BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Referring clinicians' experiences of exercise referral schemes (ERS) can provide valuable insights into their uptake. However, most qualitative studies focus on patient views only. This paper explores health professionals' perceptions of their role in promoting physical activity and experiences of a National Exercise Referral Scheme (NERS) in Wales. DESIGN Qualitativ...

Incorporation of effective backbone sampling into protein simulation and design is an important step in increasing the accuracy of computational protein modeling. Recent analysis of high-resolution crystal structures has suggested a new model, termed backrub, to describe localized, hinge-like alternative backbone and side-chain conformations observed in the crystal lattice. The model involves i...

BACKGROUND Mild depression and anxiety are common problems in general practice. They can be managed by the general practitioner (GP) alone or referred. Previous quantitative studies have shown a large variation between GPs in terms of referral behaviour. The reasons for this variation are not fully understood. AIM To describe and analyse GP's decision-making processes when considering who sho...

We present a Monte Carlo integration method, antithetic Markov chain sampling (AMCS), that incorporates local Markov transitions in an underlying importance sampler. Like sequential Monte Carlo sampling, the proposed method uses a sequence of Markov transitions to guide the sampling toward influential regions of the integrand (modes). However, AMCS differs in the type of transitions that may be...

Background: Self-referral to higher-level hospitals by women seeking skilled birth attendance services reflects in part their non-adherence established referral pathways. This choice results an inappropriate utilization of resources within health system. The Kenya Health Sector Referral Strategy aims at optimising the and access facilities. aim this study was determine prevalence factors associ...

Simulation of small molecules, polymers, and proteins in dense solvents is an important class of problems both for processing of materials in liquids and for simulation of proteins in physiologically relevent solvent states. However, these simulations are expensive and sampling is inefficient due to the ubiquitous dense solvent. Even in the absence of the dense solvent, rigorous sampling of the...

In this paper, we propose a sampler for the product-form solution of basic queueing networks, closed Jackson networks with single servers. Our approach is sampling via Markov chain, but it is NOT a simulation of behavior of customers in queueing networks. We propose a new ergodic Markov chain whose unique stationary distribution is the product form solution of a closed Jackson Network, thus we ...

Markov chain sampling methods that adapt to characteristics of the distribution being sampled can be constructed using the principle that one can sample from a distribution by sampling uniformly from the region under the plot of its density function. A Markov chain that converges to this uniform distribution can be constructed by alternating uniform sampling in the vertical direction with unifo...