which allows us to understand the author of the article in his approach to this topic. The material in this case is the writer’s biography, as well as a number of his artistic works. Methods – review, analysis, comparison, comparison, as well as characterological techniques. In the Results of the study, after presenting the biographical facts confirming the verbal, audio-visual (directing) and musical talents, steps, achievements of the analyzed writer, the author of the article moves on to the artistic style of M. Kandur, summarizing here what is an image of the individual personal resource of the Adyghe, applied and reproduced by them. This allows the author of the article to move on to clarifying the methods of presentation of texts used by the prose writer. Among these, the article presents and analyzes the portrait and interpersonal contact of the characters available to M. Kandur. Next, there is some identification of the adaptation strategies used by the writer in the artistic style, inherent in the Circassians for many centuries and traced by the author of the article from the analyzed word creator. The Conclusion generalizes and summarizes the analysis performed, formulating the significance of the work of the hero of the day in question for the ethnic culture of the Circassians.

“Saw E. O’Neill . . . Yes!”: Lynn Riggs to Barrett H. Clark, August 14, 1928

While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in France from July 1928 to April 1929, Lynn Riggs (1899–1954) wrote his most famous play, Green Grow the Lilacs, and began his most significant work focused on Indigenous people, The Cherokee Night. Riggs had already established his reputation by bringing to the stage the voices of the people of his own Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, which had become part of Oklahoma in 1907. One of his earlier “Oklahoma plays,” either A Lantern to See By or Sump’n Like Wings, had attracted the attention of Kenneth Macgowan and Eugene O’Neill, who called it “a real good piece of work.”1 Lantern and Sump’n struggled to find an audience, but in 1931 Green Grow the Lilacs would run for sixty-four performances at Broadway’s Guild Theatre, followed by a successful tour of the Midwest. The Theatre Guild later pitched the play to Rodgers and Hammerstein, who adapted it into Oklahoma! (1943). The Cherokee Night is now Riggs’s most-read play. His time in France was well spent.O’Neill, too, was in France during much of 1928 and 1929, in the company of Carlotta Monterey, whom he married in Paris on July 29, 1929. Prior to the wedding, from late March to late September 1928, the couple lived at the Villa Marguerite in Guéthary, twelve kilometers south of Biarritz on the Basque Atlantic coastline. O’Neill devoted much of that summer to revising Dynamo, which he completed on August 18.2 He seems to have interrupted his work to drive up to Biarritz on August 13, presumably at the wheel of “the Fast Blond,” a Renault roadster of which he was then enamored. (Carlotta called it “the Canary.”) Presumably the O’Neills were house-hunting: in a letter dated August 9, Carlotta told George Jean Nathan that the couple planned a move to “more modern” accommodations in Biarritz.3 On the day in question, Riggs spotted O’Neill exiting a patisserie, duly laden, one hopes, with gateaux Basques and other delights. A postcard written the next day to Riggs’s and O’Neill’s common acquaintance Barrett H. Clark tells the story with exuberance and concision (fig. 1):The card, first noticed by Phyllis Cole Braunlich, was posted from Ciboure, across the river Nivelle from St. Jean-de-Luz, where Riggs was vacationing.4Riggs evidently did not approach O’Neill, though the two playwrights had several common acquaintances. Riggs knew Ida Rauh and Mabel Dodge, in addition to Clark and Macgowan. Rauh had produced Riggs’s one-act Knives from Syria in Santa Fe (1925); she and he were sufficiently close that he would spend the summers of 1929 and 1930 at her house in Provincetown, when Susan Glaspell was also in town. Furthermore—and as the tone of the postcard suggests—Riggs was among O’Neill’s fans. Riggs acknowledged O’Neill’s stature in a letter to Clark dated August, 1927:Two months later, Riggs himself essayed the comparison in another letter to Clark, in which he said his play The Lonesome West had elicited an attentiveness from “people, not too friendly, and they sit up as people sat up (for not at all identical, but similar reasons) at The Great God Brown.”6 He may have been starstruck: although he would soon establish friendships with celebrities such as Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Franchot Tone, his orbit in the late 1920s was short on A-listers of that sort, if long on prominent artists and intellectuals like Witter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mary Hunter Austin, Spud Johnson, and Haniel Long.Riggs appears never to have met O’Neill. This postcard, therefore, documents the closest the two dramatists ever found themselves, albeit without O’Neill’s knowledge. Riggs would remain an admirer; for example, he wrote enthusiastically to Clark on November 15, 1933, about attending the Hollywood opening of The Emperor Jones.7 And, regrettably for Riggs, the comparisons to O’Neill would continue: in his review of Riggs’s The Cream in the Well in the January 21, 1941, edition of the New York Times, Brooks Atkinson dismisses Riggs’s effort as analogous to Desire Under the Elms and Mourning Becomes Electra, but “lacking tangible meaning.” One hopes for Riggs’s sake that Macgowan had shared O’Neill’s praise of his work. The memory of it would have smoothed the sharp edges of Atkinson’s unflattering comparison.

