Domains Of Practice Research Articles

Simulation-Based Training on Basic Obstetrics and Gynecology Ultrasound Skills During COVID Pandemic.

COVID-19 pandemic led to an alarming rise in sickness absenteeism among the radiologists. Anticipating a continued shortage of experienced radiologists in future COVID waves, it is essential to train the medical professionals in basic skills related to ultrasonography to enable them to perform basic Obstetrics and Gynecology (OG) scans safely in emergencies. Virtual reality simulation training is an alternative to conventional ultrasound training. A cross-sectional study was conducted during 8-day-long workshop to identify the trainees' basic, after training knowledge and skills in OG ultrasound and to document their perceptions of the training. Statistical analysis was done using descriptive statistics (percentages and mean standard deviations) and paired t test for comparisons. A total of 80 health care professionals underwent ultrasound simulation training. It was found that the post-test score in the knowledge domain, instrument handling, basic gynecological skills, and first-trimester antenatal ultrasound skills in the practical domain was significantly higher than the pre-test score (P-value < 0.0001). Out of 80 participants, 45 (56.25%) agreed that ultrasound simulation is an ideal method of teaching and training basic OG skills to the novice. Sixty-six out of 80 (82.5%) felt that the principles of handling a human mannequin are the same as those of real patients. Forty-eight participants out of 80 (60.0%) felt that ultrasound simulation can be used as an ideal tool for self-assessment of health care professionals. The study showed that ultrasound-based simulation can provide a realistic setting for training and assessment of novices in learning basic skills.

Addressing Competency in Rheumatology Telehealth Care Delivery.

Telehealth is an essential facet of care delivery for patients with rheumatic diseases. The Association of American Medical College's (AAMC) telehealth competencies (TCs) define the skills required for delivering general telehealth care across the range of clinician experience. In this study, the American College of Rheumatology's (ACR) TCs working group aimed to adapt the AAMC TCs to rheumatology, outlining the skills acquisition unique to rheumatology with a focus on knowledge, skills, and behaviors expected of recent rheumatology fellowship graduates. Through a collaborative process, the working group adapted the AAMC TCs to the training structure and practice of rheumatology. The rheumatology TCs underwent peer review among recipients of the Clinician Scholar Educator Award and attendees at the ACR 2021 Convergence conference. The rheumatology TCs define 24 essential skills required for synchronous telehealth care of patients with rheumatic diseases. The working group adapted the AAMC's 20 TCs organized within 6 domains, added 2 skills to the AAMC's domains of patient safety and appropriate use, and data collection and assessment, and created a novel domain of systems-based requirements with 2 competencies. The rheumatology TCs define expected skill levels for recent rheumatology fellowship graduates and experienced rheumatology clinicians. The rheumatology TCs represent the first adaptation of the AAMC TCs to subspecialty care, expanding the scope to include rheumatology fellowship graduates and additional domains of rheumatology practice. These competencies can guide curricular innovations and measurements of proficiency in telehealth care delivery among rheumatology trainees and experienced clinicians, enhancing the care provided to patients with rheumatic diseases.

Capacity building in mental health: preparing Caribbean psychologists for the future

