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The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on critical care healthcare professionals' work practices and wellbeing: A qualitative study
Get PDFBackground
Burnout and other psychological comorbidities were evident prior to the COVID-19 pandemic for critical care healthcare professionals (HCPs) who have been at the forefront of the health response. Current research suggests an escalation or worsening of these impacts as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Objectives
The objective of this study was to undertake an in-depth exploration of the impact of the evolving COVID-19 pandemic on the wellbeing of HCPs working in critical care.
Methods
This was a qualitative study using online focus groups (n = 5) with critical care HCPs (n = 31, 7 medical doctors and 24 nurses) in 2021: one with United Kingdom–based participants (n = 11) and four with Australia-based participants (n = 20). Thematic analysis of qualitative data from focus groups was performed using Gibbs framework.
Findings
Five themes were synthesised: transformation of anxiety and fear throughout the pandemic, the burden of responsibility, moral distress, COVID-19 intruding into all aspects of life, and strategies and factors that sustained wellbeing during the pandemic. Moral distress was a dominant feature, and intrusiveness of the pandemic into all aspects of life was a novel finding.
Conclusions
The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted critical care HCPs and their work experience and wellbeing. The intrusiveness of the pandemic into all aspects of life was a novel finding. Moral distress was a predominate feature of their experience. Leaders of healthcare organisations should ensure that interventions to improve and maintain the wellbeing of HCPs are implemented
Food insecurity, poor dietary intake and a lack of free meal uptake amongst 16–17-year-old college students in the northeast of England, UK
Get PDFFood insecurity in the UK has been described as a public health emergency. Although programmes exist to alleviate food insecurity for children and families, there is a lack of focus on 16–17 year olds across research, policy and practice. The current study set out to address this gap by investigating the food insecurity status and food intake of 16-17-year-olds relative to current nutritional guidelines. An online, cross-sectional survey design was utilised to collect data on self-reported food security status, food intake and access to and uptake of free college meals. Eighty-three students aged 16–17 years from two sixth form colleges based in the North East of England, UK participated. Food intake data were compared to current dietary recommendations on fruit and vegetable intake and high fat/salt/sugar foods; food intake was compared between food secure and food insecure young people. A minority of young people consumed enough fruit and vegetables to meet or exceed current 5-a-day dietary recommendations, but the majority of young people consumed two or more high fat/salt/sugar items, consumption of which was higher in food insecure young people. Additionally, despite almost half the current sample identifying as food insecure, only four young people reported being entitled to free college meals.The current study was the first to identify food insecurity and poor food intake specifically amongst 16–17 year olds in England. A lack of uptake of free college meals shows that current policy is not sufficient to address food insecurity amongst this group
Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov and Shcharansky: Professional Networks, Human Rights and Dissent in the Late Cold War
Get PDFThis article explores the challenge presented to governments and the scientific establishment by physicists who campaigned internationally on behalf of their Soviet scientific colleagues in the early 1980s. Cold War science operated in a highly charged environment: while the work of scientists on both sides of the Cold War divide was sponsored and closely guarded by government and military agencies, scientists were also at the forefront of activist challenges to human rights infringements suffered by their colleagues. The article explores the motivations for and limitations of a moratorium on participation in scientific exchange with the Soviet Union launched by the California-based group “Scientists for Sakharov, Orlov and Shcharansky” (SOS). It considers the ways that both professional identity and Cold War dynamics shaped this solidarity campaign. SOS sought to build their activism on a transnational basis and worked closely with scientific colleagues in Europe to do so. They pitched a campaign that appealed beyond the university and national scientific laboratories to a broad range of people who identified as scientists. Unlike many contemporary scientific organizations, the SOS leadership embraced the political nature of such activism. As a whole, this article shows how scientists navigated different political and scientific contexts when organizing support for their Soviet colleagues
A pilot evaluation of the role of a Children’s Wellbeing Practitioner (CWP) in a child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS)
Get PDFBackground
In 2017, the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (CYP-IAPT) project was extended to deliver low-intensity Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), delivered by Children’s Wellbeing Practitioners (CWPs), but to date evaluation is sparse.
Aims
To evaluate low-intensity interventions delivered by trainee CWPs for the treatment of anxiety and depression in a child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS).
Method
The evaluation adopted a quantitative, within-subjects, cross-sectional design. The outcome measures of 98 service users aged 8–17 years were included in the evaluation. Service users were children and young people accessing CAMHS in the North East of England. Outcome measures included the Revised Children’s Anxiety and Depression Scale (RCADS-47) and Goal Based Outcomes (GBOs). Descriptive data relating to the types of interventions used and outcomes following CWP involvement were also explored.
Results
Analysis of pre and post intervention data highlighted significant reduction in symptomatology across all RCADS subscales and composite total scales, and significant goal progress as measures by GBO’s. Effect sizes ranged from moderate to large (d = 0.75 – 0.90) across all subscales of the RCADS. Large effect sizes were found for depression, total anxiety and total RCADS scores (d = 0.86, d = 1.12, d = 1.14), and GBOs (d = −1.33).
