A Qualitative Study of the Theory Behind the Chairs: Balancing Lean-Accelerated Patient Flow With the Need for Privacy and Confidentiality in an Emergency Medicine Setting.

Background: Many emergency departments (EDs) have used the Lean methodology to guide the restructuring of their practice environments and patient care processes. Despite research cautioning that the layout and design of treatment areas can increase patients' vulnerability to privacy breaches, evaluations of Lean interventions have ignored the potential impact of these on patients' informational and physical privacy. If professional regulatory organizations are going to require that nurses and physicians interact with their patients privately and confidentially, we need to examine the degrees to which their practice environment supports them to do so.

Easier and Faster Is Not Always Better: Grounded Theory of the Impact of Large-Scale System Transformation on the Clinical Work of Emergency Medicine Nurses and Physicians.

Background: The effectiveness of Lean Thinking as a quality improvement method for health care has been contested due, in part, to our limited contextual understanding of how it affects the working conditions and clinical workflow of nurses and physicians. Although there are some initial indications, arising from prevalence surveys and interviews, that Lean may intensify work performed within medical environments, the evidence base still requires detailed descriptions of the changes that were actually introduced to individuals' clinical workflow and how these changes impacted health care professionals.

Objective: The aim of this study was to explore ways in which a Lean intervention may impact the clinical work of emergency medicine nurses and physicians.

Measuring Electronic Health Record Use in Primary Care: A Scoping Review.

Background: Simple measures of electronic health record (EHR) adoption may be inadequate to evaluate EHR use; and positive outcomes associated with EHRs may be better gauged when varying degrees of EHR use are taken into account. In this article, we aim to assess the current state of the literature regarding measuring EHR use.

Objective: This article conducts a scoping review of the literature to identify and classify measures of primary care EHR use with a focus on the Canadian context.

The development and assessment of an online microscopic anatomy laboratory course.

Increasing enrollment in post-secondary institutions across North America, along with an increase in popularity of and demand for distance education is pressuring institutions to offer a greater number and variety of courses online. A fully online laboratory course in microscopic anatomy (histology) which can be taught simultaneously with a face-to-face (F2F) version of the same course has been developed. This full year course was offered in the Fall/Winter (FW) terms in both F2F and online formats.

Detection of cytomegalovirus in whole blood using three different real-time PCR chemistries.

Several different primer-probe chemistries have been produced commercially for real-time PCR detection and quantification of cytomegalovirus, but there are few studies evaluating their relative performance. We assessed three such commercial reagents with respect to analytical and clinical operating characteristics. The samples included 149 clinical whole blood specimens that were de-identified and assayed in parallel with all primer-probe systems.

Functional characterisation of the regulatory subunit of cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase A homologue of Giardia lamblia: Differential expression of the regulatory and catalytic subunits during encystation.

To understand the functional roles of protein kinase A (PKA) during vegetative and differentiating states of Giardia parasites, we studied the structural and functional characteristics of the regulatory subunit of PKA (gPKAr) and its involvement in the giardial encystment process. Molecular cloning and characterisation showed that gPKAr contains two tandem 3'5'-cyclic adenosine monphosphate (cyclic AMP) binding domains at the C-terminal end and the interaction domain for the catalytic subunit. A number of consensus residues including in vivo phosphorylation site for PKAc and dimerisation/docking domain are present in gPKAr.

Zinc supplementation decreases hepatic copper accumulation in LEC rat: a model of Wilson's disease.

The effect of dietary zinc (Zn) supplementation on copper (Cu)-induced liver damage was investigated in Long-Evans Cinnamon rats (LEC), a model for Wilson's disease (WD). Four-week-old LEC (N=64) and control Long-Evans (LE) (N=32) female rats were divided into two groups; one group was fed with a Zn-supplemented diet (group I) and the other was given a normal rodent diet (group II). LEC rats were killed at 6, 8, 10, 12, 18, and 20 wk of age; the LE control rats were killed at 6, 12, 18, and 20 wk of age.