British National Research Articles

Elective Surgery in People with Dementia in Northern Ireland

AbstractBackgroundElective care is defined as care that is planned in advance for those that require a procedure or treatment for an existing condition. Elective surgery aims to improve the physical or psychological quality of life for a patient and may extend the life of an individual. Evidence has shown that surgery in people with dementia (PwD) carry even more risk than those in the general ageing population particularly in terms of post‐operative complications and mortality rates. Whilst thousands of elective surgeries take place every year, it is unclear how many of these are conducted on PwD. This study explores the types and rates of elective surgery in PwD in Northern Ireland and the contributing factors to patient referral for elective surgery.MethodData was accessed through the Honest Broker Service (NI) and was retrospectively analysed. Dementia was defined in people who received one or more dementia medications (as outlined in the British National Formulary (BNF)) or when dementia was identified as a primary or secondary cause of death. Elective surgeries were identified by elective surgery referrals (Patient Administration System) (dementia cohort: n = 26,780; control: n = 24,056).ResultOverall, significantly less PwD were referred for an elective surgery compared to controls. Within the PwD group those who had higher odds to undergo an elective surgery were male, of younger age, lived in rural areas, did not transition to a care home, and were married instead of single or widowed. PwD were less likely to have an elective surgery if they received antipsychotics, but they were more likely to have a surgery if they received lipid lowering drugs, antihypertensives, hypnotics and anxiolytics, antidepressants, or antiarrhythmics. The most common surgeries from both PwD and controls were surgeries for lens, bladder and skin. Having an elective surgery was associated with lower odds of death for PwD and controls compared to people who did not undergo a surgery.ConclusionThis paper can inform health policy through insight into factors contributing to the rate and types of elective surgery referrals for PwD to ensure PwD are afforded the same care when it comes to elective surgery compared with the general population.

“There was much new to grok”: an analysis of word coinage in science fiction literature

Abstract As can be witnessed in projects such as The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Prucher, Jeff. 2007. Brave new words: The Oxford dictionary of science fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press), science fiction has been fertile ground for the creation of new words and concepts. Whereas the aforementioned dictionary was constructed by eliciting examples and citations from volunteers, this paper presents an initial foray into data-driven methods for uncovering lexis unique to science fiction. Words unique to science fiction texts are extracted by comparing a science fiction corpus against the British National Corpus (BNC Consortium. 2007. The British National Corpus, XML edition. Oxford Text Archive. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/2554 (accessed 29 June 2022)) to produce a list of 306 neologisms from 74 texts. In addition, this study seeks to examine the ways in which authors impart the meaning of such words to the reader, drawing on frameworks of semantic word relations and work in cognitive linguistics. This reveals the use of definitions and glosses by the authors, both in narration and direct speech, co-occurrence with synonyms, and the drip-feeding of attributes pertaining to the concept being referenced. In addition, characters can be shown to struggle with the concepts to which neologisms refer, allowing authors to explore themes of alienation and other-worldliness.

On a rare, yet interesting, usage of the Polish adjective ludzki compared to the English equivalent human

The lexemes ludzki and human are treated (e.g. in didactics and translation studies) as equivalents, which is refl ected in the dictionary descriptions of the meanings of these words. At the same time, the analysis of the contexts where the expression ludzki człowiek is used leads to other conclusions: not all contents of the Polish adjective are present in its English equivalent. Ludzki is also ‘one who suspends the operation of principles for the sake of another human being’. This component of a more general meaning (‘consistent with the human nature, conceived as good; hence: characterised by favourable disposition, understanding for other people; humane, merciful, gentle, kind’, SJPDor) seems to be absent from English (adjectives human and humane).This article applies the methodology based on the pragmatic analysis of the communication situation and consideration for the context of the utterance/statement (after Grzegorczykowa 1990). The language material used was derived from the following corpora: NKJP (National Corpus of Polish), BNC (British National Corpus), and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English).

