Unfavourable Working Research Articles

Partitioning of Aβ Peptide Fragments into Blood-Brain Barrier Mimetic Bilayer.

We used all-atom replica-exchange umbrella sampling molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the partitioning of the charged tetrapeptide KLVF and its neutral apolar counterpart VVIA into the blood-brain barrier (BBB)-mimetic bilayer. Our findings allowed us to reconstruct the partitioning mechanism for these two Aβ peptide fragments. Despite dissimilar sequences, their permeation shares significant common features. Computations of free energies and permeabilities show that partitioning of both peptides is highly unfavorable, ruling out passive transport. The peptides experience multiple rotational transitions within the bilayer and typically cause considerable lipid disorder and bilayer thinning. Near the bilayer midplane, they lose almost entirely their solvation shell and the interactions with the lipid headgroups. The peptides cause complex reorganization within the proximal bilayer region. Upon insertion, they induce striking cholesterol influx reversed by its depletion and the influx of DMPC when the peptides reach the midplane. The differences in partitioning mechanisms are due to the much higher polarity of KLVF peptide, the permeation of which is more unfavorable and which exclusively assumes vertical orientations within the bilayer. In contrast, VVIA positions itself flat between the leaflets, causing minor disorder and even thickening of the BBB-mimetic bilayer. Due to the high density of the cholesterol-rich BBB bilayer, the unfavorable work associated with the peptide insertion provides a significant, but not dominant, contribution to the partition free energy, which is still governed by dehydration and loss of peptide-headgroup interactions. Comparison with experiments indicates that KLVF and VVIA permeation is similar to that of proline tetrapeptide, mannitol, or cimetidine, all of which exhibit no passive transport.

Determining the elastic-plastic effective width of the free flange of a hull girder with the breaking of a wall

This paper reports the dependences that have been derived to determine the effective width of a free flange in a dangerous cross-section of the wide-flange hull girder with the breaking of the wall/edges/axis at elastic-plastic deformation depending on the applied load for a perfectly plastic material without strengthening. Currently, there are no systematic dependences to determine the effective width of the free flange of girders of this type, except for certain cases. The technique is suitable for use for both purely elastic and elastic-plastic deformation. To calculate the stressed-strained state (SSS), a finite-element method (FEM) was used to solve the three-dimensional problem from the elasticity and plasticity theory. It has been shown that the node is exposed to simple loading. The reported results were derived within the framework of the deformation theory of plasticity. The largest ratio of external load to the boundary of fluidity is 0.9. The estimation scheme takes into consideration the most unfavorable working conditions of the examined node when the safest data are acquired. The dependences were built for the theoretical coefficient of concentration in a dangerous cross-section, which is used in the proposed procedure to determine the moment of transition from the elastic stage of deformation to elastic-plastic. When determining the effective width, the complex work of the flange and its deplanation was taken into consideration by defining the SSS components in the median plane. The feasibility of the idea of designing the SSS components on the inclined plane of a free flange has been proven. In this case, there is practically a (quasi) flat stressed state, suitable for the application of classical methods to determine the effective width. The proposed technique simplifies the calculations of the strength of the examined girder.

Work environment of hospital nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.

AimTo investigate the nurses' work environment in university hospitals during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Brazil.BackgroundThe COVID‐19 pandemic brought challenging times for nurses worldwide. In Brazil, as well as in several countries, nurses are working hard in hospital settings caring for patients infected with the virus, sometimes with unfavourable work environment conditions.MethodsThis study was a convergent embedded mixed methods research. The sample comprised 104 nurses from three Brazilian university hospitals. Data were collected in April–June 2020 from an online questionnaire with a self‐reporting Likert scale survey designed to measure the nurses' perceptions of their work environment. Qualitative data in the form of written comments were also collected through an open question. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and content analysis.ResultsThe quantitative results showed that the responses to ‘I received training on the correct use of personal protective equipment’ and ‘I am afraid of being infected’ items had the best and worst evaluations, respectively. The qualitative findings revealed five themes: feeling of insecurity, lack of personal protective equipment, lack of diagnostic tests, changes in the care flow and fear of the unknown.ConclusionThe study has highlighted the challenges faced by hospital nurses while caring for patients with COVID‐19.Implications for Nursing and Nursing PolicyThe gaps identified will assist the policymakers and hospital managers in developing policies to enhance the support offered to nurses and improve the care provided to patients with COVID‐19 in university hospitals. The results also indicate the need for attention to the mental health of the professionals due to the increasing workload and treatment of an illness hitherto unknown.

