Workload Size Research Articles

Speech-language caseloads in the schools: a workload analysis approach to setting caseload standards.

This article highlights key concepts of the recently revised policy documents of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association on workload and caseload size for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) in schools. A major premise is that the total workload activities required and performed by school-based SLPs must be taken into account to set appropriate and reasonable caseload standards. Current policies and practices used to define caseloads appear to be inadequate to ensure caseloads that allow enough time for the provision of quality services. In this article we describe school-based SLPs' workload, including the expanded roles and responsibilities that are mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and other legislation. We consider the available research on the effects of large caseloads on the service options chosen by SLPs, treatment outcomes for students, and SLP attrition and burnout. Finally, we present an approach for analyzing a SLP's total workload activities, along with a discussion of how that analysis can be used to help determine caseload standards consistent with meeting the intent of IDEA and the needs of students with disabilities.

Validating trace-driven microarchitectural simulations

Benchmark complexity and sluggish performance analysis create an ever-increasing gap between workload size and the speed of analysis. Experimental results with a new data-sampling methodology, however, show promise in closing this gap.

Clinical laboratory test menu changes in the Pacific Northwest: 1994 to 1996

Laboratory testing services are presently undergoing dynamic changes in response to a wide range of external factors. Government regulations, reimbursement, and managed care are only a few of the influences affecting the availability of testing services and on-site testing capabilities in hospital, independent, and physician office laboratories. Medical practice changes, marketplace influences, test technologies, and costs also play a role in determining where testing is being performed. To better understand the factors influencing clinical laboratory test volumes and menus and to identify on-site testing deemed essential in physician office laboratories, we gathered information from a network of clinical laboratories in the Pacific Northwest. Questionnaires were sent to 257 Laboratory Medicine Sentinel Monitoring Network participants in March 1996. In the past 2 years, changes in on-site test volumes and test menus have been primarily due to medical practice changes and marketplace influences. When laboratories had a decrease in test volumes or test menu choices, the size of the patient workload and the volumes of test orders have had the greatest impact. Laboratory regulations and managed care contracts have played a role in shifting on-site testing to outside sources; however, these factors did not appear to be primary influences. Only 5% of physician office laboratories identified tests that they believed were essential for optimal patient care but did not perform on-site.

Evaluating stream buffers as a secondary cache replacement

Today's commodity microprocessors require a low latency memory system to achieve high sustained performance. The conventional high-performance memory system provides fast data access via a large secondary cache. But large secondary caches can be expensive, particularly in large-scale parallel systems with many processors (and thus many caches).We evaluate a memory system design that can be both cost-effective as well as provide better performance, particularly for scientific workloads: a single level of (on-chip) cache backed up only by Jouppi's stream buffers [10] and a main memory. This memory system requires very little hardware compared to a large secondary cache and doesn't require modifications to commodity processors. We use trace-driven simulation of fifteen scientific applications from the NAS and PERFECT suites in our evaluation. We present two techniques to enhance the effectiveness of Jouppi's original stream buffers: filtering schemes to reduce their memory bandwidth requirement and a scheme that enables stream buffers to prefetch data being accessed in large strides. Our results show that, for the majority of our benchmarks, stream buffers can attain hit rates that are comparable to typical hit rates of secondary caches. Also, we find that as the data-set size of the scientific workload increases the performance of streams typically improves relative to secondary cache performance, showing that streams are more scalable to large data-set sizes.

Plasma nitriding in industry—problems, new solutions and limits

Plasma nitriding as a diffusion process is the oldest plasma-assisted process for the surface treatment of metals. Although the use of this process in industry is already well developed and established there are still several scientific questions in the basic understanding of the process and consequently some problems and limits concerning its upscaling for industrial use. Therefore it is necessary to get reproducible results for different geometries of workpieces and for different workload sizes. Correlations between different plasma and treatment parameters, especially in big plants, have to be considered. To understand the process handling using some simple but impressive models the difficulties of treating single parts or mixed workloads are explained. For profitable applications of plasma nitriding plants, some guidelines for the use and selection of a suitable process and a device are given. By the use of a pulsed d.c. power supply for plasma generation most of the industrial problems of the past can be solved. Some industrial experiences of the use of the plasma nitriding process are presented. The better knowledge about the plasma and some of the solutions for plasma nitriding could be transferred to other plasma-assisted processes such as plasma vapour deposition and plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition.