Classic Theories of Nationalism in the Context of Minority Nationalism in Great Britain:regional nationalist movements as a “marginal” subject of modern historiography of nationalism

The purpose of this study is to analyze the possibility of classical theories of nationalism use in analysis of the minority nationalisms histories in the British historiographical situation. The author analyses the complexities of integration and assimilation of the ideal models of Ruritania and Megalomania as imagining nationalising and modernising societies proposed by Ernest Gellner, as well as Miroslav Hrochs’ periodisation of nationalism as “ideal” interpretive models in the contexts of British historiography. The subject of the article is classical modernist theories of nationalism, the object is the possibility of their application in British historical research. It is assumed that the processes of nationalist modernisation and the development of regional nationalisms, on the one hand, are perceived through the prism of a constructivist approach. On the other hand, the author believes that the British historical material is characterised by a significant degree of resistance and therefore the use of classical theories of nationalism in the context of the conservatism of the historiographical imagination in Great Britain is debatable. The article analyses the difficulties of integrating the history of regional minority nationalisms and English nationalism into the contexts of sociocultural modernism of classical theories of nationalism. The results of the study suggest that the modern British historiographical situation is simultaneously characterised by an interest in the problems of the social history of regional nationalisms and significant conservatism, which expresses itself in ignoring classical theories of nationalism, despite the effectiveness of their interpretive models.

Gender and Deterritorialized Identity

This article explores the immersive audio-visual and sculptural art installations in the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) of three transnational contemporary women artists with familial ties to former colonies and protectorates. The Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce, MBE, presented Feeling Her Way in the British National Pavilion, for which she won the Golden Lion, the biennale’s highest honor. Zineb Sedira, a Franco-Algerian artist who lives and works in Britain, exhibited Les rêves n’ont pas de titre (Dreams Have No Titles) in the French National pavilion. The Moroccan artist, Latifa Echakhch, who was raised in France and lives in Switzerland, represented Switzerland with Le Concert, a sculptural sound installation. Each of their multidisciplinary installations engages differently with the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity to challenge cultural stereotypes and erasures—of women artists and histories of liberation struggles. This article introduces early works by each artist as a basis for understanding how their biennale projects are decolonial and feminist in order to argue that the deterritorialized may reterritorialize—create new spaces of enunciation—in and through culture. The Venice Biennale installations of Boyce, Sedira, and Echakhch bring light to intersections of present-day and historical politics and memory by engaging with identity—individual and collective—as constructed, negotiated, and always in flux. Their work is shaped by migration, displacement, refugee status, exile, and the frontier as site of obstruction and passage.

Assessing policy transfer from the United States to the British National Health Service

ABSTRACT Much has been written about the claim that the British National Health Service (NHS) is becoming more like the US health care system, something a number of commentators view as a form of “Americanization”. Yet, that term is imprecise and unhelpful for rigorous analysis of what has, and has not, happened. This paper uses the lens of policy transfer to explore this issue, which provides a sharper insight into policy development. The paper examines the relevance of the Dolowitz and Marsh framework for the study of policy transfer from the US to the British NHS from 1979 onwards. In terms of the framework’s main research questions, the discussion of the potential US influence on the NHS case stresses the role of policy entrepreneurs in policy transfer. In terms of policy success, however, commentators suggest a mix of uninformed, incomplete, or inappropriate transfer. We conclude that Dolowitz and Marsh do provide a useful framework that asks relevant questions about policy transfer, which provides a more nuanced account of policy transfer from the US to the NHS than the crude term “Americanization”.

Prescribing pattern of antipsychotics for patients with schizophrenia using the total daily dose online tool

This study aimed to investigate the prescribing pattern of antipsychotic medications for schizophrenia using the British National Formulary total daily dose (TDD) online tool. We analysed data from the electronic medical records at King Khalid University Hospital (KKUH) of 272 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who were prescribed both typical and atypical antipsychotic medications. The results showed that aripiprazole was the most commonly prescribed antipsychotic drug, followed by haloperidol then risperidone. The TDD online tool was used to calculate the TDD of each prescribed antipsychotic medication. Most patients were prescribed doses within the recommended range for each medication, although some were prescribed doses above or below the recommended range. Moreover, a high recommended TDD was associated with the combined use of antipsychotics rather than monotherapy. Additionally, high TDD levels were associated with the following antipsychotics: haloperidol, olanzapine, paliperidone, and quetiapine. Our findings highlight the importance of using evidence-based tools such as the TDD online tool to guide prescribing practices and ensure optimal dosing of antipsychotic medications for patients with schizophrenia.

