INTRODUCTION Prior reports suggest that restrictive ICU visitation policies can negatively impact patients and their loved ones. However, visitation practices in US ICUs, and the hospital factors associated with them, are not well described. METHODS A telephone survey was made of ICUs, stratified by US region and hospital type (community, federal, or university), between 2008 and 2009. Hospit...

In this paper, we study the basic diversity combining techniques and investigate analytically-derived closed-form expressions for the capacities per unit bandwidth for Rayleigh fading channels with equal gain combining (EGC) diversity. We consider different channel performance adaptation policies such as: power and rate adaptation with constant transmit power, channel inversion with fixed rate,...

BACKGROUND The enormous impact of HIV on communities and health services in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean has especially affected nurses, who comprise the largest proportion of the health workforce in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Strengthening action-based leadership for and by nurses is a means to improve the uptake of evidence-informed practices for HIV care. METHODS A p...

Building capacity to improve health through applying health impact assessment (HIA) increases the range of people, organisations and communities who are able to address health problems and, in particular, the problems that arise out of social inequity and social exclusion. To achieve this, a range of strategies is required across the areas of organisational development, workforce development, r...

BACKGROUND Academic faculty involved in public health teaching and research serve as the link and catalyst for knowledge synthesis and exchange, enabling the flow of information resources, and nurturing relations between 'two distinct communities' - researchers and policymakers - who would not otherwise have the opportunity to interact. Their role and their characteristics are of particular int...

There is growing recognition that operational research (OR) should be embedded into national disease control programmes. However, much of the current OR capacity building schemes are still predominantly driven by international agencies with limited integration into national disease control programmes. We demonstrated that it is possible to achieve a more sustainable capacity building effort acr...

The core mission of ELIXIR is to build a stable and sustainable infrastructure for biological information across Europe. At the heart of this are the data resources, tools and services that ELIXIR offers to the life-sciences community, providing stable and sustainable access to biological data. ELIXIR aims to ensure that these resources are available long-term and that the life-cycles of these ...