The unspoken reality of gender bias in surgery: A qualitative systematic review.

This study was conducted to better understand the pervasive gender barriers obstructing the progression of women in surgery by synthesising the perspectives of both female surgical trainees and surgeons. Five electronic databases, including Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL and Web of Science Core Collection, were searched for relevant articles. Following a full-text review by three authors, qualitative data was synthesized thematically according to the Thomas and Harden methodology and quality assessment was conducted by two authors reaching a consensus. Fourteen articles were included, with unfavorable work environments, male-dominated culture and societal pressures being major themes. Females in surgery lacked support, faced harassment, and had unequal opportunities, which were often exacerbated by sex-blindness by their male counterparts. Mothers were especially affected, struggling to achieve a work-life balance while facing strong criticism. However, with increasing recognition of the unique professional traits of female surgeons, there is progress towards gender quality which requires continued and sustained efforts. This systematic review sheds light on the numerous gender barriers that continue to stand in the way of female surgeons despite progress towards gender equality over the years. As the global agenda towards equality progresses, this review serves as a call-to-action to increase collective effort towards gender inclusivity which will significantly improve future health outcomes.

Economic Basis of the Control System of Labour Protection

The article studies theoretical aspects of the control system of labour protection and analyzes losses connected with working conditions both in Russia and some other countries. In the research it was found that economic losses in Russia caused by dangerous and harmful working conditions from 2012 to 2019 showed the trend to decline, however they were rather high. The analysis shows that enterprises suffer losses due to unfavorable working conditions and concealed accidents at work. The article provides tools for calculating profitability of special estimation of working conditions, discounts on insurance tariffs and economic advantages of measures aimed at labour protection, which can be used by employees of labour protection services. The author puts forward a modified formula for calculating index ( I ), which is used for discounts on insurance tariffs ( t ). The author provides the economic basis of expediency to upgrade the organization of the control system of labour protection.

Sun Protection and Public Information.

There is enough evidence that skin cancer can be prevented by an adequate usage of primary prevention measures. However, when examining people's real-life sun protection behaviour, it was often found to be insufficient. On the one hand, some people seem unaware about their risk to develop skin cancer as they might not sufficiently inform themselves. On the other hand, a lot of people know about the risk to develop skin cancer; however, they do not adequately protect themselves. Reasons for that are individual barriers such as the usage is too time-consuming or structural barriers such as unfavourable working conditions. In addition, a lot of people use sunscreen incorrectly as they tend to use only 20%-50% of the amount needed or do not reapply it.Studies have shown that there are several prevention campaigns demonstrating the successful increase in public awareness, but still more educational effort is needed to promote a better sun protection behaviour. On the basis of the effectiveness of previous intervention campaigns, future ones should use personal interventions or multi-component media such as the Internet. For promoting health-related information via the Internet, it is important to offer comprehensive, reliable, evidence-based information and to ban misleading or false information regarding sun protection.

Working conditions of Nursing professionals in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic.

