The Attitudes and Experiences of Marriage and Family Counselors for Same-Sex Couple and Family Clients: A Qualitative Study

Same-sex marriage and family counselors usually do not have enough experience and training background to help same-sex couples with marriage and family issues. Some counselors may have a personal bias toward same-sex couples due to the absence of same-sex couples and families’ background. Marriage and family counselors provide counseling services to their clients with marriage and family problems and conflicts, resulting in a positive recovery negotiation. The purpose of this study was to understand and investigate the attitudes of marriage and family counselors regarding same-sex couples and families, an area ignored in mainstream marriage and family counseling. Based on 300 surveys and 38 interviews from marriage and family counselors in the United States, the researcher categorized that more than half of the participants expressed negative attitudes against same-sex couples and families, due to cheating, unsafe sexual activities, and domestic violence. Some counselors refused to provide counseling services to same-sex couples and families due to misunderstanding and prejudice. The results suggested that additional in-service professional developments and curriculum reforms are essential to promoting multicultural family structure. Received: 13 September 2021 / Accepted: 25 November 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

725 Experience of Implementing Diversity Teaching into University of Oxford

Background Medical education should equip students with the necessary skills to support the diverse population they treat and work with and be confident to act as an ally for patients and colleagues. We found there to be a gap for a diversity module in the curriculum at Oxford University. Method We created a diversity training session for over 300 medical students aiming to; The course consisted of a series of talks conducted by a senior lecturer on diversity, doctors, patients, and students, followed by small-group case-based teaching facilitated by a final-year medical student and a junior doctor. All facilitators underwent training by a senior lecturer on diversity. The cases encouraged students to reflect on their own personal biases and enact how they would confront discrimination on the wards. Students completed a survey before and after the session, rating self-confidence on six key learning points. Results 91.4% students agreed the session was useful to their medical training. There was a significant increase in students who felt confident implementing all learning points: defining key terms (post-session: 95.4%, pre-session: 82.3%); understanding health inequalities (post-session: 93%, pre-session: 54.6%); awareness of personal bias (post-session: 87.9%, pre-session: 70%); partaking in allyship (post-session: 95%, pre-session: 89.5%); and being an active bystander (post-session: 91.4%, pre-session: 45.9%). 79.3% felt confident to challenge acts of discrimination (33.6% pre-session). Conclusions This session educates and empowers students to challenge acts of discrimination. We recommend the implementation of similar sessions at all medical schools.

Health Literacy in Primary Care: Reflections and Suggestions for Physicians, Researchers, and Administrators

As the healthcare system evolves, it is becoming more complicated for physicians and patients. Patients might have had one doctor in the past, but now are likely to regularly see several specialists along with their primary care physician. Patients can access their health records online, which increases transparency and accountability, but adds more information they have to interpret. This is the concept of health literacy—the ability to obtain, process, and act upon information regarding one’s health. This article will characterize health literacy in primary care and provide three areas that primary care physicians and researchers can direct their focus in order to increase health literacy among patients: community engagement, trainee education, and examination of personal bias.

13. Grounds for judicial reviewProcedural impropriety, natural justice, and legitimate expectation

Each Concentrate revision guide is packed with essential information, key cases, revision tips, exam Q&As, and more. Concentrates show you what to expect in a law exam, what examiners are looking for, and how to achieve extra marks. This chapter discusses the grounds for judicial review. These include procedural impropriety, which means breach of the rules of natural justice, and failure to comply with statutory procedural requirements. This chapter looks at the definitional elements of the rules of natural justice, whether the rules of natural justice apply in principle, the extent to which the rules of natural justice apply, disciplinary hearings, licensing cases, pecuniary and personal bias, whether or not a fair trial has taken place, and the right to be given reasons for a decision. This chapter also considers legitimate expectation as a ground for judicial review.

Use of Psychotropic “Pro Re Nata” Medications by Patients Attending the Outpatient Clinic in a Hospital: A Qualitative Exploration

Introduction: Administration of psychotropic pro re nata (PRN) medications is influenced by diverse factors such as legal use of PRN medications, the attitude of patients, personal bias, and stigma toward such medication use. While PRN prescriptions increase the efficiency of care and encourage patients to participate in self-care, the use of psychotropic PRN medications by outpatients has raised concerns about its risks of harm, especially for the outpatients. This study explored the use of psychotropic PRN medications by patients attending the outpatient clinic in a hospital.Methods: Qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted. Purposeful sampling was done to achieve cases with enriched information. Participants were chosen regardless of their ethnicity and were selected using the database and patient records in the clinic. Patients 18 years of age prescribed PRN psychotropic medications attending outpatient clinics in a hospital were included. Vulnerable patients (e.g., pregnant ladies, prisoners, cognitively impaired individual, AIDS/HIV subjects, and terminally ill subjects) were excluded.Results: This study revealed the patients' perspectives and experiences on self-management of psychotropic PRN medications. The themes that emerged were clustered as education and background, knowledge on psychotropic medications, frequency of medication intake, underuse of medication, the overdose of medication, side effects concern, source of information, and personal experience.Conclusions: Patients' understanding of medication, inappropriate medication use, cues to action, and use of alternatives are the factors that affected the self-management of psychotropic PRN medications by the patients.