National audit of drug information centers

A comprehensive audit of drug information centers (DICs) was conducted to obtain information on sources of funding, staffing, information resources, computerization, workload, and scope of services and activities and to examine the role of DICs in education, patient care, and research. Responses were obtained from 98 of the 121 DICs surveyed. The scope of activities and services varied considerably between centers and depended on such factors as source of funding, size of institution, academic affiliation, staffing, and workload. Many DICs are involved in writing newsletters, preparing information for pharmacy and therapeutics committee meetings, developing and updating formularies, and providing contract services to other organizations. The patient-care activities of DICs include providing consultations, performing drug-use reviews, monitoring adverse drug reactions, and coordinating investigational drug studies; DICs are also involved in training undergraduate and graduate pharmacy students and residents and conducting research projects. Large workloads and lack of time were cited most often as factors limiting DIC participation in patient-care, educational, and research activities. Because DICs are involved in a wide variety of educational, research, and patient-care activities, more emphasis should be placed on documenting the costs of these services in relation to their benefits to the institution.

Do general practitioners have different "referral thresholds"?

One of the most interesting puzzles in general practice is why doctors differ so greatly in the frequency with which they refer patients to hospital. Published figures range from less than 0-5 to more than 15 per 100 consultations,1 and from only 0-6% to 25-9% of patients on a practice list a year. ? Obvious differences in patient characteristics, such as age, sex, social class, type and severity of problem, and distance from the practice; in doctor characteristics, such as age, years in general practice and in a particular practice, special medical interests, and postgraduate training ; and in practice characteristics, such as size of list, work load, urban or rural setting, partnership or single-handed structure, and distance from hospital1'11 may explain many of these marked variations. These differences in rates may also be explained by what other authors have called a referral threshold' * >*? that is, doctors have a personal level at which the stimulus of a consultation produces a referral. This concept would be supported if doctors were observed to refer at dissimilar rates even when patient, doctor, and practice characteristics were the same. Unfortunately, only a few studies* ' of the process have controlled for more than one of these characteristics at a tame. Since 1971, the general practice partnership of one of us (BJ) has kept extensive records on every consultation. The size and detail of these data allowed us to carry the observations of previous workers one step further?we compared the rates of several doctors while a number of patient and practice variables were controlled. Our purpose was to examine the hypothesis that general practitioners have a personal threshold. Practice characteristics were the same for each

Supply, Need, and Distribution of Anesthesiologists and Nurse Anesthetists in the U.S., 1972 and 1980

This paper examines the relationship between problems in anesthesia care delivery and the availability and utilization of trained anesthesia manpower. The 1972 and 1980 projected supply and mix of anesthesiologists and nurse anesthestists is described and compared to the current and projected need for their services. The need estimates developed for anesthesia manpower are based upon published data on operations, productivity and theoretical team configurations. Utilization data are used since they are quantifiable and the need for anesthesia services is, indeed, supply-induced. Two estimates of need are developed based upon differing degrees to which anesthesia teams can be effectively employed, this being contingent upon the size of the hospital operative workload. While the need estimates developed for anesthesiologists for 1972 and 1980 were fairly close in aggregate number to the actual and projected supply; the need estimates for nurse anesthetists fell far short of their 1972 and 1980 projected supply. The 1972 need estimates are then compared on a statewide basis to the actual supply and mix of anesthesia personnel to reveal a severe maldistribution which is quantified in terms of shortage and execesses of anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists for each state.

Smoking and Work Load

Smokers, smokers deprived, and nonsmokers performed a compensatory tracking task while simultaneously performing a crossadaptive loading task. By means of the cross-adaptive technique, the size of the subject's total work load (tracking and loading tasks combined) was individually tailored to utilize each subject's entire attentional capacity. No differences were detected as a function of smoking condition either in tracking or loading task performance, and it was concluded that smoking condition did not affect the size of the work load which could be handled. Performance generally improved with trials, however, none of the smoking condition × trials interactions was significant, indicating that performance changes with practice did not differ among the various smoking conditions.