A Critic on Legal, Ethical, and Regulatory Issues of Off-Label Medicines Shepardizing Intellectual Property Law towards Pharmacoeconomics: A Discussion of Pfizer’s Norvasc Patent Case

Purpose: Pharmacoeconomics is a pharmacy discipline designed to tackle issues on clinical, ethical, and safety factors leading to advocacy of healthcare corporate governance in fulfillment of the pillars of sustainable development. Thus, it is necessary to discuss illegal diversions of Intellectual Property of drug patents as these legal problems serve as impediments to Pharmacoeconomics. This paper aims to elucidate the advantages of Off-label medicines in favor of clinical, ethical, and safety aspects of Pharmacoeconomics towards patient safety and treatment for welfare.
 Methodologies: Quantitative measurement is crucial for validation of drug quality products. It is used for comparison of both legal and illegal diversions of healthcare corporate governance. Patent Law and its policy options are tools to measure the violations of the perpetrator under Intellectual Property Law. Meanwhile, the British National Formulary follows the Human Medicines of 2012 and communicate with FDA for the implementation of off-label medicines as policy for clinical practice under legal removal of patent protection for medical research and practice. This study follows a diagnostic design as a research method based on ethical, regulatory, and legal presentations to characterize problems involved in drug management system towards efficiency of evidence-based medicine practice utilizing theories, models, and frameworks towards financial intelligence. 
 Findings: The elucidation of Kano Model Framework exhibits the aberration and compliance of patent drugs towards compliance of healthcare corporate governance. Based on exhibition of intellectual property law, it can be extended to fulfill the goals of sustainable development of monetary success and hence, the human society can be reflected as their success to their financial intelligence as their inventorship is declared as non-obviousness to public welfare and safety. Moreover, the moral standard of ethical decision-making illustrated the importance of opting to off-label medicines emphasizing cost-efficiency goals of Pharmacoeconomics in drug therapy. Hence, the Shariah Jurisprudence Method for Pharmacoeconomics is the modelling of Clinical Pharmacy Practice towards Healthcare Corporate Governance in fulfillment of business ethics as public welfare and safety of human society.
 Recommendation: Kano Model Framework is an integrated tool of measuring the success of healthcare corporate governance. With the elucidation aids of modelling the importance of Pharmacoeconomics, it is recommended to develop ways of making artificial intelligence as a sole success, profit, benefit, and contribution to clinical pharmacy practice, starting from its drug development up to its intended purpose of human drug treatment in healthcare setting, in relation to its accompanied FDA regulating bodies, as British National Formulary team compliance of maintaining the crucial functions of observing and monitoring document for patient safety.

Matching-Adjusted Indirect Comparisons in the assessment of hemato-oncological drugs

ObjectiveMatching-Adjusted Indirect Comparison is a methodology that has been developed to assess new treatments vs alternatives when a direct comparison is not available through a randomized controlled trial. These comparisons are of particular interest in the areas of oncology and hematology where uncertainty in decision-making on the inclusion of new drugs is frequently accentuated by both the severity of the disease and the high cost of treatment. The objective of this study was to describe how Matching-Adjusted Indirect Comparison methodology has been used to date in the assessment of hematological cancer drugs by international agencies. MethodBetween January 2015 and October 2019, an exhaustive search was conducted of the websites of European National Agencies that provided public information on the assessment process. The assessments provided by these agencies were reviewed to obtain a list of hematological cancer drugs for which the presentation of a Matched-Adjusted Indirect Comparison was recorded. For this list of drugs, the role of the comparison in the assessment process was analyzed for each selected agency. ResultsThirteen hematological and oncological treatments were found in which the pharmaceutical marketing authorization holder had presented Matching-Adjusted Indirect Comparisons: most of this information referred to the first half of 2018. Acceptance of this methodology diverges among agencies, ranging from 50% in the case of the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, to 40% in the case of French National Authority for Health, to not having been taken into account in any of the 3 cases assessed by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care. The main cause of non-acceptance was matching-related problems. ConclusionsMatching- Adjusted Indirect Comparison methodology is a tool that is being utilized in the decision-making process for assessing new hematological cancer treatments.

Frame integration and head-switching

Abstract Employing Frame Semantics as implemented in the Berkeley FrameNet database, this paper analyzes English sentences expressing concerns of risk derived from the British National Corpus and their Japanese translations (created for the purposes of the current study). It introduces the ideas of content and interpretation predicates, frame integration, and head-switching as effectual devices for recognizing obscure constructional equivalences across languages. Our findings shed light on the development of a new contrastive framework for verbal predicativity: that is, a framework based on the recognition of content and interpretation predicates and how it intersects with the categorical distinction in lexicalization patterns between verbs and adverbs.