Personal bias in nutrition advice: A survey of healthcare professionals' recommendations regarding dairy and plant-based dairy alternatives

Objective: To examine the relationship between health professionals' personal dietary preferences and their professional nutrition advice on dairy and plant-based dairy alternatives. Design: Cross sectional web-based survey. Survey examined health professionals' personal dietary preferences, including milk preference, (plant-based or dairy milk), dietary pattern (vegetarian or omnivore), and if they followed a "plant-based" diet, and examined if they would advise patients to consume dairy and/or plant-based dairy alternatives. Logistic regression models examined if health professionals' personal dietary preferences were associated with their willingness to recommend either product. Setting: Sample of U.S. health professionals. Participants: Non-probability convenience sampling recruited registered dietitian nutritionists, physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, dentists, dental hygienists, and students in any of these degree programs holding Junior standing and above. 331 respondents completed relevant survey questions and were included in analyses. Results: Most respondents would recommend dairy (81%) and dairy alternatives (72%) to their patients. Half (49%) reported a preference for plant-based milk, about 40% identified as having a dietary pattern that reduces animal product intake, and about 40% reported following a plant-based dietary pattern. Plant-based milk preference (OR 4.52; 95% CI 2.31 to 8.82, p<0.001) and following a vegetarian dietary pattern (OR 1.91; 95% CI 1.11 to 3.27, p=0.019) were associated with greater odds of recommending dairy alternatives to a patient. Plant-based milk preference (OR 0.16; 95% CI 0.07 to 0.35, p<0.001), following a vegetarian dietary pattern (OR 0.45; 95% CI 0.25 to 0.82, p=0.009), and following a plant-based dietary pattern (OR 0.41; 95% CI 0.22 to 0.76, p=0.005) were associated with lessor odds of recommending dairy to a patient. Dietetics professionals were more likely than all other health professionals to recommend both dairy and dairy alternatives to patients. Conclusions: Healthcare professionals' nutrition recommendations appear to reflect their personal nutrition habits, despite dairy being an important source of essential nutrients for patients who are willing and able to consume it. Improved nutrition training focusing on evidence-based nutrition recommendations, reducing personal bias in practice, and routinely including registered dietitians on interprofessional healthcare teams may improve the quality of nutrition advice given to U.S. consumers.

Operation of Public Transportation Ticket Vending Machine in Kraków, Poland: An Eye Tracking Study

Whereas the majority of evaluations of self-service kiosks are based on interviews or observations and as such are burdened with personal bias, eye tracking was seen as a method for an objective analysis. To demonstrate the feasibility and usability of such an assessment technique, the task of purchasing a public transportation ticket from a modern ticket vending machine in Kraków, Poland was evaluated. The test participants relatively easily operated the machine with time taken to purchase a ticket ranging from 54 s for foreigners not familiar with the equipment to 29 s for local inhabitants. Even though the number of gazes recorded for the foreigners group was 2.4 times higher than for the local test participants, the fixation times were almost equal. Faulty or delayed operation of the payment terminal was a meaningful equipment issue encountered by eight test participants. The study demonstrated that the operation of the analysed ticket vending machine should not cause much trouble to anyone. The use of an eye tracker, which was employed for such an assessment for the first time, permitted the identification of possible operational ambiguities that could hinder the user experience without the bias associated with other assessment techniques. The used method was found to be efficient and the results provided valuable information.

General Music and SEL: A Matter of Equity

As we consider how best to help our students achieve, we must work to ensure that our practices are equitable. That is, we must make certain that each of our students are equipped with the skills and opportunities to be successful in school and in life. Equity must be a central goal for all educators—in all academic areas. A general music classroom alignment with Social and Emotional Learning can, if implemented with fidelity and purpose, help promote equity in a number of important ways by acknowledging systemic inequities, identifying personal bias, and actively disrupting barriers to equity that plague so many schools.

Advanced Machine Learning Methods for Prediction of Fracture Closure Pressure

Determining the closure pressure is crucial for optimal hydraulic fracturing design and successful execution of fracturing treatment. Historically, the use of diagnostic tests before the main fracturing treatment has significantly advanced to gain more information about the pattern of fracture propagation and fluid performance to optimize the designs. The goal is to inject a small volume of fracturing fluid to breakdown the formation and create small fracture geometry, then once pumping is stopped the pressure decline is analyzed to observe the fracture closure. Many analytical methods such as G-Function, square root of time, etc. have been developed to determine the fracture closure pressure. There are cases in which there is difficulty in determining the fracture closure pressure, as well as personal bias and field experiences make it challenging to interpret the changes in the pressure derivative slope and identify fracture closure. These conditions include: High permeability reservoirs where fracture closure occurs very fast due to the quick fluid leakoff.Extremely low permeability reservoir, which requires a long shut-in time for the fluid to leak off and determine the fracture closure pressure.The non-ideal fluid leak-off behavior under complex conditions. The objective of this study is to apply machine learning methods to implement a predesigned algorithm to execute the required tasks and predict the fracture closure pressure while minimizing the shortcomings in determining the closure pressure for non-ideal or subjective conditions. This paper demonstrates training different supervised machine learning algorithms to help predict fracture closure pressure. The workflow involves using the datasets to train and optimize the models, which subsequently are used to predict the closure pressure of testing data. The output results are then compared with actual results from more than 120 DFIT data points. We further propose an integrated approach to feature selection and dataset processing and study the effects of data processing on the success of the model prediction. The results from this study limit the subjectivity and the need for the experience of personal interpreting the data. We speculate that a linear regression and MLP neural network algorithms can yield high scores in the prediction of fracture closure pressure.