Kelp deforestation by sea urchin grazing is a widespread phenomenon globally, with vast consequences for coastal ecosystems. The ability of sea urchins to survive on a kelp diet of poor nutritional quality is not well understood and bacterial communities in the sea urchin intestine may play an important role in digestion. A no-choice feeding experiment was conducted with the sea urchin Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis, offering three different seaweeds as diet, including the kelp Saccharina latissima.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To determine the ability of Section GG of the Inpatient Rehabilitation Facility - Patient Assessment Inventory (Section GG)'s quantification of mobility and self-care to predict discharge destination for persons with stroke after inpatient rehabilitation.
Design: Retrospective, observational cohort study.
Setting: 150-bed inpatient rehabilitation facility within a metropolitan health system.
Purpose: Fragmentation in health and social care services can result in poor access to services, lack of continuity and inadequate provision for needs. A focus on integration of services are thus suggested to prevent negative consequences of fragmentation for service recipients. There are, however, few studies that explore the competence needed for integration of services in municipal health and social care organizations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The paper discusses the implementation of a digital workspace to facilitate collaboration in health and social services for vulnerable children and adolescents in eight Norwegian municipalities. The purpose of the workspace is to enhance collaboration independent of space and time. Collaborating services are schools, kindergartens, school health services, educational services and child welfare services.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: New Public Management (NPM) has increased fragmentation in municipal health and social care organizations. In response, post-NPM reforms aim to enhance integration through service integration. Integration of municipal services is important for people with complex health and social challenges, such as concurrent substance abuse and mental health problems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe gradient in health inequalities reflects a relationship between health and social circumstance demonstrating that health worsens as you move down the socioeconomic scale. Norway's Public Health Act (PHA) specifically aims to tackle the gradient by addressing the social determinants of health. In this article, we draw on data from 2 studies that investigated how municipalities in Norway deal with these challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Norway is internationally known today for its political and socio-economic prioritization of equity. The 2012 Public Health Act (PHA) aimed to further equity in the domain of health by addressing the social gradient in health. The PHA's main policy measures were (1) delegation to the municipal level of responsibility for identifying and targeting underserved groups and (2) the imposition on municipalities of a "Health in All Policies" (HiAP) approach where local policy-making generally is considered in light of public health impact.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring an investigation of positive environmental cultures with Enterobacter cloacae from an endobronchial ultrasound scope, possible pseudotransmission was discovered between 2 patients. All reprocessing steps were adhered to and the original equipment manufacture's quality control assessment of the scope could not determine the root cause. Our findings appear to be the first documented case of pseudotransmission from an endobronchial ultrasound scope and suggest bacterial transmission may exist in endoscopes without an elevator channel.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScand J Public Health
February 2018
Aims: The gradient in health inequalities reflects a relationship between health and social circumstance, demonstrating that health worsens as you move down the socio-economic scale. For more than a decade, the Norwegian National government has developed policies to reduce social inequalities in health by levelling the social gradient. The adoption of the Public Health Act in 2012 was a further movement towards a comprehensive policy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContinuous flow methods are utilized in conjunction with direct arylation polymerization (DArP) for the scaled synthesis of the roll-to-roll compatible polymer, poly[(2,5-bis(2-hexyldecyloxy)phenylene)-alt-(4,7-di(thiophen-2-yl)-benzo[c][1,2,5]thiadiazole)] (PPDTBT). PPDTBT is based on simple, inexpensive, and scalable monomers using thienyl-flanked benzothiadiazole as the acceptor, which is the first β-unprotected substrate to be used in continuous flow via DArP, enabling critical evaluation of the suitability of this emerging synthetic method for minimizing defects and for the scaled synthesis of high-performance materials. To demonstrate the usefulness of the method, DArP-prepared PPDTBT via continuous flow synthesis is employed for the preparation of indium tin oxide (ITO)-free and flexible roll-coated solar cells to achieve a power conversion efficiency of 3.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScand J Public Health
August 2017
Aims: One of the goals of the Norwegian Public Health Act is to reduce health inequities. The act mandates the implementation of policies and measures with municipalities and county municipalities to accomplish this goal. The article explores the prerequisites for municipal capacity to reduce health inequities and how the capacity is built and sustained.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Promot Int
December 2017
Worldwide, inequalities in health are increasing, even in well-developed welfare states such as Norway, which in 2012, saw a new public health act take effect that enshrined equity in health as national policy and devolved to municipalities' responsibility to act on the social determinants of health. The act deems governance structures and "Health in All Policies" approaches as important steering mechanisms for local health promotion. The aim of this study is to investigate whether Norway's municipalities address living conditions - economic circumstances, housing, employment and educational factors - in local health promotion, and what factors are associated with doing so.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Antimicrobial resistance presents a threat to quality patient care. Knowledge of localantibacterial susceptibility patterns can guide clinicians in empiric antibacterial administration andassist pharmacists and infectious disease physicians in development of appropriate therapeutic pathways.
