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Flushing peripheral intravenous catheters: A scoping review
No full textBackground
Peripheral intravascular catheters (PIVCs) are indispensable vascular access devices in healthcare, facilitating the administration of intravenous therapies. Despite their vital role, PIVCs are frequently associated with complications such as occlusion, infection, and thrombosis, which contribute to catheter failure. Flushing catheters is one of the most common practices during PIVC maintenance, as it cleans the internal catheter lumen, ensuring patency and reducing the risk of complications. However, inconsistencies in flushing practices such as flushing technique, volume to use, frequency, and methods highlight a lack of consensus in the literature and clinical guidelines.
Methods
Following JBI scoping review methodology, a comprehensive search was conducted across PubMed, Embase, Scopus, CINAHL, and grey literature sources. Studies were included if they focused on PIVC flushing techniques, flushing methods (speed, volume, frequencies, interval), or their impact on catheter-related outcomes. Data were charted using the PAGER (Patterns, Advances, Gaps, Evidence, Research recommendations) framework.
Results
Of the 4539 initial studies retrieved, 39 met the inclusion criteria. Key findings reveal significant variability in flushing practices, with no consensus on optimal technique (continuous, intermittent, or pulsatile), volume (commonly 5–10 mL), or frequency (ranging from every 6 hours to every 24 hours). Pulsatile flushing showed promise in laboratory studies for reducing bacterial colonization and maintaining catheter patency but lacked consistent clinical evidence. Fluid dynamics studies on the flushing process suggested potential endothelial injury from high flushing velocities and the need for standardized practices.
Conclusion
While some studies have investigated PIVC flushing, the existing research remains inconsistent, with a lack of clinical trials and mechanistic evidence on how flushing affects catheter patency, endothelial damage, and complication prevention
Review of best practice for the ongoing monitoring of emerging substances of concern in soils, sediments, and sewage sludge across the EU
No full text[No abstract available]Environmental Protection Agency of Ireland and the Department of Agriculture, Food, and the Marin
When will employees voice up? Leader-member exchange similarity and leader group prototypicality
No full textVoice, defined as employees’ expression of ideas with an intention to improve team or organizational functioning, is often directed to their immediate leader. This makes the quality of the leader-member relationship—conceptualized as leader-member exchange (LMX)—a key predictor of voice. However, research has largely overlooked the fact that the influence of one's LMX is also shaped by the LMX relationships that others have with the same leader. Drawing on the social identity perspective, we propose two ways in which the LMX of others can shape the LMX-voice relationship: (a) LMX similarity (i.e., similar LMX quality between the focal employee and team members) emphasizes a shared collective identity, thereby motivating voice; and (b) LMX positive dissimilarity (i.e., having a better LMX relationship than others) highlights a unique relational identity with the leader, which may also motivate voice. We further argue that leader group prototypicality—the extent to which the leader is seen as embodying the team's collective identity—moderates which of these dynamics is more salient in predicting voice. These interactive effects are expected to be more pronounced for prohibitive voice (suggestions to discontinue a practice) than for promotive voice (suggestions to improve work practices), as the former entails greater social risk and thus depends more heavily on social identity considerations. Using multilevel polynomial regression and response surface analyses on field data of 321 leader-member dyads nested in 47 teams, we found support for most of our predictions
Disability human rights standards before the European Court of Human Rights—false convergence and methodologically-driven divergence?
No full textThe UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has positively impacted the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Overall, the ECtHR has delivered significant judgments in favour of persons with disabilities and is moving towards a disability-sensitive interpretation of facts. However, in specific areas such as legal capacity, inclusive education, voting, and involuntary treatment, the ECtHR has sharply distanced itself from the CRPD following some initial attempts at harmonizing its norms with that of the treaty. This emerging divergence does not arise from differences in underlying substantive norms, but rather from the ECtHR’s different jurisprudential methods and views on its role relative to the CRPD’s treaty body, as well as the polycentric nature of their respective decisions. Explaining the nature of the disagreement is key to understanding what role adjudicative bodies can play in promoting disability rights, and whether their norms can be harmonized.peer-reviewe
Transforming text into discovery: OCR enrichment of digital collections in the University of Galway Library
No full textThe paper was presented at the 4th IEEE Conference on Digital Preservation and Processing Technology of Written Heritage (DPWH) on 7 October 2025. It will be published in the Proceedings of the 8th Congress on Information Science and Technology (IEEE CiSt'2025).The University of Galway Library has been working on an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline to transform scanned archival materials into machine-readable text at scale. This significantly enhances the accessibility and searchability of the University’s digitised heritage collections, supporting diverse areas of research interest and fostering deeper engagement with the Library’s holdings.
