Therapist characteristics were explored as possible predictors of working alliance, rated early and later in therapy both by therapists (n=59) and patients (n=270) in an ongoing multisite project on process and outcome of psychotherapy. Patients and therapists had divergent perspectives on the working alliance. Therapists' experience, training, skill, and progress as therapists did not have any...

Modern practice in perinatology involves a significant portion of invasive procedures. Training in fetal diagnostic procedures is generally accomplished using in vitro model. Fetal therapeutic procedures require a more sophisticated skill. Fetoscopic intervention is most commonly performed for laser dichorionization of the placental in twin-twin transfusion syndrome. A co-ordination between ult...

BACKGROUND Motivational interviewing (MI) is a collaborative, client-centred counselling style aimed at eliciting and strengthening clients' intrinsic motivation to change. There is strong research evidence supporting the efficacy of MI, notably in its application among alcohol and drug abuse populations. MI interventions in smoking cessation may yield modest but significant increases in quitti...

Active listening is a well-known skill applied in human communication to build intimacy and elicit self-disclosure support wide variety of cooperative tasks. When conversational UIs, active from machines can also greater by signaling the users that they are being heard, which have positive outcomes. However, it takes considerable engineering effort training embed skills at scale, given need per...

We present a comprehension-based computational model of UNIX user skill acquisition and performance in a training context (UNICOM). The work extends a comprehension-based theory of planning to account for skill acquisition and learning. Individual models of 22 UNIX users were constructed and used to simulate user performance on successive command production problems in a training context. Compa...

BACKGROUND Flexible sigmoidoscopy, a core skill for the primary care physician, requires learned hand-eye skills that can be difficult to master during residency training. With recent advances in virtual reality simulation technology, simulated flexible sigmoidoscopes are available to family medicine residents for training before their initial and subsequent live patient examinations. The purpo...

The perspectives and practices of health care workers (HCWs) regarding disclosure to HIV-infected children have not been adequately investigated ten years after the roll-out of pediatrics antiretroviral therapy (ART). The aim of the study was to examine the opinions of HCWs about disclosure to HIV-infected children and determine their role in disclosure to children accessing ART in health cente...

BACKGROUND Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has the highest prevalence of HIV globally, and this is due to persistent new HIV infections and decline in HIV/AIDS-related mortality from improved access to antiretroviral (ART) therapy. There is a limited body of work on perspectives of health-care providers (HCPs) concerning disclosing outcomes of HIV investigations to children and adolescents in SSA. Mos...

BACKGROUND Despite many high-quality programs in basic surgical-skill education, the surgical skill of junior doctors varies widely. This, together with the waning interest in surgery as a career among medical students, is a serious issue confronted by hospitals and healthcare systems worldwide. We, therefore, developed and implemented an intensive one-day surgical-skill training course for two...