Publications by authors named "Amanda Mac"

Play spaces are important components of paediatric healthcare environments. They provide children with critical opportunities to experience the social, emotional, and developmental benefits of play while in healthcare settings for appointments or hospitalizations. These spaces can help to mitigate stress, provide a sense of normalcy in unfamiliar environments, and facilitate social engagement for children and their families.

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Background: Ensuring language concordant care through medical interpretation services (MIS) allows for accurate information sharing and positive healthcare experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic led to a regional halt of in-person interpreters, leaving only digital MIS options, such as phone and video. Due to longstanding institutional practices, and lack of accessibility and awareness of these options, digital MIS remained underused.

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Background: Transfers to emergency departments (EDs) from long-term care (LTC) can expose residents to care discontinuities and risks. Virtual platforms can increase the breadth of care available for residents within their facility, thus replacing transfers to EDs when safe and appropriate. The authors aimed to assess whether leveraging a virtual care platform at an LTC facility would reduce the number of transfers to EDs.

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Objectives: This qualitative study aimed to explore the perspectives of Canadian global surgeons with experience developing surgical education partnerships with low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) for the purpose of identifying factors for success.

Design: A purposive sample of leaders from global surgery programmes at Canadian Faculties of Medicine participated in virtual semi-structured interviews. A six-phase thematic analysis was performed using a constructivist lens on verbatim transcripts by three independent researchers.

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Article Synopsis
  • Spirometry and plethysmography are crucial pulmonary function tests, but relying solely on spirometry can result in missed lung disease diagnoses, especially for restrictive conditions.
  • Researchers developed a deep learning model using data from 748 patients to enhance the interpretation of spirometry results without plethysmography.
  • The model demonstrated significantly better accuracy (94.67%) in diagnosing lung conditions compared to trained pulmonologists (66.67%) and decision trees (75.61%), suggesting that deep learning can effectively improve lung disease diagnostics.
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Many patients with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show disturbances in their sleep/wake cycles, and they may be particularly vulnerable to the impact of circadian disruptors. We have previously shown that a 2-weeks exposure to dim light at night (DLaN) disrupts diurnal rhythms, increases repetitive behaviors and reduces social interactions in contactin-associated protein-like 2 knock out (Cntnap2 KO) mice. The deleterious effects of DLaN may be mediated by intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) expressing the photopigment melanopsin, which is maximally sensitive to blue light (480 nm).

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