Health professionals' experiences and views on obstetric ultrasound in Victoria, Australia: A cross-sectional survey.

Background: Obstetric ultrasound is an important tool, aiding in screening, diagnosis, and surveillance throughout pregnancy.

Aims: To explore obstetric doctors', midwives', and sonographers' experiences and views of obstetric ultrasound in Victoria, Australia. To investigate the increasing role of obstetric ultrasound for clinical management, and the adequacy of resources and training for appropriate use of ultrasound in clinical management.

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2023/24: Ion channels.

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2023/24 is the sixth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews, mostly in tabular format, of the key properties of approximately 1800 drug targets, and over 6000 interactions with about 3900 ligands. There is an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (https://www.

Prioritizing population oral health through public policy in Australia: the Victorian experience.

Dental caries, a non-communicable disease, is one of the most prevalent diseases globally and share common modifiable risk factors with obesity such as excess sugar intake. However, prioritization by governments to improve population oral health has been limited and is typically excluded from the discourse of public health policy development. Therefore, interventions that target dental caries can have other co-benefits including obesity prevention.

Implications of a temperature-dependent heat capacity for temperature-gated ion channels.

Temperature influences dynamics and state-equilibrium distributions in all molecular processes, and only a relatively narrow range of temperatures is compatible with life-organisms must avoid temperature extremes that can cause physical damage or metabolic disruption. Animals evolved a set of sensory ion channels, many of them in the family of transient receptor potential cation channels that detect biologically relevant changes in temperature with remarkable sensitivity. Depending on the specific ion channel, heating or cooling elicits conformational changes in the channel to enable the flow of cations into sensory neurons, giving rise to electrical signaling and sensory perception.

Convergence of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy: Updates on OTJR's Occupational Science Section.

Established in 2019, OTJR's Occupational Science Section provides a dedicated venue for showcasing empirical occupational science research and fostering translation of that research into occupational therapy practices. In this invited commentary, the first and second Associate Editors of the Occupational Science Section reflect on its early growth, connecting the foci of the Occupational Science Section to topics discussed at selected occupational science and occupational therapy conferences in 2022. The commentary concludes with a discussion of future possibilities for the Occupational Science Section as it moves forward.

Calcium dependence of both lobes of calmodulin is involved in binding to a cytoplasmic domain of SK channels.

KCa2.1-3 Ca-activated K-channels (SK) require calmodulin to gate in response to cellular Ca. A model for SK gating proposes that the N-terminal domain (N-lobe) of calmodulin is required for activation, but an immobile C-terminal domain (C-lobe) has constitutive, Ca-independent binding.

THE CONCISE GUIDE TO PHARMACOLOGY 2021/22: Ion channels.

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2021/22 is the fifth in this series of biennial publications. The Concise Guide provides concise overviews, mostly in tabular format, of the key properties of nearly 1900 human drug targets with an emphasis on selective pharmacology (where available), plus links to the open access knowledgebase source of drug targets and their ligands (www.guidetopharmacology.

Support for and willingness to be involved in voluntary assisted dying: a multisite, cross-sectional survey study of clinicians in Victoria, Australia.

Background: In the Australian state of Victoria, specialist doctors are central to the operation of voluntary assisted dying (VAD). However, a broad range of clinicians may be involved in the care of patients requesting or using VAD.

Aims: To describe levels of support for and willingness to be involved in VAD and consider factors associated with clinician support for the VAD legislation and physicians' willingness to provide VAD in practice.

Producing precarity: The individualization of later life unemployment within employment support provision.

There have been marked policy shifts within many nations towards 'extended work lives', with such shifts often underpinned by an assumption that individual aging citizens can make the responsible choice to prolong work and thereby avoid dependency on the state. However, possibilities for extended work lives are inequitably distributed, and older workers who become unemployed often face prolonged unemployment and barriers to obtaining sustainable employment. Drawing on findings from an ethnographic study addressing the negotiation of long-term unemployment in two North American cities, this article attends to how jobseekers aged 50 and older, employment support service providers, and organizational stakeholders understood and attempted to manage later life unemployment.