PurposeThe English-speaking Caribbean is currently at a crossroads regarding the education and training of home-grown psychologists meeting the ever-increasing demands for mental health care in the region. This paper recommends an innovative approach to build capacity in mental health care in the English-speaking Caribbean that will require partnerships between the regional university, experienced registered practising psychologists, professional resources in the diaspora, public health and education institutions, which will produce trained clinical supervisors, PhD psychologists and improved mental health services in the region.Design/methodology/approachDocuments about the postgraduate programmes in psychology from the regional university were sourced. PubMed, Medline and Google Scholar were searched for the English language published articles using the key phrases psychology AND/OR psychologist AND/OR education AND training AND mental health. Searches of the reference lists of included articles were also undertaken.FindingsPostgraduate psychology programmes in the region have become stalled at the master’s level. Meanwhile, doctoral-level training is being sought outside the Caribbean largely due to the lack of availability of trained clinical supervisors. Moreover, training outside the region may lead to deficits regarding cultural relevance of practices, as well as impede the overall development of Caribbean psychology.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper provides insights into the current practice of education and training for Caribbean postgraduate psychology students and the implications for the development of the practice of psychology in the region. Recommendations for educational and training strategies are provided.Practical implicationsThe proposed framework presented will help upgrade experienced master’s-level trained psychologists to PhDs with training in clinical supervision through Research Advancing Intensive Supervision Education (RAISE) doctoral programmes and can cultivate improved mental health services with a wider reach across the Caribbean.Social implicationsRaising the training standards of the psychologists, preparing clinical supervisors and increasing access to practicum sites will improve the trajectories of psychologists within the English-speaking Caribbean and the mental health of the population. Such changes will help to ensure the use of culturally appropriate therapies with Caribbean clientele. There are many social implications for capacity building within the practice and research domains of the preparation of psychologists. For example, increased access to psychological care, improved well-being of citizens, decreased prevalence of work absenteeism and improved management of citizens’ mental health and well-being.Originality/valueThis paper provides insights into the current practice of education and training for Caribbean postgraduate psychology students and the implications for the development of the practice of psychology in the region. Recommendations for educational and training strategies are provided. The proposed organising framework presented offers a new conceptual model that can be used to guide the capacity building of psychologists within the English-speaking Caribbean. The proposed framework will help upgrade experienced master’s-level trained psychologists to PhDs with training in clinical supervision through RAISE doctoral programmes and can cultivate improved mental health services with a wider reach across the Caribbean.

‘Free rein’ to learn about language, culture &amp; technology: a multimodal digital text exchange project between school students in Australia and Japan

As part of an Australia-Japan Foundation project, school students in Australia and Japan created and exchanged multimodal digital texts (MDTs) in order to learn language through authentic communicative practice, raise intercultural capability, and develop 21st century skills and digital literacies. Analysis of teacher and student interview and focus group data using the 4-domain SPeCT (Structures, Practices, Capabilities, and Technologies) model derived from earlier cross-cultural multimodal digital text exchange research revealed that, notwithstanding certain challenges relating to Structures, Capabilities, and Technologies, teachers and students were overwhelmingly positive about the project, whose relatively free nature was seen as fostering learning. The perceived benefits were largely in the domains of Practices and Capabilities: in the former, these related to choice and autonomy, personalisation and inclusivity, and collaboration and peer learning; in the latter, they related to practising language, learning about one’s own and others’ cultures, and developing 21st century skills and digital literacies. This suggests that within the wider field of telecollaboration and COIL (collaborative online international learning), there is merit in young learners being given some ‘free rein’, or autonomy, in creating and exchanging MDTs.

Domain-Specific Heuristics in Answer Set Programming: A Declarative Non-Monotonic Approach

Domain-specific heuristics are an essential technique for solving combinatorial problems efficiently. Current approaches to integrate domain-specific heuristics with Answer Set Programming (ASP) are unsatisfactory when dealing with heuristics that are specified non-monotonically on the basis of partial assignments. Such heuristics frequently occur in practice, for example, when picking an item that has not yet been placed in bin packing. Therefore, we present novel syntax and semantics for declarative specifications of domain-specific heuristics in ASP. Our approach supports heuristic statements that depend on the partial assignment maintained during solving, which has not been possible before. We provide an implementation in Alpha that makes Alpha the first lazy-grounding ASP system to support declaratively specified domain-specific heuristics. Two practical example domains are used to demonstrate the benefits of our proposal. Additionally, we use our approach to implement informed search with A*, which is tackled within ASP for the first time. A* is applied to two further search problems. The experiments confirm that combining lazy-grounding ASP solving and our novel heuristics can be vital for solving industrial-size problems.

Advanced practice roles amongst therapeutic radiographers/radiation therapists: A European survey