LCM2021 – the UK Land Cover Map 2021

Abstract. Land cover is a key environmental variable, underpinning widespread environmental research and decision making. The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) has provided reliable land cover information since the early 1990s; this supports multiple scientific, government and commercial objectives. Recent advances in computation and satellite data availability have enabled annual UKCEH land cover maps since 2017. Here, we introduce the latest, annual UK Land Cover Map representing 2021 (LCM2021), and we describe its production and validation. LCM2021 methods replicate those of LCM2017 to LCM2020 with minor deviations in cloud-masking processes and training data sourcing to enhance accuracy. LCM2021 is based on the classification of satellite and spatial context data into 21 land cover or habitat classes, from which a product suite is derived. The production of LCM2021 involved three highly automated key stages: pre-processing of input data, image classification and production of the final data products. Google Earth Engine scripts were used to create an input data stack of satellite and context data. A set of training areas was created based on data harvested from historic UKCEH land cover maps. The training data were used to construct a random forest classifier, which yielded classified images. Compiled results were validated against 35 182 reference samples, with correspondence tables indicating variable class accuracy and an overall accuracy of 82.6 % for the 21-class data and 86.5 % at a 10-aggregated-classes level. The UK Land Cover Map product suite includes a set of raster products in various projections, thematic and spatial resolutions (10 m, 25 m and 1 km), and land–parcel or vector products. The data are provided in 21-class (all configurations) and aggregated 10-class (1 km raster products only) versions. All raster products are freely available for academic and non-commercial research. The data for Great Britain (GB) are provided in the British National Grid projection (EPSG: 27700) and the Northern Ireland (NI) data are in the TM75 Irish Grid (EPSG: 29903). Information on how to access the data is given in the “Data availability” section of the paper.

Idioms in General English Corpora: on Frequency, Register, and Cross-Variety Variation

Research into idioms and phraseology has become an established part of the corpus linguistic research agenda and has often revolved around either corpus-based or corpus-driven methodologies. At the same time, a relatively recent approach to socio-variational aspects of language in the form of Cognitive Sociolinguistics has contributed to establishing an ideal platform for the study of variation in the varieties of English. The present paper rests on these two research strands in a survey devoted to variation on the level of idioms in present-day English, namely those denoting competition. While idioms, first and foremost, are theoretically identified with the frameworks of Phraseology, Cognitive Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics, among others, this study will make use of a corpus-based method of idioms introduced by Moon and Gustawsson’s idioms frequency and significance threshold, paired with Moze and Mohamed’s sociolinguistic profiling of idioms. The Idioms will be examined in two national varieties of English, namely those spoken in Great Britain and the USA, which are represented in the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, respectively. With the assumption that the concept of competition is variety-specific, the main questions to be answered during the analysis are: (1) To what extent can the frequency of use of idioms be regarded an element of variation? and (2) Are there any differences in the prominence of specific variables, such as frequency, register, gender, and age across the two varieties under study? The preliminary findings indicate a significant amount of similarity, but upon closer examination of the data, some important variations are emphasised. Thus, a discussion of the results provides a basis for an inter-variety comparison of the idioms denoting competition and, in so doing, adds to the universality / variation debate.

Unity of the United Kingdom as a post-Brexit challenge

The article is devoted to the changes that take place in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland after it left the European Union, which finally took place on January 31, 2020. As it turned out, one of the side effects of Brexit was the violation of the unity of the British state – in this respect, its future, in the shape in which it currently operates, has become questionable. Maintaining this unity should be treated as one of the most important challenges facing the British political elites today.
 The aim of the article is to analyze the current state of the unity of the British state – primarily in the context of separatist tendencies in Scotland and the potential reunification of Ireland, and also, to a lesser extent, in the context of the development of Welsh and English nationalism. The author tries to answer the question of how much Brexit can affect this unity in the long term and whether it can lead to the disintegration of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. To answer this research question, the author uses the historical method, the institutional and legal analysis method, as well as the content analysis method.
 The conducted analysis leads the author to the conclusion that the United Kingdom will face a deepened devolution in the near future, and thus – evolution towards a classic federal state. This kind of constitutional reform seems today to be the price of maintaining the unity of this country.

National variation in prophylactic antibiotic use for elective primary total joint replacement.