Sizes and Shapes of Sea Ice Floes Broken by Waves–A Case Study From the East Antarctic Coast

The floe size distribution (FSD) is an important characteristics of sea ice, influencing several physical processes that take place in the oceanic and atmospheric boundary layers under/over sea ice, as well as within sea ice itself. Through complex feedback loops involving those processes, FSD might modify the short-term and seasonal evolution of the sea ice cover, and therefore significant effort is undertaken by the scientific community to better understand FSD-related effects and to include them in sea ice models. An important part of that effort is analyzing the FSD properties and variability in different ice and forcing conditions, based on airborne and satellite imagery. In this work we analyze a very high resolution (pixel size: 0.3 m) satellite image of sea ice from a location off the East Antarctic coast (65.6°S, 101.9°E), acquired on February 16, 2019. Contrary to most previous studies, the ice floes in the image have angular, polygonal shapes and a narrow size distribution. We show that the observed FSD can be represented as a weighted sum of two probability distributions, a Gaussian and a tapered power law, with the Gaussian part clearly dominating in the size range of floes that contribute over 90% to the total sea ice surface area. Based on an analysis of the weather, wave and ice conditions in the period preceding the day in question, we discuss the most probable scenarios that led to the breakup of landfast ice into floes visible in the image. Finally, theoretical arguments backed up by a series of numerical simulations of wave propagation in sea ice performed with a scattering model based on the Matched Eigenfunction Expansion Method are used to show that the observed dominating floe size in the three different regions of the image (18, 13 and 51 m, respectively) agree with those expected as a result of wave-induced breaking of landfast ice.

An Empirical Algorithm for COVID-19 Nowcasting and Short-Term Forecast in Spain: A Kinematic Approach

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of forecasting techniques can play an advisory role in policymakers’ early implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in order to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission. In this article, we present a simple approach to even day and 14 day forecasts of the number of COVID-19 cases. The 14 day forecast can be taken as a proxy nowcast of infections that occur on the calculation day in question, if we assume the hypothesis that about two weeks elapse from the day a person is infected until the health authorities register it as a confirmed case. Our approach relies on polynomial regression between the dependent variable y (cumulative number of cases) and the independent variable x (time) and is modeled as a third-degree polynomial in x. The analogy between the pandemic spread and the kinematics of linear motion with variable acceleration is useful in assessing the rate and acceleration of spread. Our frame is applied to official data of the cumulative number of cases in Spain from 15 June until 17 October 2020. The epidemic curve of the cumulative number of cases adequately fits the cubic function for periods of up to two months with coefficients of determination R-squared greater than 0.97. The results obtained when testing the algorithm developed with the pandemic figures in Spain lead to short-term forecasts with relative errors of less than ±1.1% in the seven day predictions and less than ±4.0% in the 14 day predictions.

Legal Transitions without Legitimate Expectations*

Legal Transitions without Legitimate Expectations*

Use of peripheral venous catheters in two Norwegian hospitals.