IntroductionAdvanced Practice (AP) roles in Radiotherapy (RT) over time are variable, often locally developed and not underpinned by professional standards which leads to conceptual and practical gaps. This study aimed to assess AP roles amongst Therapeutic Radiographers/Radiation Therapists (TR/RTTs) and identify educational gaps for this level across Europe. MethodsAn anonymous online survey was designed, validated, and distributed across Europe. Convenience sampling was used to recruit advanced TR/RTTs practitioners or TR/RTTs working in AP roles. Descriptive analysis from closed questions and thematic analyses from open questions are reported. ResultsA total of 272 responses were obtained, of which 189 eligible participations were from 21 European countries. 42% of respondents acknowledged additional education required to perform AP, and 25% reported a minimum of five years of RT practice to perform AP roles/tasks. There is a trend to work more on the clinical practice domain with a low percentage of working time allocated to research. Inconsistency was found in job titles, scopes of practice, and educational backgrounds across and even within countries. Education needs regarding knowledge about image-guided and adaptive RT, multimodal imaging and technologies, and advanced treatment planning were found. Training needs on leadership and management skills and clinical site-specific expertise were identified. ConclusionThis study clearly shows a gap in education support, a need for standardisation in job titles and scopes of practice across Europe. Implications for practiceAs the first large-scale assessment of current AP roles and educational support amongst TR/RTTs across Europe, this study recommends the establishment of governance structure and role regulation. It also informs the curricula for master programmes to align the education with current and future practice.

Reenchanting the Enlightenment

In light of research which, since the publication of Rousseau and Porter’s Ferment of Knowledge, has demonstrated the continued centrality of magic and the occult to what may be termed “scientific knowledge” in the early modern period, this essay argues that one domain of practice where these concerns remained paramount well into the eighteenth century is the consumption of recipes. Whether exchanged between individuals or collected in print format, these mobile informational media relied on forms of proof under­pinned by personal experience and collective accreditation, with an inductive and empirical focus that was distinct from Cartesian deduction. Because the culture of recipe exchange was so widespread, encompassing scholars, savants and lay readers, secrets offered ways to challenge strict mechanistic interpretations in favour of a view of the natural world as informed by unseen active powers, particularly where the virtues of materials such as magnets or medicinal simples were concerned. Using private library catalogues of book owners, a commonplace book and a scientific periodical produced in France during the decades after 1700, the article traces the way secrets culture continued to foster an epistemological space in which mechanical explanations evidently fell short of accounting for quotidian experience.

Life Experiences and Teaching Practices: An Analysis of Role Models in Accountancy

This study seeks to understand the meaning of experiences and knowledge used in the process of professional development of teachers of undergraduate courses in Accountancy in Brazil. It was used as the theoretical basis for the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth of Teachers and the teaching knowledge from Tardif’s perspective. A semi-structured interview with a qualitative and reflective approach was used as a technique to build the narratives. The analyzed excerpts were grouped into four analysis categories: the personal domain, related to the disciplinary knowledge of accounting; the domain of practice and the didactic-pedagogical knowledge; the external domain and experiential knowledge; and the domain of consequence, highlighting the significant results in professional development. From the analyses, it is concluded that teachers develop in teaching through reflection and action on their practice; through the positive relationships of partnership, support, and guidance established with their students; through the careful search for the exchange of experiences with peers and with the professional market; as well as through the personal search for the improvement of their daily teaching practice.

Special Issue on: Advancements in Mathematics and Optimization Techniques in Technology &amp; Business

Advancements in Mathematics and Optimization Techniques in Technology and Business are integral components of numerous scientific and practical domains, providing valuable tools for understanding complex phenomena, making informed decisions, and predicting outcomes. Over the years, these disciplines have witnessed significant advancements, driven by the relentless pursuit of improved methodologies, the availability of vast amount of data, and the need to address increasingly intricate real-world problems. One of the key areas of focus in this special issue is the development of mathematical modeling techniques for complex systems which are characterized by their intricate interconnectedness, making them challenging to study and analyze. Researchers have made significant strides in developing sophisticated mathematical models and computational methods to simulate and understand such systems. Network modeling, agent-based modeling, stochastic modeling, and dynamical systems are among the areas that have seen remarkable progress, enabling researchers to gain deeper insights into the behavior and dynamics of complex systems.