The paper discusses key aspects of building an OCR pipeline, including the performance of available OCR software on heritage data, pre-processing of digitised images, quality assurance, and converting the OCR engine outputs for DAMS upload and seamless IIIF integration. The pipeline aims at balancing automation with quality control for successful extraction of printed, typewritten and handwritten text. We believe that our experience may help other GLAM institutions that are considering incorporating automatic text extraction into their digital collections workflow.The authors wish to acknowledge and give thanks for the financial contributions made to the Imirce project that have enabled the continued growth and improvement of this digital heritage resource. Funded grants were received from the Irish Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media in 2024, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 2025
Intersectional Discrimination Index (IDI): Understanding the student experience of intersectional discrimination at the University of Galway
No full textThis study was conducted by the Centre for Global Women’s Studies at the University of Galway with funding from the HEA and supported by the Office of the Vice-President for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (OVPEDI) as part of the overarching project “Embedding EDI in University of Galway”. The project specified three core inter-related strands: Data Collection, Race Equality Strategy and Action Plan, and development of an Intersectional Discrimination Index (IDI) which builds on previous work in the EDI Strategy (2020-2025), Gender Equality Action Plan, and the Intercultural Campus work stream of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Campus Committee (EDICC). Using a student survey, the study sought to understand:
• Socio-demographic characteristics – including age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, religion, disability status, sexual orientation, socio-economic background, and program of study.
• Systemic, structural, or institutional discrimination – measuring perceptions and experiences of discrimination embedded in university policies, practices, and structures.
• Day-to-day discrimination and microaggressions – documenting subtle, frequent forms of bias and exclusion in both academic and social contexts.
• Recommendations and expectations – capturing student-led suggestions for actions to prevent discrimination and improve inclusivity.
Based on the survey data, the study also piloted an Intersectional Discrimination Index (IDI). The IDI served as a validation tool, confirming that the survey reliably captured the complex ways in which overlapping identities shaped students’ experiences of discrimination
Legal skills: understanding and adapting legal education to the changing needs of clients
No full textThe movie A Few Good Men is known for the infamous line: ‘You can’t handle the truth.’ Less attention is placed on the dialogue that follows when Jack Nicholson’s character tells the attorney cross-examining him: ‘You have the luxury of not knowing what I know… I have greater responsibility than you can fathom.’ In imbuing lawyering skills, much of the academic focus has been on legal writing, research, analysis, and advocacy. Although, these skills remain the core requirements for lawyers in ‘handling the truth’, this article argues, however, that, particularly, in a world changed by the pandemic and artificial intelligence, lawyers will need to be able to offer more. There needs to be a move from a ‘linear’ approach to case progression which, typically, starts with the historical facts of the dispute presented at an initial lawyer-client interview and progresses to final hearing or settlement, to one in which lawyers need to consider the wider implications of the conflict that has arisen. Consideration must be given to the personal, financial, societal factors or responsibilities that may have contributed to the legal issue for the client and how these factors may potentially impact on the client’s autonomy to resolve the dispute.
In attempting to ensure that future lawyers ‘fathom’ the client perspective, this article will examine importance of legal educators underpinning design thinking in law by being cognisant of, and engaging law students with theory, to include Bronfenbrenner’s theory of the ‘ecology of human development’ and the extent to which being part of this wider ecology impacts on conflict and the way in which a dispute develops. It argues that a robust theoretical framework will aid understanding for a more ‘client-centred’, multi-disciplinary and therapeutic jurisprudential approach enhancing design thinking, such that future generations of lawyers develop the transversal skills required to take a wider, shared leadership perspective in addressing clients’ concerns in a more complete way. While this applies more specifically to future lawyers in common law jurisdictions, it is argued that such understanding will be important for anyone who wishes to use their law degree or training, in-house or in industry, whether working with teams of professionals, clients or customers across both common and civil law jurisdictions
Carbon pricing and household burdens in newly affluent countries - An application to Lithuania
No full textThis paper assesses household burdens from a carbon tax with revenue recycling and compares them to price changes during the recent cost-of-living crisis. The illustration focuses on Lithuania, an OECD country that attained high-income status a decade ago, and that recently enacted a €60/ton CO2 carbon tax despite a challenging policy context, with high poverty rates and major concerns about the affordability of energy and other necessities. Although households spend large shares of their budget on energy, the average impact of the carbon tax on their overall cost of living is comparatively modest. At around 3 % on average, it is substantially smaller than the impact of inflation between 2021 and 2024 (35.8 %). Results confirm that direct burdens from higher fuel prices fall disproportionately on lower-income households. But indirect effects of carbon pricing, from higher prices of goods other than fuel, are sizeable and broadly “flat” across the income distribution, which dampens regressivity. We simulate seven different options for compensating households by recycling carbon-tax revenues back to them through transfers or by lowering other taxes. When carefully designed, revenue recycling allows considerable scope for cushioning burdens, and for addressing concerns about disproportionate costs for some groups of households and voters.This research was supported by the Luxembourg Fond National de la Recherche (AFR individual, project id: 14614512) and the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (ecoMOD Project, project number: 2023-1-LI01-KA220-HED-000157594). The opinions expressed and arguments employed herein are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official views of the OECD or of its member countries.peer-reviewe
Examining ecliptic pulsars using the low frequency array telescope
No full textPulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars with extreme magnetic fields, emitting beams of radio waves along their magnetic axes which is, in general, misaligned with their rotation axes. As these beams sweep across our line of sight, we observe periodic radio pulses allowing pulsars to serve as highly precise cosmic clocks. This property underpins the technique of pulsar timing, which enables a wide range of astrophysical investigations, from probing the interior structure of neutron stars to detecting low-frequency gravitational waves.
