Improving delirium screening in older adults at the Royal United Hospital, Bath.

Aims/background: Delirium affects around 20% of older inpatients, increasing mortality and length of stay. Around 30% of cases are preventable. The authors sought to determine compliance of the admissions to the Older People's Unit of the Royal University Hospital Bath with the national and internal guidelines for delirium screening and improve its use on admission.

Development of a structured process for fair allocation of critical care resources in the setting of insufficient capacity: a discussion paper.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic there was widespread concern that healthcare systems would be overwhelmed, and specifically, that there would be insufficient critical care capacity in terms of beds, ventilators or staff to care for patients. In the UK, this was avoided by a threefold approach involving widespread, rapid expansion of critical care capacity, reduction of healthcare demand from non-COVID-19 sources by temporarily pausing much of normal healthcare delivery, and by governmental and societal responses that reduced demand through national lockdown. Despite high-level documents designed to help manage limited critical care capacity, none provided sufficient operational direction to enable use at the bedside in situations requiring triage.

Localizing syntactic predictions using recurrent neural network grammars.

Brain activity in numerous perisylvian brain regions is modulated by the expectedness of linguistic stimuli. We leverage recent advances in computational parsing models to test what representations guide the processes reflected by this activity. Recurrent Neural Network Grammars (RNNGs) are generative models of (tree, string) pairs that use neural networks to drive derivational choices.

Improving recruitment of older people to research through good practice.

There is widespread evidence both of the exclusion of older people from clinical research, and of under-recruitment to clinical trials. This review and opinion piece provides practical advice to assist researchers both to adopt realistic, achievable recruitment rates and to increase the number of older people taking part in research. It analyses 14 consecutive recently published trials, providing the number needed to be screened to recruit one older participant (around 3:1), numbers excluded (up to 49%), drop out rates (5-37%) and whether the planned power was achieved.

Rehabilitation of older patients: day hospital compared with rehabilitation at home. Clinical outcomes.

Objectives: to test the hypothesis that older people and their informal carers are not disadvantaged by home-based rehabilitation (HBR) relative to day hospital rehabilitation (DHR).

Design: pragmatic randomised controlled trial.

Setting: four geriatric day hospitals and four home rehabilitation teams in England.

Short-range remote detection of liquid surface contamination by active imaging Fourier transform spectrometry.

An imaging Fourier transform spectrometer developed at TUHH was used for short-range remote detection and identification of liquids on surfaces. The method is based on the measurement of infrared radiation emitted and reflected by the surface and the liquid. A radiative transfer model that takes both the real and imaginary parts of the refractive index of the materials into account has been developed.

Design of a broadband UV-visible alpha-barium borate polarizer.

Until recently, the construction of polarizers for operation below approximately 260 nm were limited to materials such as magnesium fluoride and crystalline quartz. These materials have a much smaller birefringence than calcite, but unlike calcite they have good transmission below 200 nm. These materials are, however, not well suited for Glan-Taylor-type polarizer designs, as they do not produce a large angular separation of the polarized components.

Low-loss ultrabroadband 90 degree optical rotator with collinear input and output beams.

An achromatic device to rotate optical polarization by 90 degrees is described. This is based on a series of reflecting surfaces that rotates incoming light about the optical axis and translates it such that the exiting light is collinear. Polarization rotation is achieved by rotation of the optical beam, as opposed to the more common approach of phase retardation by use of birefringent elements.