OBJECTIVE To assess blood pressure measurement by health professionals of a public hospital in S o Paulo State. METHODS Semi-structured interviews and direct observation were performed with a verification list according to the criteria reported by Perloff et al. One hundred and five health professionals took part in the study. After measuring blood pressure, the level of concordance between t...

BACKGROUND: There are over 16 000 nursing homes in the United States (US), among which approximately 70% of residents are cognitively impaired. Reflecting this, approximately 20% of US nursing homes maintain Special Dementia Care Units (SCUs). SCUs supposedly provide more staff time and more specialized staff assignments to residents than do traditional care units. AIMS OF THE STUDY: This paper...

BACKGROUND Support with managing medicines at home is a common reason for older people to receive community nursing services. With population ageing and projected nurse shortages, reliance on nurses may not be sustainable. We developed and tested a new workforce model: 'Workforce Innovation for Safe and Effective (WISE) Medicines Care', which enabled nurses to delegate medicines support home vi...

The effects of two different prevention programmes on: (1) reported neck, shoulder and back pain, (2) perceived physical exertion at work and perceived work-related psychosocial factors, were evaluated by questionnaires after 12 and 18 months. Female nursing aides and assistant nurses (n = 282) working in the home-care services, were randomly assigned to one of three groups for: (1) individuall...

BACKGROUND Unregulated health care aides provide the majority of direct health care to residents in long term care homes. Lower job satisfaction as reported by care aides is associated with increased turnover of staff. Turnover leads to inferior job performance and negatively impacts quality of care for residents. This study aimed to determine the individual and organizational variables associa...

The Safe Home Care Project investigated both qualitatively and quantitatively a range of occupational safety and health hazards, as well as injury and illness prevention practices, among home care aides in Massachusetts. This article reports on a hazard identified by aides during the study's initial focus groups: smoking by home care clients on long-term oxygen therapy. Following the qualitativ...

The effect of Earth albedo variation on the pointing and tracking subsystem of a planetaly optical communication package is analyzed. By studying the Cramer-Rao bound of the tracking error variance, it is shown that, when the Earth albedo is precisely known, the variance in spatial tracking error is inversely proportional to the total signal count. In contrast, a small uncertainty in the Earth ...

Within the general framework of active imaging we address the degree of polarization (DOP) estimation in the presence of additive Gaussian detector noise. We first study the performance of standard DOP estimators and propose a method to increase estimation precision using physically relevant a priori information. We then consider the realistic case of nonuniform illumination distribution. We de...