Strategies to address the shortcomings of commonly used advanced chronic heart failure descriptors to improve recruitment in palliative care research: A parallel mixed-methods feasibility study.

Background: Recruitment challenges contribute to the paucity of palliative care research with advanced chronic heart failure patients.

Aim: To describe the challenges and outline strategies of recruiting advanced chronic heart failure patients.

Design: A feasibility study using a pre-post uncontrolled design.

Integrating care for high-risk patients in England using the virtual ward model: lessons in the process of care integration from three case sites.

Background: Patients at high risk of emergency hospitalisation are particularly likely to experience fragmentation in care. The virtual ward model attempts to integrate health and social care by offering multidisciplinary case management to people at high predicted risk of unplanned hospitalisation.

Objective: To describe the care practice in three virtual ward sites in England and to explore how well each site had achieved meaningful integration.

Thermosediminibacter oceani gen. nov., sp. nov. and Thermosediminibacter litoriperuensis sp. nov., new anaerobic thermophilic bacteria isolated from Peru Margin.

A new group of anaerobic thermophilic bacteria was isolated from enrichment cultures obtained from deep sea sediments of Peru Margin collected during Leg 201 of the Ocean Drilling Program. A total of ten isolates were obtained from cores of 1-2 m below seafloor (mbsf) incubated at 60 degrees C: three isolates came from the sediment 426 m below sea level with a surface temperature of 9 degrees C (Site 1227), one from 252 m below sea level with a temperature of 12 degrees C (Site 1228), and six isolates under sulfate-reducing condition from the lower slope of the Peru Trench (Site 1230). Strain JW/IW-1228P from the Site 1228 and strain JW/YJL-1230-7/2 from the Site 1230 were chosen as representatives of the two identified clades.