Inquérito de Conhecimento, Atitude e Prática sobre estilo de vida saudável em pessoas com HIV

Abstract Objective to develop and assess a Knowledge, Attitude and Practice survey on healthy lifestyle in people with human immunodeficiency virus. Method a development study, with the elaboration of survey through of an integrative review and analysis of the guidelines; content and appearance analysis by 22 expert judges; and semantic analysis by 22 outpatients. The proportion of positive assessments of the items was measured, considering a percentage equal to or greater than 85%. Results the survey had three domains and seven axes: chronic diseases in people with human immunodeficiency virus; body weight control; healthy eating; physical exercise; avoiding smoking, alcohol and illicit drugs; stress control/reduction; antiretroviral and other medication compliance. Knowledge and attitude domains had 10 questions, and practice domains had 11. In the assessment by expert judges, nurses, doctors and nutritionists participated, with positive agreement of items above 85%. Patients underwent semantic analysis, with 100% positive agreement in the domains. Conclusion and implications for practice the survey had adequate evidence of validity, to be used by nurses and other health professionals, to support care, educational strategies and research with people living with the human immunodeficiency virus.

Are Diagnostic Delays Associated with Distress in Breast Cancer Patients?

Introduction: Receiving a new breast cancer diagnosis can cause anxiety and distress, which can lead to psychologic morbidity, decreased treatment adherence, and worse clinical outcomes. Understanding sources of distress is crucial in providing comprehensive care. This study aims to evaluate the relationship between delays in breast cancer diagnosis and patient-reported distress. Secondary outcomes include assessing patient characteristics associated with delay. Methods: Newly diagnosed breast cancer patients who completed a distress screening tool at their initial evaluation at an academic institution between 2014 and 2019 were retrospectively evaluated. The tool captured distress levels in the emotional, social, health, and practical domains with scores of “high distress” defined by current clinical practice guidelines. Delay from mammogram to biopsy, whether diagnostic or screening mammogram, was defined as >30 days. Result: 745 newly diagnosed breast cancer patients met inclusion criteria. Median time from abnormal mammogram to core biopsy was 12 days, and 11% of patients experienced a delay in diagnosis. The non-delayed group had higher emotional (p = 0.04) and health (p = 0.03) distress than the delayed group. No statistically significant differences in social distress were found between groups. Additionally, patients with higher practical distress had longer time interval between mammogram and surgical intervention compared to those with lower practical distress. Older age, diagnoses of invasive lobular carcinoma or ductal carcinoma in situ, and clinical anatomic stages 0-I were associated with diagnostic delay. Conclusion: Patients with higher emotional or health-related distress were more likely to have timely diagnoses of breast cancer, suggesting that patients with higher distress may seek healthcare interventions more promptly. Improved understanding of sources of distress will permit early intervention regarding the devastating impact of breast cancer diagnosis.

Household and Halakhah: A Genealogy of Jewish Practice

In this article, I examine the role of the household and its web of social relations in the formation of halakhah. Through close readings of talmudic texts, I propose that the household functions not only as a domain of halakhic practice but as a significant point of origin. Drawing upon the Latin root matrix (mother), I suggest that everyday activities involving food preparation, childrearing, and household management form a significant matrix in the genealogy of halakhah, from ancient through modern times. Ultimately, I conclude that the practicalities of household life and its halakhic renderings are mutually-informing and, at times, inseparable religious formations.

The Critical Subject and the Subject of Critique in International Law and Technology

The making of legal subjects has long been a crucial terrain for critical theory, also in relation to international law, where both emancipatory promises and expressions of power or discipline are tied to how subjects are recognized and enacted. International law's modes of subject-making have therefore been an important site of aspiration, struggle, and critique. While some have celebrated the rise of the individual on the stage of international law, the liberal ideal of legal and political subjectivity lingering in these celebratory accounts has been confronted by different strands of feminist, post-colonial, and Marxist critique. With proliferating use of digital technologies in practices of (global) governance, the making of legal subjects has taken novel forms. Big data manufacture subjects in ways that spark new legal anxieties and destabilize or problematize established patterns of critical engagement. In data-driven practices that we will describe, subjects are no longer exclusively enacted as abstract autonomous entities or classified along stable criteria (of difference or enmity). Sustained by tools of pattern recognition and technologies for the “unsupervised uncovering of correlations,” nascent forms of global governance by data produce subjects as transient clusters of attributes and data points within transient clusters of attributes and data points—bundles of vectors within vectors, only tentatively and temporarily tied together. In this essay, we map out how this mode of subject-making has become prevalent in different domains of international legal practice. We trace these dynamics to changes in the exercise of state sovereignty and the technoscopic regimes—assemblages for information flow, processing, retention, and surveillance—that states rely on.