Most patients in Norwegian hospitals are routinely given one or more peripheral venous catheters. A peripheral venous catheter is considered to be a benign device but may entail a risk of local infection with resulting bloodstream infection and sepsis. Good practice in the insertion and care of these catheters is essential to prevent infection. This study presents Norwegian data from the 'One Million Global Catheters Study', which evaluated practice in relation to peripheral venous catheters in 419 hospitals in 51 countries. Two Norwegian hospitals collected data from medical and surgical wards on a single day in November 2014 (Levanger Hospital) and a single day in February 2015 (St Olavs Hospital). Professional development nursing specialists recorded observations of peripheral venous catheters such as insertion site, dressing, documentation and indication. We evaluated 136peripheral venous catheters in a total of 121patients. We found 44 (32.4%) catheters associated with various clinical problems such as pain, redness or swelling around the insertion site, catheter dislocation, or blood in the infusion set. Altogether 50peripheral venous catheters (36.8%) were not in use for either medications or fluid on the day in question. In 93 of 131 cases (71.0%), there was no documentation of venous catheter assessment in the previous 24 hours. Care and monitoring of venous catheters could be significantly improved. There was considerable incidence of unused peripheral venous catheters, and lack of documentation was widespread.

Solving a dial-a-flight problem using composite variables

A dial-a-flight problem (DAFP) is described as experienced by a tourist airline operating in Botswana. Typically, a daily schedule is drawn up manually by a team of experienced schedulers a few days before the day in question. In this research, the problem is modeled and optimized using a composite variable formulation of a multi-commodity network flow model. The method takes many of the problem constraints into account at the variable creation stage, reducing the problem size in terms of variables and constraints. As such the method is mostly suitable for highly constrained problems. Six daily lists of booking requests were supplied by the airline, and these were set up and solved. The results are compared with the actual costs incurred by the airline on the day in question. Additional ten lists of booking requests of various sizes were created and solved, and the results compared to results from an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation.

Does Perceived Crowding Cause Winter Backcountry Recreationists to Displace?

Winter backcountry sports such as skiing and snowshoeing have experienced a tremendous increase in popularity in recent decades in the European Alps. Recreationists commonly encounter other recreationists on their route. Because enjoying solitude and being close to nature are important motivations for pursing winter backcountry activities, crowding on backcountry routes is highly likely to diminish recreational experiences, with potential consequences for nature and recreationists. This study explored perceptions of and responses to crowding among Swiss backcountry skiers and snowshoers, using an online survey that asked about their motivations for pursing their activity and gauged their perception of crowding using the “people at one time” approach. Each of the 830 participants rated 4 scenarios on a 9-point Likert scale ranging from “far too few people” to “far too many people” and answered follow-up questions about potential displacement choices in response to perceived crowding. Participants rarely perceived backcountry routes as having too few people but often perceived them as crowded. We found only minor differences in perceptions of crowding among participants pursuing different activities or those with different motivations. The most common reaction to perceived crowding was to avoid the route in the future, and the next most common was to adjust a route to avoid the crowd on the day in question. This indicates that crowding is likely to lead to short- and long-term spatial displacement of winter backcountry sport activities. This is likely to have a negative impact on wildlife—as well as on backcountry recreationists' safety, because they might inadvertently enter avalanche-prone areas.

Institutionalised whiteness, racial microaggressions and black bodies out of place in Higher Education

ABSTRACTOn the morning of Friday 3 February 2017, Femi Nylander – a Black Oxford alumnus – walked through the grounds of Oxford University’s Harris Manchester College. Later that morning a CCTV image of Femi was circulated to staff and students who were urged to ‘maintain vigilance’.Whilst ‘post-racial’ ideology insists on framing such incidents as isolated aberrations bereft of wider structural and institutional context, in this article I draw upon the theoretical concepts of racial microaggressions and bodies out of place in order to disrupt this hegemonic interpretation.Adopting the Critical Race Theory (CRT) method of counter-narrative, I centralise the voices of student campaigns as sites of legitimate experiential knowledge. These campaigns reveal a web of whiteness that undergirds Higher Education. It is this web, I argue, that ensnares Femi on the day in question. Thus, Femi’s experience cannot be understood in abstraction from structural white supremacy and institutionalised whiteness.

Study of the Thermal Internal Boundary Layer in Sea Breeze Conditions Using Different Parameterizations: Application of the WRF Model in the Greater Vitória Region

Abstract In the present study, the physical parameterizations of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model are verified for making accurate inferences about the dynamics of the Thermal Internal Boundary Layer (TIBL) generated by sea breeze in an urban center with an island in a bay along a coastal region with rugged topography. The simulations were performed using parameterizations from Yonsei University (YSU), Mellor-Yamada-Janjic (MYJ) and Asymmetric Convective Model version 2 (ACM2) for the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) and Noah and Rapid Update Cycle (RUC) for the Land Surface Model (LSM). The data inferred by the WRF model were compared with those obtained by a Surface Meteorological Station (SMS) and by measurements generated using Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), Sonic Detection and Ranging (SODAR) and radiosonde. The simulations showed that although the object of this research was a region with high geographical complexity, the YSU parameterization set (non-local closure) for the ABL and the Noah parameterization for the LSM presented satisfactory results in determining ABL height generated by the sea breeze on the day in question.