To trigger a reflection on the current working conditions of Nursing professionals in coping with the Covid-19 pandemic. A theoretical-reflective study supported by studies from the Marxist perspective, national and international scientific articles, and official documents from the World Health Organization and the Federal Nursing Council. The daily work of Nursing professionals in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic presents unfavorable working conditions in Brazil and worldwide, with emphasis on the deficit of professionals, overload of activities, low pay, and personal protective equipment, often insufficient and inadequate, conditions that can lead to exhaustion, illness and death. This study can contribute to raising discussions about the need for improvements in the working conditions of Nursing professionals, especially in pandemic times and the impact on the health of these professionals.

Nurses' perceived work environment in the public sector tertiary care hospitals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan

Aim: Aim of the study is to evaluate nurses’ perceptions regarding their work environment in the public sector tertiary care hospitals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan.Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study design was conducted from March-July 2019. Multi stage sampling method was selected. First we obtained four strata of the total 13 hospitals and then randomly selected four hospitals from the four strata. Three hundred and thirty-nine registered nurses were proportionately recruited from the each hospital through simple random sampling into the study from four major tertiary care teaching hospitals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. A self-reported scale Perceived work environment and nurses work index (PWES&NWI) was distributed among the study participants. Grand mean score 2.5 for taken for unfavorable work condition.Results: In a sample of 339(80%) of the nurses were female while the mean age of the participants was 30.8 years. Grand mean scores of the four components namely: nurse participation in hospital affairs, nurse foundation for quality of care, nurse manager ability and, availability of adequate resources were >2.5 except collegial nurse-physician relationship grand mean was 2.3. These results indicate that nurse’s work environment was unfavorable for practice. There was a statistically significant association between gender, current work units, and education with the five subscales of the nurse’s work environment (p<0.05). Conclusion: Nurse’s perceived their work environment in public tertiary care hospitals of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is unfavorable for nursing practice.The findings of the current study may provide empirical support for developing a framework of nurses’ work environment in the future.

A Smart Operator Assistance System Using Deep Learning for Angle Measurement

Manual workstations play a critical role in flexible assembly lines by enabling human responses to reconfiguration that is faster than machine responses. As a result, human is more adaptive and sometimes unreplaceable by machines in complex assembly. However, with the increasing complexity of tasks, product quality has become highly susceptible to human error due to increments in operators’ cognitive load. One of the errors that affect assembly quality is the operator’s use of a handheld tool with an unfavorable working angle when handling the workpiece. In this case, an assistive mechanism to remind workers about the wrong working angle is necessary to support the process. To this end, this study proposes an angle monitoring system to inspect the working angle of handheld tools and provide feedback in real time with minimal interruption to the assembly process. The proposed system consists of an angle measurement model and an action recognition model, which are both built using deep-learning-based object detection algorithm. Besides, the system was designed with flexibility that it is applicable to different tools and assembly tasks. A case study on fastening a high-end graphical processing unit card is investigated to evaluate their performance. Results show 95.83% and 99.83% accuracies of the models. In practice, the proposed study is expected to facilitate assembly quality by preventing the failure of angle-related operations in a timely and reliable manner.

Fluid Automation — A Definition and an Application in Remanufacturing Production Systems

Production systems must be able to quickly adapt to changing requirements. Especially in the field of remanufacturing, the uncertainty in the state of the incoming products is very high. Several adaptation mechanisms can be applied leading to agile and changeable production systems. Among these, adapting the degree of automation with respect to changeover times and high investment costs is one of the most challenging mechanisms. However, not only long-term changes, but also short-term adaptations can lead to enormous potentials, e.g. when night shifts can be supported by robots and thus higher labor costs and unfavorable working conditions at night can be avoided. These changes in the degree of automation on an operational level are referred to as fluid automation, which will be defined in this paper. The mechanisms of fluid automation are presented together with a case study showing its application on a disassembly station for electrical drives.