Prophylactic antibiotic regimens for elective primary total hip and knee arthroplasty vary widely across hospitals and trusts in the UK. This study aimed to identify antibiotic prophylaxis regimens currently in use for elective primary arthroplasty across the UK, establish variations in antibiotic prophylaxis regimens and their impact on the risk of periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) in the first-year post-index procedure, and evaluate adherence to current international consensus guidance. The guidelines for the primary and alternative recommended prophylactic antibiotic regimens in clean orthopaedic surgery (primary arthroplasty) for 109 hospitals and trusts across the UK were sought by searching each trust and hospital's website (intranet webpages), and by using the MicroGuide app. The mean cost of each antibiotic regimen was calculated using price data from the British National Formulary (BNF). Regimens were then compared to the 2018 Philadelphia Consensus Guidance, to evaluate adherence to international guidance. The primary choice and dosing of the prophylactic antimicrobial regimens varied widely. The two most used regimens were combined teicoplanin and gentamicin, and cefuroxime followed by two or three doses of cefuroxime eight-hourly, recommended by 24 centres (22.02%) each. The alternative choice and dosing of the prophylactic antimicrobial regimen also varied widely across the 83 centres with data available. Prophylaxis regimens across some centres fail to cover the likeliest causes of surgical site infection (SSI). Five centres (4.59%) recommend co-amoxiclav, which confers no Staphylococcus coverage, while 33 centres (30.28%) recommend cefuroxime, which confers no Enterococcus coverage. Limited adherence to 2018 Philadelphia Consensus Guidance was observed, with 67 centres (61.50%) not including a cephalosporin in their guidance. This analysis of guidance on antimicrobial prophylaxis in primary arthroplasty across 109 hospitals and trusts in the UK has identified widespread variation in primary and alternative antimicrobial regimens currently recommended.

Functional-Semantic Features of Complex Sentences of Purpose in British and American Variants of English

The functional-semantic features of purpose clauses introduced by conjunctions so that, lest, in order that, for fear that, in the hope that, and to the end that are examined in this study. These conjunctions differ in their frequency and expressiveness. The material for the study was taken from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus. The novelty of the research lies in specifying the list of differential features of the categorical grammatical value of complex sentences of purpose. It is demonstrated that complex sentences with purpose conjunctions are used in literary, journalistic, scientific, and conversational texts, but their frequency differs not only depending on the type of discourse but also on the language variant. Based on statistical data, it is confirmed that Present Subjunctive forms are the most commonly used in purpose clauses regardless of the language variant. Types of purpose clauses are analyzed: proper-purpose, argumentative-purpose, syncretic, and anti-purpose clauses. It is established that the first ones, which are not complicated by additional shades of meaning, are most frequent in American texts, while the third ones, containing indications of circumstances for achieving the goal, are most commonly used in British texts.

Cryptographically Secure Private Record Linkage using Locality-Sensitive Hashing

Private record linkage (PRL) is the problem of identifying pairs of records that approximately match across datasets in a secure, privacy-preserving manner. Two-party PRL specifically allows each of the parties to obtain records from the other party, only given that each record matches with one of their own. The privacy goal is that no other information about the datasets should be released than the matching records. A fundamental challenge is not to leak information while at the same time not comparing all pairs of records. In plaintext record linkage this is done using a blocking strategy, e.g., locality-sensitive hashing. One recent approach proposed by He et al. (ACM CCS 2017) uses locality-sensitive hashing and then releases a provably differential private representation of the hash bins. However, differential privacy still leaks some, although provable bounded information and does not protect against attacks, such as property inference attacks. Another recent approach by Khurram and Kerschbaum (IEEE ICDE 2020) uses locality-preserving hashing and provides cryptographic security, i.e., it releases no information except the output. However, locality-preserving hash functions are much harder to construct than locality-sensitive hash functions and hence accuracy of this approach is limited, particularly on larger datasets. In this paper, we address the open problem of providing cryptographic security of PRL while using locality-sensitive hash functions. Using recent results in oblivious algorithms, we design a new cryptographically secure PRL with locality-sensitive hash functions. Our prototypical implementation can match 40000 records in the British National Library/Toronto Public Library and the North Carolina Voter Registry datasets with 99.3% and 99.9% accuracy, respectively, in less than an hour which is more than an order of magnitude faster than Khurram and Kerschbaum's work at a higher accuracy.

Lexical Demands of Academic Written English: From Students’ Assignments to Scholarly Publications

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which contained 2,761 student assignments, and the Public Library of Science One (PLOS ONE) corpus which included 4,000 scholarly articles. Results from the analyses demonstrated significant differences in lexical difficulty between students’ assignments and scholarly publications. The proportion of academic vocabulary in written texts was also found to increase as the writers’ levels went up. Cross-discipline comparisons highlighted the difference in lexical difficulties between scientific disciplines.