Multi-Meteotsunami Event in the Adriatic Sea Generated by Atmospheric Disturbances of 25–26 June 2014

A series of meteotsunamis hit a few locations in the Mediterranean and Black Seas during 22–27 June 2014. Meteotsunamis were particularly numerous on 25 and 26 June in the Adriatic Sea, where at least six harbours and bays were stricken by powerful waves: strongest events occurred in Vela Luka (Korcula Island), a known meteotsunami hot-spot, where waves reached height of ~3 m, and in Rijeka dubrovacka Bay, where strong ~5 m/s currents accompanied ~2.5 m high waves. Intensification of high-frequency sea level activity was observed at both the eastern and western Adriatic tide gauge stations, with maximum recorded wave heights reaching ~68 cm (Ortona, Italy). A series of individual air pressure disturbances characterized by pronounced rates of air pressure change (up to 2.4 hPa/5 min), limited spatial extent (~50 km) and high temporal variability, propagated over the Adriatic on 2 days in question. Numerical hydrodynamic model SCHISM forced by measured and idealised air pressure disturbances was utilised to reproduce the observed Adriatic sea level response. Several important conclusions were reached: (1) meteotsunamis occurring at various parts of the coast were generated by different atmospheric air pressure disturbances; (2) topographic influence can be removed from sea level spectra by computing spectral signal-to-background ratios; the result, being related to the external forcing, resembles atmospheric pressure spectra; (3) sea response is strongly dependant on details of atmospheric forcing; and (4) over complex bathymetries, like the middle and south Adriatic ones, numerous effects, including Proudman resonance, edge waves, strong topographical enhancement and refractions on the islands placed on the pathway of atmospheric disturbances should be taken into account to fully understand meteotsunami generation and dynamics. An in-depth numerical study is planned to supplement the latter conclusion and to quantify contribution of each process.

Outbreak of measles at the children's department of the Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden

Background: Measles outbreaks are unusual in Sweden due to a good coverage of the national immunization program for children which started in 1982. Today the symptoms of measles are not commonly recognized by health-care personnel and contagious cases can easily be missed. We describe an outbreak of measles which involved a total of ten persons related to the children's department of the Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden. Methods & Materials: By ordinary surveillance and management of clinical measles cases, an epicentre of the outbreak was linked to two days, and all medical records from patients (total 177) at the outpatients clinic for those days was retrospectively reviewed to find further cases. Results: An unvaccinated man and a woman vaccinated once with clinical signs of measels, both working at the hospital where admitted to the infection ward. During the following week an additional three children are diagnosed with measels, all unvaccinated. These five cases had all been at the children's hospital during the same two days. Medical records were reviewed. Our findings revealed that an unvaccinated teenage girl with Systemic lupus erythematosus had been admitted to the children's department during the days in question. Her symptoms were typical of measles, but these had been interpreted as due to her underlying disease combined with a respiratory infection and drug rashes.Another two unvaccinated children who hade visited the children's department was diagnosed serologically with measles, and a further two secondary cases to these, one man vaccinated twice and a 3-year-old child vaccinated once, succumbed with clinical infection. Conclusion: Despite good vaccination coverage, if presented at a hospital, measles may easily spread among immune suppressed and non vaccinated individuals.Although rarely seen, measles must always be considered as a differential diagnosis among rash-patients, even if previously vaccinated against measels.Vaccinations of the health-care personnel should be promoted.These outbreaks are costly to manage.