Prolonged Viral Shedding in Patients with Mild to Moderate COVID-19 Disease: A Regional Perspective.

Background: The risk of transmission of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is increasingly understood to be greatest early after symptom onset, however, factors associated with prolonged and increased risk of transmission remain unclear. In settings where COVID-19 prevalence is low, there may be a benefit of extending the period that patients are isolated to decrease the risk of transmission. This study explored the duration of viral shedding in such a location, in patients with mild-moderate COVID-19 disease in Ballarat, Australia.

Towards OPtimising Care of Regionally-Based Cardiac Patients With a Telehealth Cardiology Pharmacist Clinic (TOPCare Cardiology).

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease is a major burden on the health of Australians, and cardiac health disparities exist for those who live outside of metropolitan areas. Poor patient medication literacy was identified by cardiologists at a regional Victorian health service as a barrier to medication optimisation and a factor in inefficiency in their service. Studies in Australia and overseas have shown pharmacists involved in multi-disciplinary and pre-admission models result in more accurate medication histories, increased patient medication knowledge and lower medication related adverse events.

Structural basis of cytoplasmic NaV1.5 and NaV1.4 regulation.

Voltage-gated sodium channels (NaVs) are membrane proteins responsible for the rapid upstroke of the action potential in excitable cells. There are nine human voltage-sensitive NaV1 isoforms that, in addition to their sequence differences, differ in tissue distribution and specific function. This review focuses on isoforms NaV1.

Cultural safety in hospitals: validating an empirical measurement tool to capture the Aboriginal patient experience.

Objective The aim of the present study was to develop a scale to measure cultural safety in hospitals from an Aboriginal patient perspective. Methods The Cultural Safety Survey was designed to measure five key characteristics of cultural safety that contribute to positive hospital experiences among Aboriginal hospital patients. Investigators developed a range of different methods to assess the validity and reliability of the scale using a sample of 316 participants who had attended a New South Wales hospital in the past 12 months.

Occupational Therapists as Street-Level Bureaucrats: Leveraging the Political Nature of Everyday Practice.

Background.: As front-line service providers who often work in systems regulated by governmental bodies, occupational therapists can be conceptualized as "street-level bureaucrats" ( Lipsky, 1980/2010 ) who effect and are affected by policy.

Purpose.

Ancestral reconstruction of protein interaction networks.

The molecular and cellular basis of novelty is an active area of research in evolutionary biology. Until very recently, the vast majority of cellular phenomena were so difficult to sample that cross-species studies of biochemistry were rare and comparative analysis at the level of biochemical systems was almost impossible. Recent advances in systems biology are changing what is possible, however, and comparative phylogenetic methods that can handle this new data are wanted.

Non-Additive Effects of Binding Site Mutations in Calmodulin.

Despite decades of research on ion-sensing proteins, gaps persist in the understanding of ion binding affinity and selectivity even in well-studied proteins such as calmodulin. Site-directed mutagenesis is a powerful and popular tool for addressing outstanding questions about biological ion binding and is employed to selectively deactivate binding sites and insert chromophores at advantageous positions within ion binding structures. However, even apparently nonperturbative mutations can distort the binding dynamics they are employed to measure.

Using Occupational Justice as a Linchpin of International Educational Collaborations.

When designing international educational collaborations, occupational science and occupational therapy educators must consider how occupational justice can be a linchpin for students' learning. This article describes an international collaboration involving 52 undergraduate occupational science students in the United States and 41 undergraduate occupational therapy students in South Africa. The students participated in six synchronous video conferences in 2016, during which they gave group presentations about four occupational science constructs and engaged in general question-and-answer sessions.

A Novel Peptide Restricts Ethanol Modulation of the BK Channel In Vitro and In Vivo.

Alcohol is a widely used and abused substance. A major unresolved issue in the alcohol research field is determining which of the many alcohol target proteins identified to date is responsible for shaping each specific alcohol-related behavior. The large-conductance, calcium- and voltage-activated potassium channel (BK channel) is a conserved target of ethanol.