Releasing time to care: a quality improvement project aimed to increase direct rehabilitation time in a Stroke Rehabilitation Centre.

Stroke is a leading cause of disability among adults, and any treatment that improves functional outcome, like higher intensity of rehabilitation therapy, can significantly reduce its financial burden. Clinicians on a stroke rehabilitation ward are expected to track and nationally report on rehabilitation time to contribute to the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme (SSNAP), a process that was manual, paper-based, time-consuming and redundant, which in turn impacted on a reduction in clinical time to provide stroke rehabilitation. We aimed to release 20% of clinical time by reducing inefficiencies within their time management and reporting process, ensuring that clinicians had more time available for direct patient care.

Feasibility, Acceptability, and Preliminary Efficacy of the Taking Care of Us Intervention for Couples Living With Heart Failure.

Background And Objectives: Despite the significant impact of heart failure on both members of the care dyad, few interventions focus on optimizing the health of the dyad. The current study examined the feasibility and acceptability of the novel Taking Care of Us (TCU) program with mid-late-life couples living with heart failure and explored preliminary efficacy.

Research Design And Methods: This NIH Stage I study used a 2-arm randomized controlled trial with pretest-post-test design and an additional 5-month follow-up to compare TCU with an educational counseling attention-control condition.

Engineering synthetic phosphorylation signaling networks in human cells.

Protein phosphorylation signaling networks have a central role in how cells sense and respond to their environment. We engineered artificial phosphorylation networks in which reversible enzymatic phosphorylation cycles were assembled from modular protein domain parts and wired together to create synthetic phosphorylation circuits in human cells. Our design scheme enabled model-guided tuning of circuit function and the ability to make diverse network connections; synthetic phosphorylation circuits can be coupled to upstream cell surface receptors to enable fast-timescale sensing of extracellular ligands, and downstream connections can regulate gene expression.

PGMweb: an online tool for visualizing the X-ray beam path through plane grating monochromators.

We present here a newly developed software tool (called PGMweb) for computing and simulating the X-ray beam path through a plane grating monochromator (PGM), a key component in soft X-ray beamlines at modern synchrotron and free-electron laser facilities. A historical overview of the development of PGMs is presented, with special attention dedicated to the collimated PGM optical scheme found at several X-ray facilities worldwide. The analytical expressions that fully describe the geometry of a PGM are derived and have been implemented as functions in a Python library (pyplanemono).

Health Outcomes 50 Years After Preterm Birth in Participants of a Trial of Antenatal Betamethasone.

Background And Objectives: Preterm birth results in neonatal and childhood morbidity and mortality. Additionally, population-based studies show poorer cardiovascular health in adult survivors, but a full range of health outcomes has not been investigated into midlife. We aimed to assess the health outcomes after preterm vs term birth at 50 years in survivors of a randomized trial of antenatal betamethasone.