A preliminary investigation of the acoustic factors impacting decision making in speaker attribution

Attributing utterances to speakers in a good quality recording of clear speech might seem to be a simple and straightforward task, yet transcribers have been shown to “regularly and obliviously get it wrong” (Love 2020: 156). This issue has received very limited attention, and our research focuses on the issue from a forensic linguistic perspective where attributing an utterance to a speaker in a forensic case could effectively be accusing them of having committed a crime. Literature on speaker attribution/recognitionnever shows 100% accuracy even in very good acoustic conditions, with marked drops in performance when features are masked (as they often are in forensic situations). In this preliminary study, five phonetically trained listeners transcribed an audio file of six people engaged ina panel discussion from television (we focus on audio only). The speech of two female speakers is correctly attributed in almost all cases, so we pay attention to the acoustic features of four male voices. Listeners werealmost never correct in their judgements about the exact number of speakers in the recording and made multiple attribution errors. We show that this is because of the fundamental nature of the speech acoustics; within-speaker variation is larger than between speaker variation for F0, intonational properties, and speech rhythm. Love, R. (2020). Overcoming challenges in corpus construction: The spoken British National Corpus 2020. Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics. New York: Routledge.

Antibiotic prescribing in remote versus face-to-face consultations for acute respiratory infections in primary care in England: an observational study using target maximum likelihood estimation

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an ongoing increase in the use of remote consultations in general practice in England. Although the evidence is limited, there are concerns that the increase in remote consultations could lead to more antibiotic prescribing. In this cohort study, we used patient-level primary care data from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink to estimate the association between consultation mode (remote versus face-to-face) and antibiotic prescribing in England for acute respiratory infections (ARI) between April 2021 and March 2022. Eligibility criteria were applied at both practice-level and patient-level. 400 practices in England were sampled at random and then 600,000 patients were randomly sampled from the eligible patients (whose sex was recorded). Consultations for acute respiratory infections were identified. All antibiotic prescriptions were included, with the exception of antituberculosis drugs and antileprotic drugs, as identified through chapter 5.1 of the British National Formulary. The CPRD Aurum data was linked to the COVID-19 ONS infection survey by region. All analyses were done at the individual level. Repeated consultations from the same patient within 7 days were grouped together. We used targeted maximum likelihood estimation, a causal machine learning method with adjustment for infection type and patient-level, clinician-level and practice-level factors. There were 45,997 ARI consultations (34,555 unique patients) within the study period, of which 28,127 were remote and 17,870 were face-to-face. For children, 48% of consultations were remote and, for adults, 66% were remote. For children, 42% of remote and 43% of face-to-face consultations led to an antibiotic prescription; the equivalent values for adults were 52% and 42%, respectively. After adjustment with TMLE, adults with a remote consultation had 23% (odds ratio [OR] 1.23, 95% CI: 1.18-1.29) higher chance of being prescribed antibiotics than if they had been seen face-to-face. We found no significant association between consultation mode and antibiotic prescribing in children (OR 1.04 95% CI: 0.98-1.11). The higher rates of antibiotic prescribing in remote consultations for adults are cause for concern. We see no significant difference in antibiotic prescribing between consultation mode for children. These findings should inform antimicrobial stewardship activities for health-care professionals and policy makers. Future research should examine differences in guideline-compliance between remote and face-to-face consultations to understand the factors driving antibiotic prescribing in different consultation modes. None.

Developing and validating a mid-frequency word list for chemistry: a corpus-based approach using big data

Given the importance of specialized vocabulary in scientific communication and academic discourse, there is a growing need to create wordlists to address the vocabulary-learning needs of university students and researchers in different subject areas. The current study analyzed a corpus of chemistry research articles (with 278 million running words) to establish a mid-frequency vocabulary list for this field. Using frequency, range, and dispersion criteria, the study identified 560 lemmas in the fourth to the ninth British National Corpus/Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) lists that provided 6.4% coverage of all words in the corpus. The list was validated using specialized and general corpora, and the results confirmed the value and relevance of the items for chemistry. Moreover, for using the list for pedagogical goals, the vocabulary items were divided into five bands based on their coverage and importance. The 100 words in the first band were the most important mid-frequent vocabulary in chemistry, as they provided 3.05% coverage. The study highlights the significant contribution of mid-frequency words in research articles and the findings have implications for using large corpora as a big data source in identifying specialized and field-specific vocabulary.