Sexual Healing: Daily Diary Investigation of the Benefits of Intimate and Pleasurable Sexual Activity in Socially Anxious Adults

A growing literature attests to deficits in social and romantic life quality in people with elevated social anxiety, but no research to date has explored how intense intimate encounters influence social anxiety symptoms. This study investigated whether the presence and quality of sexual activity on a given day predicted less social anxiety and negative cognitions on a subsequent day. We also explored whether the benefits of sexual activity would be stronger for more socially anxious individuals. Over 21days, 172 undergraduate students described the presence and quality of sexual activity, social anxiety symptoms, and use of social comparisons on the day in question. Time-lagged analyses determined that being sexually active on one day was related to less social anxiety symptoms and the generation of fewer negative social comparisons the next day. Furthermore, more intense experiences of pleasure and connectedness during sex predicted greater reductions in social anxiety the next day for people high in trait social anxiety, compared to those low in trait social anxiety. These results were similar regardless of whether sex occurred in the context of romantic relationships or on weekdays versus weekends. The results suggest that sexual activity, particularly when pleasurable and intimate, may mitigate some of the social anxiety and negative comparisons frequently experienced by people with high trait social anxiety.

A pervasive and persistent Asian dust event over North America during spring 2010: lidar and sunphotometer observations

Abstract. Among the many well-documented cases of springtime trans-Pacific transport of crustal dust from Asia to North America (significant events include those of 1998, 2001, and 2005), the events of March and April 2010 were extraordinary both in the extent of the dust distribution and in the unique meteorological conditions that caused the dust layers in the free troposphere to linger and be detectable across Canada and the northern United States for over a month. This study focuses on extending previous research by combining data from CORALNet (Canadian Operational Research Aerosol Lidar Network) lidars in Vancouver, BC, and Egbert, ON, with AERONET (AErosol RObotic NETwork) sunphotometer retrievals and model results from HYSPLIT (HYbrid Single-Particle Lagrangian Integrated Trajectory) and NAAPS (Navy Aerosol Analysis and Prediction System) to monitor the arrival and distribution of dust layers across North America. This is the first documented instance of lidar detection of Asian dust from the Egbert CORALNet installation, where layers identified as dust using depolarization ratios corresponded with retrievals of coarse-mode optical depth at the co-located AEROCAN/AERONET site. In Vancouver dust layer depolarization ratios varied from 0.27 for dust above 6 km to less than 0.10 for the first 1.5–2 km above the surface. Similar layers of elevated dust exhibited much lower volume depolarization ratios for all altitudes in Egbert, ON, where maximum depolarization ratios stayed below 0.15 for all layers from 2–8 km with no clear variation with altitude, or over time. The relative lack of variation is an indication that as the layers of dust were transported across North America the rates of change in their optical properties slowed. HYSPLIT back trajectories performed throughout the free troposphere above these sites showed a majority of air parcels originating from central Asia on the days in question. Using these techniques, it was shown that elevated layers of aerosol reaching the west coast of North America as early as 17 March also included dust from the same central Asian sources, extending the known duration of the 2010 event by almost a full month.

Consensus-Building Mechanism for Setting Service Expectations in Air Traffic Flow Management

A significant challenge of effective air traffic flow management (ATFM) is to allow various competing airlines to collaborate with an air navigation service provider (ANSP) in determining flow management initiatives. Over the past 15 years this challenge has led to the development of a broad approach to ATFM known as collaborative decision making (CDM). A set of CDM principles has evolved to guide the development of specific tools that support ATFM resource allocation. However, these principles have not been extended to cover the problem of providing strategic advice to an ANSP in the initial planning stages of traffic management initiatives. This paper describes a mechanism in which competing airlines provide consensus advice to an ANSP by means of a voting mechanism. The mechanism is based on the recently developed majority judgment voting procedure. The result of the procedure is a consensus real-valued vector that must satisfy a set of constraints imposed by the weather and traffic conditions of the day in question. Although this problem was developed and modeled on the basis of specific ATFM features, it appears to be highly generic and amenable to a much broader set of applications. Analysis of this problem involved several interesting sub-problems, including a type of column generation process that created candidate vectors for input to the voting process.