The Design and Load Experiment Study on Corbel of Moving Sinking hanging Scaffold for Ultra-deep Shaft

Aiming at the difficulty of suspending the hanging scaffold of ultra-deep shafts, the corbel suspension device was designed by analyzing the needs of the moving type sinking hanging scaffold, and the strength check calculation was carried out to theoretically verify that the corbel can withstand the pressure of the sinking hanging scaffold. At the same time, through the no-load and heavy-load experiment of the moving type sinking hanging scaffold, the working status, force and overall load of each corbel of the moving type sinking hanging scaffold were monitored in real time. According to the experiment, it is concluded that the corbels can meet the conditions of use under the most unfavorable working conditions, which further improves the structural design theory of the sinking hanging scaffold and ensures the safe construction of the moving type sinking hanging scaffold.

ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ОРГАНИЗАЦИОННОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ В ПОДРАЗДЕЛЕНИЯХ УГОЛОВНО-ИСПОЛНИТЕЛЬНОЙ СИСТЕМЫ

The paper presents the analysis of the results of a mass anonymous questionnaire survey of the criminal executive system employees of the Samara region, which identified some characteristics of the organizational culture of this system manifested in the form of group values, attitudes, behavioral norms, rules, customs, and traditions regulating the professional behavior of employees. According to the opinion of most surveyed employees, such most expressed characteristics are moderation in duty relations; the use of various communication forms among the employees; the uniformity in the style of dress (clothes); strict attitude to the time, punctuality. The opinions of the surveyed employees are divided approximately equally regarding other organizational culture characteristics – food etiquette; formalization degree of relations between employees; the level of formedness of values and norms of professional behavior, worldviews; the existence of conditions for development and self-fulfillment of employees; the attitude towards the job as to a value, attitude to one’s obligations, the interrelation between the results of the work and their remuneration, the existence of planning of the staff employment career. The authors specified factors influencing the formation of these characteristics. They are strict regulation of professional activity, possible extremality related to the aggression from the convicts, and some unfavorable work conditions. All these can lead to emotional burnout and professional deformation of the employees’ personalities. In such conditions, the organizational culture characteristics can be formed, which negatively reflect upon personal and business interrelations of employees, their attitude towards the convicts, and their own professional activity. The authors give recommendations aimed at the optimization of organizational culture characteristics at the divisions of the criminal executive system of the Samara Region.

The effects of working and living conditions of physicians on burnout level and sleep quality.

Background: Burnout is a multidimensional syndrome associated with intense working conditions and negative psychosocial factors in physicians. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of living and working conditions of physicians on burnout level and sleep quality in Turkey. Methods: In this internet-based questionnaire study, 1053 physicians [General Practitioners (n=233); Basic Medical Sciences (n=26); Internal Medical Sciences (n=530), and Surgery Sciences (n=264)] were included in the study, filling the forms consisting of study conditions, Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) questions. Results: Negative occupational factors such as physicians having a night shift, high number of patients who are cared for daily, short examination period, low financial gain, exposure to violence, and mobbing were associated with poor sleep quality and burnout. Factors such as being subjected to violence, mobbing, and age are predictive of increasing burnout in women. Working on night shifts or being on-call were associated with all aspects of burnout. The proportion of those with poor sleep quality was significantly higher in those working night shifts (74.6%) than those working daytime shifts (67.2%) and those who were exposed to violence (75.1%) compared to those who were not exposed to violence (43.2%) (p=0.013, p<0.001, respectively). Conclusions: Impaired sleep quality, violence, mobbing, young age, excessive night shifts, short examination period, and low income may play a role in physician burnout. Our study data suggest that it is important to improve physicians’ unfavorable working conditions and to prevent violence against burnout.

Comprehensive assessment of the dust environment at the construction industry enterprises

Most technological lines for the production of building materials, products and structures are accompanied by dustemission at almost all stages of their production. In the absence or imperfection of aspiration systems, the concentration of dust in the working area air can be many times higher than the standard values. In this case, unfavorable working conditions are most often caused by an increased concentration of dust in the air of industrial premises. Assessment of the dust environment at industrial enterprises, as a rule, is understood as the study of air in working areas, the power of dust emissions into the atmosphere, as well as the efficiency of dust cleaning devices [1].