RAIs IN TOP TIER LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC JOURNALS: MOVES, STEPS, AND THEIR IDEATIONAL MEANING REALIZATIONS

This study aims to attest how the transitivity analysis of move steps as well as their sequences in research article introductions of the top tier language and linguistic journals assists novice writers by providing some patterns to consider. To this end, the Swales’ CARS model and systemic functional linguistics were deployed. All data analysis and their interpretations were included in the umbrella of qualitative approach with the assistance of simple descriptive statistics. Results showed that there were 3 moves and 17 steps found with few consecutive sequences identified among them. Moreover, the patterns of move steps characterized as high, low, conventional, and optional were also observed. As for the realization of ideational meaning, based on transitivity analysis of move steps, there were 5 processes spotted with relational process dominating and existential the least. Furthering this, the present study has implications both in practical and theoretical domains.

Design and Implementation of a Pilot Model for IoT Smart Home Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is a complementary part of our style of life. IoT technology coexists with existing cellular communication for developing 5G. Both academic researchers and industrial householders pay attention to the benefits of IoT technology. However, the rapid growth of IoT networks suffers from some limitations, such as heavy traffic load, traffic congestion,... <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">etc</i> . In this paper, a parallel distributed smart home architecture is proposed to solve human-being problems and achieve welfare in society. The proposed network has a light traffic load and low traffic congestion to avoid a single-point failure. The architecture of the proposed smart home network involves connectivity, security, registration, protocols, and scenarios to update registration. Also, the paper presents a framework of state diagrams, processes, and algorithms for IoT smart home networks. This framework includes a design and implementation of a pilot model of IoT smart home domains to meet human beneficiaries. The model consists of six practical smart home network domains in both normal and urgent modes to proof of the concept. The pilot model is programmed based on three major aspects: objectives, processes with algorithms, and state diagrams. The novelty of the paper lies in the capability to implement a smart home architecture pilot model using simple development kits. The design and implementation of the practical IoT smart home networks are tested and measured using a CoolTerm sniffer tool. The results of measurement prove that the proposed model achieves light traffic profiles and low average data rates.

Intercultural Communication and English Reading and Writing Teaching

Language is the carrier of culture, learning a foreign language is not just learning words and articles on the surface. Instead, it should be regarded as a cultural learning process. The ultimate purpose of learning a foreign language, therefore, is to have a real understanding of the cultural connotations and to apply them successfully in the practice of cross-culture communication. However, culture teaching is always ignored by teachers in English teaching. Reading is a skill that English learners must master and an important indicator of English proficiency. Reading barriers will have a certain impact on learners' academic performance and daily communication. Meanwhile, Writing is a kind of written form of communication to express thoughts. It involves comprehensive usages of listening, speaking, reading and other language skills. Therefore, in both theoretical and practical teaching domains, problems of writing have been the focus of language educators. However, the students’ writing ability improves comparatively slowly, and the results of teaching are not satisfying owning to the fact that students are not fully aware of the cultural differences between China and the west in the way of expressing. They often fail to think in the western way when writing. Thus, teachers should pay full attention to and seriously study the cultural differences between Chinese and English and apply cross-cultural communication to English reading and writing practice. Only in this way can they help students improve their English level and avoid Chinglish.

The Compassionate Communities Connectors programme: experiences of supported families and referring healthcare providers.

Comprehensive evaluations that include the experience of patients and service providers are vital if interventions are to be translated into the standard practice of health services and allow formal networks to work as partners with informal community networks. However, published evaluations are limited in the palliative care volunteering literature. The objective of the study is to explore the experiences and views of both patients and their family carers who received support and their referring healthcare providers concerning their participation in the Compassionate Communities Connectors programme, in the south-west region of Western Australia. Connectors identified and addressed gaps in community and healthcare provision by accessing resources and mobilising social networks of people with life-limiting illnesses. The perspectives of patients, carers and service providers concerning the feasibility and acceptability of the intervention were sought. Semistructured interviews were undertaken with 28 patients/families and 12 healthcare providers, resulting in 47 interviews in total (March 2021-April 2022). An inductive content analysis was used in analysing interview transcripts to identify key themes. Families greatly appreciated the support and enablement received from the Connectors. Healthcare providers were impressed with the high level of resourcefulness exhibited by the Connectors and perceived a great need for the programme, particularly for those socially isolated. Three themes captured the patients'/families' perspectives: connector as an advocate, increasing social connectedness and taking the pressure off families. Healthcare providers' perspectives were captured in three themes: reducing social isolation, filling a gap in service provision and building the capacity of the service. Perspectives of patients/families and healthcare providers demonstrated the mediating role of Connectors. Each group saw the Connectors' contribution through the lens of their particular interests or needs. However, there were indications that the connection was shifting the way each group understood and practised care, encouraging or restoring agency to families and reminding healthcare providers that collaborating beyond the boundaries of their roles actually enhances the whole ecology of care. Using a Compassionate Communities approach to mobilise health and community sectors has the potential to develop a more holistic approach that addresses the social, practical and emotional domains of care.