Enhanced Catalogue Records Positively Impact Circulation but Are Not Used to Their Potential in Patron Searching

Enhanced Catalogue Records Positively Impact Circulation but Are Not Used to Their Potential in Patron Searching

Determination of the quiet daily geomagnetic variations for polar regions

A novel procedure to derive the daily varying quiet level for polar geomagnetic data is presented. Recorded data from selected quiet intervals are weighted and superposed to form the basis for an estimate of the quiet daily curve (QDC) for the variation in each of the recorded components on any selected day. The quiet daily variation is controlled by the level of solar UV and X-ray emissions, and parameters in the solar wind in combination with the actual season and the location of the observatory. The procedure uses the variability in the recorded geomagnetic data rather than international magnetic indices like Kp to determine the quiet intervals in accordance with the concept proposed by Janzhura and Troshichev (2008). A special problem for the estimation of the QDC in polar regions is the influence from the solar wind sector structure acting particularly through the azimuthal component, IMF By, of the interplanetary magnetic field. In the superposition of recordings to estimate the QDC for any given day, the present procedure uses weighting functions to give preference to intervals with quietest conditions, closest to the day in question, exposed to the same face of the sun, and within the same sector of the solar wind. The effects of control parameters for the selection of quiet intervals and smoothing of the initial QDC values are carefully controlled. The procedure is fully automated and delivers quality control parameters in addition to the QDC values. It is considered a further step forward in the processing of geomagnetic data to derive reliable and reproducible QDCs for the difficult high-latitude regions.

Occupational Hazard: The Experience of a False Patient Accusation

Living through the events described below has been a learning experience for me and will likely influence the way I practice child psychiatry throughout my career. I hope that, by my sharing my experience in this essay, others will learn something, as well. On a Wednesday afternoon, 4 months before I was scheduled to complete my child psychiatry fellowship, I was summoned to my supervisor’s office. He informed me that a 9-year-old patient of mine had made an allegation that I had touched him inappropriately and had taken a picture of him inappropriately during an appointment 1 month earlier. I was told that the patient’s mother “did not believe him,” but “thought she should tell somebody.” The hospital elected to do an internal investigation, which included a risk-management person meeting with me later that day. During this meeting I stated that although I routinely do take the patient’s blood pressure in the presence of his or her parents, I otherwise never touch any of my patients, nor do I photograph patients. I added that I was quite sure I had never met with this patient apart from his mother, since he regularly met with a therapist on an individual basis, and most of the interaction during our psychopharmacology clinic visits was between me and the patient’s mother. The risk-management person asked whether I was working alone on the day in question. I told her that I could not remember whether someone such as a medical student or visiting resident was present with me that day and added that unfortunately I, like many others, did not routinely document their presence. She pointed out to me that I was finding myself in a situation that is “an occupational hazard” for anyone who works with children. I was told to continue with my clinical duties while the internal investigation was being conducted and did so dutifully the next day, with a renewed respect for defensive medicine. On Thursday evening, it dawned on me that, a few weeks earlier, a pediatric resident had “shadowed” me in my psychopharmacology clinic. Could this have been the same day that the misconduct allegedly took place? I certainly hoped so. On Friday morning, I decided to do some investigating on my own. I made some phone calls and was able to confirm that I indeed had a resident shadowing me on the day in question. I relayed my discovery to those involved in the internal investigation and was told that “things were looking good.” I breathed a sigh of relief. What had blindsided me less than 48 hours earlier appeared to be going away about as quickly as it had arrived. So I was doubly surprised when, several minutes later, the risk-manager called and said, “Oh my God, I just received a call informing me that the sheriffs are on the way to the hospital to arrest you. Do not go anywhere; I’ll be right over.” Moments later, I was being discreetly escorted down the freight elevator by hospital security staff. We met an unmarked sheriff’s car at the loading dock, where they proceeded to pat me down, put me in handcuffs, and take me to the station for questioning. I was placed in a secure room after having my belt and shoelaces safely removed, and I was then read my “Miranda rights.” They proceeded to try to question me, but I elected to follow the advice the risk-manager had given me shortly before I was handcuffed, and refused to answer any questions until I could speak to an attorney. After sitting in the secure room alone for about an hour (by far the worst part of the day) I was informed that the decision had been made to “book and release” me with orders to return for a “charging date” about 31⁄2 weeks later. The charge in question: first-degree sexual assault of a child—a felony. It turns out that “book-and-release” is a process that can take between 3 and 9 hours, involving a Received August 19, 2010; revised November 16, 2010; accepted November 30, 2010. The author’s contact information has been withheld because of the sensitive nature of the article contents. Any comments may be directed to the editors, at acadpsych@gmail.com. Copyright © 2011 Academic Psychiatry