1,721,009 research outputs found
Physician assistants in the German inpatient care: barriers and enablers of integration
No full textPurpose: Various health systems are challenged by a multifaceted crisis of increased service demand and workforce shortages. The effects are devastating and may end up in decreased access to care, poor quality of patient care and extreme demands on the workforce. The introduction of the physician assistant (PA) profession provided an avenue to address such challenges in several countries. In Germany, the integration of PAs has been proceeding slowly. Design/methodology/approach: To understand the integration of the profession in Germany, we conducted 15 expert interviews to reveal how the PA profession is perceived among healthcare experts as well as the barriers and facilitators of integration in inpatient care. Findings: Our results highlight a generally positive perception of PAs, particularly in terms of workload relief and bridging the gap between healthcare professionals. Nonetheless, barriers include resistance from healthcare workers unfamiliar with the PA role, while workforce shortages and collaborative teamwork facilitate integration. Originality/value: These findings lay the groundwork for potential integration-enhancing strategies in Germany
COVID-19 in the Netherlands: A three-phase analysis
Get PDFIntroduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has presented global challenges in the health, economy, society, and political sector for the past three years. For the Netherlands, the dynamic nature of the pandemic can be divided into three phases. The initial phase exclusively relied on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). The second phase was characterized by the introduction of vaccines alongside the continuation of stringent NPIs. Finally, the third phase marks the post-vaccine and booster stage, characterized by minimal or absent NPIs. This paper examines the interplay between the mitigation policies, the vaccination rollout, health outcomes, and economic indicators in the Netherlands in these three phases. Methods: This analysis used national real-time data on COVID-19-related health outcomes, health service utilization, vaccination rollout, and economic indicators. Our descriptive analysis applied the “Categorising Policy & Technology Interventions (CPTI)” framework. Results: The number of daily deaths, hospital admission and ICU admission experienced the highest peak in the first phase, while the number of daily cases first spiked in the third phase. The containment measures reached a very significant level twice, resulting in a full lockdown twice. In the first two phases, the peak in stringency of the CPTI containment category was parallel with the peaks in health outcomes. Conversely, in the third phase, the containment measures were scaled down prior to the peak in daily cases. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the Dutch three-phased COVID-19 mitigation strategy managed to fulfil its aim and protect vulnerable individuals, prevent healthcare institutions from overload, and move from the pandemic to the endemic phase
Special Issue: The COVID-19 pandemic: Vaccination strategies and global health policies
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Are we past the COVID-19 Pandemic? Insights from Singapore
Get PDFObjective: This study aims to examine the interplay between high policy stringency, vaccination rates and epidemiological outcomes to develop insights on COVID-19 policy transition in Singapore Methods: The CPTI (Categorising Policy & Technology Interventions) framework was used to classify reported interventions from January 2021 to October 2022. To analyse the impact of vaccine measures, an additional category was created. The highest monthly proportion of de-escalated measures was used as a basis to define the periods that mark the policy transition in Singapore i.e. Phase 2 and 3. Proportions of significantly escalated measures were calculated and analysed against full and booster vaccination rates, alongside epidemiological indicators – monthly total number of infections and deaths, and monthly average active hospitalisation and ICU cases. Results: Implementation of highly stringent policies were observed to have reduced in intensity as vaccination rates picked up from Phase 2 to 3. Containment measures were the most frequently and consistently adopted beside vaccine policies. Epidemiological indicators appeared to be generally lower in Phase 3 than Phase 2. Specifically, despite reduced intensity of stringent polices, hospitalisation and ICU cases were observed to remain relatively low when vaccination rates were correspondingly higher in Phase 3 compared to Phase 2. Conclusion: The descriptive analysis of COVID-19 policy shift in Singapore based on selected indicators preliminarily suggested its successful transition from the pandemic to endemic phase in its response strategies. A policy transition plan should consider the significance of vaccination rates in an exit strategy that protects the population against worse health outcomes
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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