Generative Inference Network for Imbalanced Domain Generalization.

Domain generalization (DG) aims to learn transferable knowledge from multiple source domains and generalize it to the unseen target domain. To achieve such expectation, the intuitive solution is to seek domain-invariant representations via generative adversarial mechanism or minimization of cross-domain discrepancy. However, the widespread imbalanced data scale problem across source domains and category in real-world applications becomes the key bottleneck of improving generalization ability of model due to its negative effect on learning the robust classification model. Motivated by this observation, we first formulate a practical and challenging imbalance domain generalization (IDG) scenario, and then propose a straightforward but effective novel method generative inference network (GINet), which augments reliable samples for minority domain/category to promote discriminative ability of the learned model. Concretely, GINet utilizes the available cross-domain images from the identical category and estimates their common latent variable, which derives to discover domain-invariant knowledge for unseen target domain. According to these latent variables, our GINet further generates more novel samples with optimal transport constraint and deploys them to enhance the desired model with more robustness and generalization ability. Considerable empirical analysis and ablation studies on three popular benchmarks under normal DG and IDG setups suggests the advantage of our method over other DG methods on elevating model generalization. The source code is available in GitHub https://github.com/HaifengXia/IDG.

Equivariant Filters are Equivariant

Observers for systems with Lie group symmetries are an active area of research that is seeing significant impact in a number of practical domains, including aerospace, robotics, and mechatronics. This paper builds on the theory of the recently proposed Equivariant Filter (EqF), which is a general observer design for systems on homogeneous spaces that takes advantage of symmetries to yield significant performance advantages. It is shown that the EqF error dynamics are invariant to transformation of the input signal and equivariant as a parametrised vector field. The main theorem shows that two EqF's with different choices of local coordinates and origins and with equivalent noise modelling yield identical performance. In other words, the EqF is intrinsic to the system equations and symmetry. This is verified in a simulation of a 2D robot localisation problem, which also shows how the ability to choose an origin for the EqF can yield practical performance advantages by mitigating floating point precision errors.

Partial Domain Adaptation for Scene Classification From Remote Sensing Imagery

Although domain adaptation approaches have been proposed to tackle cross-regional, multitemporal, and multisensor remote sensing applications since they do not require any human interpretation in the target domain, most current works assume identical label space across the source and the target domains. However, in real-world applications, we often transfer knowledge from a large-scale dataset with rich annotations to a small-scale target dataset with scarcity of labels. In most cases, the label space of the source domain is usually large enough to subsume that of the target domain, which is termed partial domain adaptation. In this article, we propose a new partial domain adaptation algorithm for remote sensing scene classification and our proposed method contains three major parts. First, we employ a progressive auxiliary domain module to alleviate the negative transfer effect caused by outlier classes. Second, we adopt an improved domain adversarial neural network (DANN) with multiweights to better encourage domain confusion. Last but not least, we design an attentive complement entropy regularization to improve the prediction confidence for samples and avoid untransferable samples (such as the samples belonging to outlier classes in the source domain) being mistakenly classified. We collect three common remote sensing datasets to evaluate our proposed method. Our method achieves an average accuracy of 79.36%, which considerably outperforms other state-of-the-art partial domain adaptation methods with an average accuracy improvement of 1.90%–12.45% and attaining a 13.67% gain compared to the straightforward deep learning model (ResNet-50). The experiment results indicate that our approach shows promising prospects for solving more general and practical domain adaptation problems where the label space of the source domain subsumes that of the target domain.