scholarly journals ‘Pleural Triage’ facilitates effective management of a pleural service in the COVID-19 era

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 147997312110665
Author(s):  
Syed Ajmal ◽  
Alison Stockbridge ◽  
Claire Vella ◽  
Sarah Johnstone ◽  
Tracey Deakin ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for management of pleural diseases. As resources and staff have been redirected to manage acutely unwell COVID-19 patients, routine medical practice and service provision for pleural diseases have been severely disrupted. We recognised the impact this had for patients with pleural diseases, who can be highly vulnerable to infection and often have conditions for which treatment cannot be safely delayed. The pleural service was reviewed in a tertiary centre, focusing on the changes that allowed maintenance of a service whilst maximising patient and staff safety, with the aim that these service transformations can be adopted elsewhere to improve care for pleural patients during and beyond COVID-19.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stéphane Sanchez ◽  
Cécile Payet ◽  
Marie Herr ◽  
Anne Dazinieras ◽  
Caroline Blochet ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND The elderly are particularly exposed to adverse events from medication. Among the various strategies to reduce polypharmacy, educational approaches have shown promising results. OBJECTIVE We aimed to evaluate the impact of the implementation of a good medical practice booklet on polypharmacy in nursing homes. METHODS We identified nursing homes belonging to a geriatric care provider that had launched a policy of proper medication use using a good medical practice booklet delivered to prescribers and pharmacists. Data were derived from electronic pill dispensers. The effect of the intervention on polypharmacy was assessed with multilevel regression models, with a control group to account for natural trends over time. The main outcomes were the average daily number of times when medication was administered and the number of drugs with different presentation identifier codes per resident per month. RESULTS 96,216 residents from 519 nursing homes were included between 1 January 2011 and 31 December 2014. The intervention group and the control group both decreased their average daily use of medication (-0.05 and -0.06). The good medical practice booklet did not have a statistically significant effect (exponentiated difference-in-differences coefficient 1.00, 95% confidence interval 0.99-1.02, P=.45). CONCLUSIONS Although the good medical practice booklet itself did not seem effective in decreasing medication use, our data show the effectiveness of a higher-level policy to decrease polypharmacy.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0160323X2110092
Author(s):  
Laura A. Reese ◽  
Xiaomeng Li

This research focuses on change within informal service provision networks, specifically examining the impact that changes within a key organization can have on the larger network. Employing a before and after survey design with a treatment at the midpoint and participant observation, it asks: What is the impact of a major change within one organization on the larger external network? What is the nature of the organizational ties? and, How do political factors exogenous to the network impact the network evolution process? The findings suggest that internal change within a focal actor can have ripple effects throughout the network increasing density. Public service provision at the local level can be enhanced through an increase in partnerships between the public and nonprofit sectors. However, network evolution can be limited by the larger political environment and lack of a coordinating role on the part of local government.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 75-81
Author(s):  
Ahad Mirza Baig ◽  
Alkida Balliu ◽  
Peter Davies ◽  
Michal Dory

Rachid Guerraoui was the rst keynote speaker, and he got things o to a great start by discussing the broad relevance of the research done in our community relative to both industry and academia. He rst argued that, in some sense, the fact that distributed computing is so pervasive nowadays could end up sti ing progress in our community by inducing people to work on marginal problems, and becoming isolated. His rst suggestion was to try to understand and incorporate new ideas coming from applied elds into our research, and argued that this has been historically very successful. He illustrated this point via the distributed payment problem, which appears in the context of blockchains, in particular Bitcoin, but then turned out to be very theoretically interesting; furthermore, the theoretical understanding of the problem inspired new practical protocols. He then went further to discuss new directions in distributed computing, such as the COVID tracing problem, and new challenges in Byzantine-resilient distributed machine learning. Another source of innovation Rachid suggested was hardware innovations, which he illustrated with work studying the impact of RDMA-based primitives on fundamental problems in distributed computing. The talk concluded with a very lively discussion.


Social Change ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-482
Author(s):  
Zoya Hasan

The recent spread of the delta variant of the COVID-19 pandemic in many countries, though uneven, has once again set alarm bells ringing throughout the world. Nearly two years have passed since the onset of this pandemic: vaccines have been developed and vaccination is underway, but the end of the campaign against the pandemic is nowhere in sight. This drive has merely attempted to adjust and readjust, with or without success, to the various fresh challenges that have kept emerging from time to time. The pandemic’s persistence and its handling by the governments both have had implications for citizens’/peoples’ rights as well as for the systems which were in place before the pandemic. In this symposium domain experts investigate, with a sharp focus on India, the interface between the COVID-19 pandemic and democracy, health, education and social sciences. These contributions are notable for their nuanced and insightful examination of the impact of the pandemic on crucial social development issues with special attention to the exacerbated plight of society’s marginalised sections. In India, as in several other countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected democracy. The health crisis came at a moment when India was already experiencing democratic backsliding. The pandemic came in handy in imposing greater restrictions on democratic rights, public discussion and political opposition. This note provides an analysis and commentary on how the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic impacted governance, at times undermining human rights and democratic processes, and posing a range of new challenges to democracy.


Author(s):  
Sangeeta Mittal ◽  
Monika

Trade credit is important as a funding source for companies having a liquidity shortage. Trade credit comprises of both accounts receivable and payable. The financial literature has discussed the impact of accounts receivable or payable on a company’s financial performance. However, there is a lack of studies on the effects of accounts receivable and payable on each other and further its effect on the financial performance of small-cap companies. Financial performance is determined using the profitability and value of the company. The researchers examined the financial performance implications of offering and receiving trade credit for a sample of 193 BSE small-cap manufacturing companies in India during the period 2011–2019. Granger causality test, Levin, Lin and Chu Unit root test, correlation and regression have been used for data analysis. The finding suggested that accounts receivable influenced the use of accounts payable. The aftermath of accounts payables is that it negatively and significantly affected the profitability and had an insignificant relationship with the value of the company. The result implies that effective management of accounts receivable can influence the application of accounts payable that improves a company’s profits and value. The current study is useful for SMEs’ managers in determining the financial performance and capital structure.


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