In this thesis, we focus on a special group of pulsars, those that pass close to the Sun in the sky during part of the year, known as ecliptic pulsars. As their radio beams travel through the solar wind (a stream of charged particles flowing outward from the Sun), we see a change in their signals, resulting in measurable increases in dispersion measure (DM). We develop and apply a Bayesian framework that models the solar wind’s spatial electron density as a spherically symmetric distribution and its temporal variations as a power law in the power spectrum. This model effectively captures the dynamic nature of the solar wind and represents a promising approach for future pulsar timing array (PTA) noise modelling.
Building on this modelling work, we launched a dedicated observational campaign targeting seven ecliptic pulsars using the Irish LOFAR (I-LOFAR) telescope, two of which are PTA sources. We applied high-precision pulsar timing techniques to derive accurate DM time series and investigated phenomena such as pulse nulling, frequency-dependent profile evolution, and DM chromaticity. Our results demonstrate the viability of using stand-alone LOFAR stations for high-fidelity low-frequency pulsar timing, a crucial asset for the European PTA and the broader low-frequency radio astronomy community.
In the final component of this thesis, we explored the variable emission behaviour of an ecliptic source, PSR~B0656+14, a pulsar that exhibits features similar to rotating radio transients (RRATs). Using I-LOFAR observations, we conducted detailed statistical analyses including flux density distribution fitting, wait time studies, and single-pulse spectral index measurements to characterise its stochastic emission. We find compelling evidence for a memoryless emission process and a hybrid flux distribution, shedding new light on emission characteristics of RRAT-like pulsars.
Together, these studies contribute not only to improving our understanding of solar wind effects on pulsar timing but also to the broader efforts of enhancing PTA sensitivity and using pulsars as precise probes of astrophysical plasmas. They also highlight the scientific potential of low-frequency radio observations from stand-alone LOFAR stations, both for solar wind studies and the characterisation of complex emission behaviours in pulsars
Evaluating the feasibility and acceptability of the Informed Health Choices-Cancer programme: A pilot randomised trial protocol
No full textBackground
More than one-third of cancer-related health information is unreliable or misleading. With increasing health information seeking, the risks of misinformation exposure are growing. Educational approaches that are delivered clearly and in accessible formats are a promising way to strengthen critical thinking and decision-making skills, thereby helping to reduce the exposure of those impacted by cancer to misleading cancer information.
Methods
This pilot randomised trial will assess the feasibility and acceptability of conducting a larger definitive trial evaluating the Informed Health Choices-Cancer (IHC-C) programme. The IHC-C is an online evidence-based education programme co-designed by stakeholders, including public and patient partners. It aims to equip people impacted by cancer (i.e., current patients, survivors, caregivers, and loved ones) with the skills and knowledge necessary to think critically about the reliability of health information and claims and make informed health choices. Participants will be randomised to either the IHC-C intervention group or a waitlist control group. The primary outcome of this pilot trial are feasibility (recruitment and retention rates, etc.) and acceptability (participant satisfaction and perceived usefulness, etc.). Demographic and cancer-related data will be collected to characterise the sample and inform recruitment strategies for a future definitive trial. Preliminary measures of critical thinking and decision-making skills will also be gathered to support the selection of key outcomes for the future trial.
Discussion
This pilot trial will inform the design and conduct of a future definitive randomised trial. Insights gained will inform sample size estimations, refine recruitment strategies, optimise programme delivery, and improve data collection processes, ensuring a robust and scalable approach for the definitive trial.This work was supported by China Scholarship Council (CSC) [grant number 202106370067]; and the College of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at the University of Galway awarded to ML