Working Conditions in Essential Occupations and the Role of Migrants

Following a national lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, state governments in Germany published lists of “essential” occupations that were considered necessary to maintain basic services such as health care, social care, food production and transport. Against this background, this paper examines working conditions and identifies clusters of similar jobs in these essential occupations. Differences across clusters are highlighted using detailed data on job characteristics, including tasks, educational requirements and working conditions. Two clusters with favourable or average working conditions account for more than three-quarters of jobs in essential occupations. Another two clusters, comprising 20% of jobs in essential occupations, are associated with unfavourable working conditions such as low pay, job insecurity, poor prospects for advancement and low autonomy. These latter clusters exhibit high shares of migrants. Further evidence suggests that this pattern is linked to educational requirements and how recent migrants evaluate job characteristics. It is argued that poor working conditions could affect the resilience of basic services during crises, notably by causing high turnover. Policies towards essential occupations should therefore pay close attention to working conditions, the role of migrant labour and their long-term implications for resilience.

Aspects of the special assessment of working conditions of the medical personnel working with coronavirus patients

RELEVANCE: The medical personnel of military medical organizations are put under unfavorable working conditions during their professional activity. These conditions increase the risk of developing work-related diseases, lead to deterioration in health and wellness, and decrease efficiency in the workplace. Physical and mental stress increase significantly during the pandemic especially for health care providers providing treatment for COVID-19.&#x0D; AIM: To establish the correspondence between real working conditions and the results of the special assessment of working conditions for health care providers providing treatment for the new coronavirus infection.&#x0D; RESULTS: The biological factor is the main cause of harm for all types of medical personnel, according to the study of the special assessment of working conditions of medical personnel in military-medical organizations cards in 20162019. Dealing with patients with the new coronavirus infection is in the 3.3 class of harmfulness, which grants the right to shorter work hours/work days to all medical personnel. However, working hours increase during a pandemic. Factors such as emotional stress and work schedules are not taken into account during the special assessment of working conditions. The negative impact of the use of personal protective equipment (e.g. anti-plague suits) during the entire shift has not been evaluated.&#x0D; CONCLUSION: The analysis of the special assessment of working conditions of the medical personnel of the military medical organizations shows that the existing system for assessing working conditions does not fully reflect the actual working conditions of workers in present-day conditions, who work with patients who have COVID-19 (1 table, bibliography: 8 refs).

Assessment of occupational health risk for employees of the main occupations of aluminum production

Introduction. The Russian aluminum industry is one of the world’s leading producers of aluminum. At the same time, the features of aluminum production technology contribute to the formation of unfavorable working conditions and increased risk to the health of workers. In this regard, an urgent but insufficiently studied issue in the production of aluminum is the assessment of occupational risks that establish the likelihood of health disorders in workers. Material and methods. The basis of the assessment of occupational risks was the existing regulatory documents (Guidelines) issued by the Federal Center for Hygiene and Epidemiology of Russian Consumer Health and Epidemiology. Existing methodical recommendations and medical technologies were used to calculate occupational risks and allowable working time (experience) under the chemical factor. The values of the annual volume of the air inhaled by the individual of the production environment and the average annual concentrations of toxicants, determined in the air of the working zone of the employees of the main occupational groups, were used. Occupational risk calculations were carried out over a period of 25 years. The total risk assessment for individual occupational groups was conducted under the probability (risk) rule calculated for individual chemicals. Results. Studies have found the average annual concentrations of harmful substances in the air of the working area over the past 5 years to be significantly lower when using the upgraded electrolysis technology (UET) compared to the traditional technology of self-burning anodes (SBA). The exception was hydrofluoride, whose concentrations did not depend on the technologies used, exceeding the MPC by 1.7 - 3.0 times. The total health risk for employees of the main occupations over a period of 25 years was in the range of 7.2 to 22.1% when using SBA, which is almost 2 times higher than when using UET (from 3.7 to 11.6 %). The highest levels of risk were observed in the group of workers using SBA and operators of electrolysis baths with UET, and the lowest - in the crane operators using both technologies. Conclusion. The use of indices of occupational risk and acceptable working hours under the influence of adverse production factors allows identifying a contingent of employees with an increased level of exposure to occupational hazards. Based on the obtained data, it is possible to predict the levels of occupational morbidity and evaluate the effectiveness of measures to improve working conditions, which plays an important role in managing occupational risk.