Methods: To characterize Wisconsin antibacterial susceptibility patterns and elucidate geographicor temporal variation in antibacterial resistance, a retrospective, observational analysis of antibiogram data was performed.
Aims: The public health coordinator (PHC) is a municipal-government position in Norway whose role is to organise and oversee municipal policies and functions to support national public health goals. This cross-sectional study investigates conditions associated with use of PHCs by Norwegian municipalities in the period immediately before the new Public Health Act came into effect in 2012, decentralising responsibility for citizen health to the municipal level. This study provides descriptive baseline data regarding Norwegian municipalities' use of PHCs in this time - a marker for municipal engagement with inter-sectorial collaboration - before this policy was nationally mandated, and explores whether municipal characteristics such as structure, socio-economic status and extent of Health in All Policies (HiAP) implementation were associated factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The two pillars of public health are health promotion and disease prevention. Based on a notion of governance in the state -local relation as changing from hierarchical via New Public Management (NPM) to New Public Governance (NPG), the governance of public health in Norway is contrasted to governance of public health in the other Nordic states: Denmark, Finland and Sweden.
Aim: The article aims to present and discuss the governance of public health as it is played out in the state-local relationship.
Norwegian national policies have been distinguished by their focus on equity, contributing to comprehensive policies to reduce the social inequities in health (SIH). The newly adopted Public health act, which aims at reducing the SIH, endorses these acknowledgements while highlighting the importance of municipalities as the key actors in public health. Municipal obligations include inter-sectoral policies for health, health impact assessments (HIA), and the development of local health overviews.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAqueous nanoparticle dispersions of a series of three low-band-gap polymers poly[4,8-bis(2-ethylhexyloxy)benzo(1,2-b:4,5-b')dithiophene-alt-5,6-bis(octyloxy)-4,7-di(thiophen-2-yl)(2,1,3-benzothiadiazole)-5,5'-diyl] (P1), poly[(4,4'-bis(2-ethylhexyl)dithieno[3,2-b:2',3'-d]silole)-2,6-diyl-alt-(2,1,3-benzothiadiazole)-4,7-diyl] (P2), and poly[2,3-bis-(3-octyloxyphenyl)quinoxaline-5,8-diyl-alt-thiophene-2,5-diyl] (P3) were prepared using ultrasonic treatment of a chloroform solution of the polymer and [6,6]-phenyl-C(61)-butyric acid methyl ester ([60]PCBM) mixed with an aqueous solution of sodium dodecylsulphate (SDS). The size of the nanoparticles was established using small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) of the aqueous dispersions and by both atomic force microscopy (AFM) and using both grazing incidence SAXS (GISAXS) and grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS) in the solid state as coated films. The aqueous dispersions were dialyzed to remove excess detergent and concentrated to a solid content of approximately 60 mg mL(-1).
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