Conclusions
Findings support the potential value of low intensity CBT interventions delivered by CWPs in reducing anxiety and depression in this population. Recommendations for the development of the CWP role and CWP services are discussed
Corporate Social Responsibility and Tax Avoidance: The Effect of Shareholding Structure - Evidence from the UK
Get PDFDuring their 47th G7 summit in June 2021, the largest economies agreed to combat tax evasion. This paper investigates tax avoidance phenomenon by examining the possible moderation effect of shareholding structure (internal and external shareholdings), as a corporate governance mechanism, on the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and tax avoidance. Using a sample of FTSE350 non-financial listed firms from 2002 to 2016, I find that institutional shareholding dampens the positive relationship between firms’ social responsibility and tax citizenship. However, the association between corporate social and tax citizenship is magnified for firms with entrenched managerial shareholding. The empirical findings inform tax policymakers and regulators about the need to consider the corporate shareholding structure that magnifies/dampens the tax avoidance risk. Generally, the findings hold for alternative measures of tax avoidance and CSR commitment, Two-Stage Least Squares and Tobit regressions, and additional control variables
Ensemble learning-based approach for residential building heating energy prediction and optimization
Get PDFAccurate building energy consumption prediction is critical for engineers to design optimized operational strategies for building heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems. In this paper, an stacking ensemble learning-based model is established based on the operational data of a district resident buildings heating station for building heating system energy consumption prediction. The ensemble model is optimized by outlier processing, feature selection, parameter optimization based on grid search. A new feature based on Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) algorithm was proposed to take historical energy feature into consideration. The performance of the ensemble model and four base machine learning methods, including multiple linear regression, extreme learning machine, extreme gradient boosting and support vector regression, are evaluated. Compared with the four base models, the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of the ensemble model decreases by 4.36%–71.70%, and the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) by 3.80%–49.73%. Using the new feature based on EWMA can further reduce the MAE and RMSE of the ensemble model by 10.36% and 19.89%, respectively. The result proves that the proposed ensemble model with the added historical feature effectively improves the prediction model's accuracy for building heating energy consumption
Soft diamond-like carbon coatings with superior biocompatibility for medical applications
Get PDFBiomedical applications of diamond-like carbon (DLC) coatings are continuously increasing due to their superior mechanical properties, low friction coefficient, antiwear characteristics, and biocompatibility. The mechanical and tribological characteristics of DLC coatings have been comprehensively investigated on various substrate systems as a function of their deposition parameter dependant features for various biomaterial applications. However, the relationship between biocompatibility and resulting hardness of DLC coatings as a function of their bias voltage driven intrinsic features like sp2 and sp3 bonds remains largely unexplored. In this work, a series of DLC coatings are prepared as a function of varying bias voltage from 0 to −120 V, and characterised for their atomic structure, physical, and mechanical properties, and biocompatibility. The contact angle and surface roughness of the DLC coatings reduce while hardness increases from 7.8 to 20.3 GPa with increasing bias voltage from 0 to −120 V. A relatively soft DLC coating is shown to retain excellent biocompatibility which is approximately 38% higher than the harder DLC coatings following exposure of their leached extracts to L929 mouse fibroblast cells. This work demonstrates the complex interdependence of biocompatibility and hardness of DLC coatings and the outcomes will support correct material selection with an appropriate balance of these key properties for specific biomedical applications such as load-carrying and non-load carrying devices
Private and Utility Enhanced Recommendations with Local Differential Privacy and Gaussian Mixture Model
Get PDFRecommendation systems rely heavily on behavioural and preferential data (e.g. ratings and likes) of a user to produce accurate recommendations. However, such unethical data aggregation and analytical practices of Service Providers (SP) causes privacy concerns among users. Local differential privacy (LDP) based perturbation mechanisms address this concern by adding noise to users' data at the user-side before sending it to the SP. The SP then uses the perturbed data to perform recommendations. Although LDP protects the privacy of users from SP, it causes a substantial decline in recommendation accuracy. We propose an LDP-based Matrix Factorization (MF) with a Gaussian Mixture Model (MoG) to address this problem. The LDP perturbation mechanism, i.e., Bounded Laplace (BLP), regulates the effect of noise by confining the perturbed ratings to a predetermined domain. We derive a sufficient condition of the scale parameter for BLP to satisfy ε -LDP. We use the MoG model at the SP to estimate the noise added locally to the ratings and the MF algorithm to predict missing ratings. Our LDP based recommendation system improves the predictive accuracy without violating LDP principles. We demonstrate that our method offers a substantial increase in recommendation accuracy under a strong privacy guarantee through empirical evaluations on three real-world datasets, i.e., Movielens, Libimseti and Jester
An exploratory study of US acquirers’ market performance: pre- versus post-Sarbanes–Oxley act of 2002
Get PDFPurpose – Motivated by the findings of Bhabra and Hossain (2017) that highlight an improvement in US market performance in the post-Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) period, this paper aims to investigate how this change varies with the methods of payment used for the deals.
Design/methodology/approach – Deductive in nature and using an event study approach, this paper uses a sample of 675 deals between 1999 and 2006 to test three research hypotheses in a pre-post setting.
Findings – Results show that at the aggregate level, there is a significant improvement in the market performance of US acquirers around the announcement day in the aftermath of the passage of SOX 2002. Considered separately, both US stock acquirers and cash acquirers did not experience any significant improvement in market performance in the post-Sarbanes–Oxley period. These results are robust to controlling for governance, firm and deal variables, as well as industry and year fixed effects.
Research limitations/implications – Exploratory in nature, the results are to be interpreted in light of the sample size and the period under investigation.
Practical implications – The results provide evidence for regulators and legislators on the contribution of SOX 2002 to curbing managerial misconduct. Significant improvement in the market performance also signals more confidence in managerial decisions and a reduction in agency problems. The insignificant change in stock acquirersâeTM market performance can be an indication that policymakers should exert more efforts to improve shareholders’ confidence in the quality of disclosure.
Originality/value – This investigation provides unique insights on whether SOX has been effective in mitigating mispricing concerns associated with stock-financed acquisitions and whether it was effective in moderating the governance mechanism associated with cash-financed acquisitions