Is there a time and place for health education in chain pharmacies? Perspectives of Polish community pharmacists.

Pharmaceutical practice has evolved significantly from the provision of drugs to a more patient-centred model. However, the ownership structure of pharmacies may impact the level of cognitive services provided by them. The discrepancy may be observed between pharmacists' opinions on how involved they should get and their actual involvement in health promotion and disease prevention. Given the growing market share of pharmacy chains in Europe, this study aimed to investigate the attitudes of pharmacists employed in them towards their role as health educators. It applies Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour to examine pharmacists' perspectives with the use of semi-structured in-depth interviews. A total of 10 semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted in May 2017 among Polish pharmacists employed in chains. Obtained results showed that respondents welcomed the possibility of providing health education, but simultaneously they seek physicians' and patients' acceptance for undertaking this task. Competency gaps and unfavourable working conditions may also decrease pharmacists' intention to serve as health educators. Including the role of a health educator to the scope of the pharmacists' practice requires a precise definition of their competencies and responsibilities together with additional training aimed to fill potential gaps in their qualifications. The pharmacists' image as a health educator should also be widely communicated to patients and other healthcare professionals.

An improved deep residual network with multiscale feature fusion for rotating machinery fault diagnosis

Intelligent mechanical fault diagnosis algorithms based on deep learning have achieved considerable success in recent years. However, degradation of the diagnostic accuracy and operational speed has been significant due to unfavorable working conditions and increasing network depth. An improved version of ResNets is proposed in this paper to address these issues. The advantages of the proposed network are presented as follows. Firstly, a multi-scale feature fusion block was designed, to extract multi-scale fault feature information. Secondly, an improved residual block based on depthwise separable convolution was used to improve the operational speed and alleviate the computational burden of the network. The effectiveness of the proposed network was validated by discriminating between diverse health states in a gearbox under normal and noisy conditions. The experimental results show that the proposed network model has a higher classification accuracy than the classical convolutional neural networks, LeNet-5, AlexNet and ResNets and a faster calculation speed than the classical deep neural networks. Furthermore, a visual study of the different stages of the network model was conducted, to effectively comprehend the operational processes of the proposed model.

Assessing the effect of socio-economic features of low-income communities and COVID-19 related cases: An empirical study of New York City

ABSTRACT This study examined the effect of socio-economic features of low-income communities and COVID-19 related cases in New York City. The study developed hypotheses and conceptual framework of low-income communities and COVID-19 associated cases based on literature and theoretical review. The proposed framework was then tested using Structural Equation Model (SEM) with secondary data collected from New York Health and Mental Hygiene Department, US Census Bureau, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings revealed that unfavourable working conditions, underlying health conditions, and poor living conditions significantly and positively affects the number of COVID-19 confirmed cases. The study further revealed a positive and significant relationship between confirmed COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 related deaths. Theoretically, this study provides empirical results and a conceptual framework that could be used by other researchers to investigate low-income communities and COVID-19 related topics. Practically, this study called on the federal and state governments to effectively apply the health justice approach to eliminate healthcare discrimination for people living in low-income and marginalised communities as well as providing accessible, safe housing for the more vulnerable who need a place to self-quarantine due to COVID-19 exposure. Further practical and theoretical implications policies are discussed.