Workload and patterns of care in the Timmins Family Health Team in Ontario.

Objective: To characterize primary care physician and nurse practitioner ("GP") workload and availability, and any relationship with daytime, low-acuity emergency department (ED) and after-hours walk-in clinic (WIC) visit counts.

Design: Retrospective database review.

Setting: Timmins, Ont, with 5 family health team (FHT) office sites, 1 after-hours FHT WIC, and 1 ED.

Using blackboard collaborate, a digital web conference tool, to support nursing students placement learning: A pilot study exploring its impact.

Ensuring student nurses, when in clinical placement areas, receive good quality Higher Education Institution (HEI) lecturer support is challenging. This is because conventional HEI placement support, is resource intensive and arguably infeasible with growing student numbers. Evidence suggests, however, that online collaborative learning solutions (e.

Outcomes of transmastoid resurfacing for superior canal dehiscence using a cartilage overlay technique.

Objective: Superior semicircular canal dehiscence is a well-described syndrome with potentially debilitating symptoms. We report on the audiologic and long-term symptom outcomes of 10 patients (12 ears) undergoing a cartilage overlay transmastoid resurfacing technique.

Methods: Retrospective chart review and cross-sectional outcomes recall survey were used.

ResistanceSim: development and acceptability study of a serious game to improve understanding of insecticide resistance management in vector control programmes.

The use of insecticides is the cornerstone of effective malaria vector control. However, the last two decades has seen the ubiquitous use of insecticides, predominantly pyrethroids, causing widespread insecticide resistance and compromising the effectiveness of vector control. Considerable efforts to develop new active ingredients and interventions are underway.

Observer aging and long-term avian survey data quality.

Long-term wildlife monitoring involves collecting time series data, often using the same observers over multiple years. Aging-related changes to these observers may be an important, under-recognized source of error that can bias management decisions. In this study, we used data from two large, independent bird surveys, the Atlas of the Breeding Birds of Ontario ("OBBA") and the North American Breeding Bird Survey ("BBS"), to test for age-related observer effects in long-term time series of avian presence and abundance.

Widespread reproductive variation in North American turtles: temperature, egg size and optimality.

Theory predicts the existence of an optimal offspring size that balances the trade-off between offspring fitness and offspring number. However, in wild populations of many species, egg size can still vary from year to year for unknown reasons. Here, we hypothesize that among-year variation in population mean egg size of freshwater turtles is partly a consequence of their gonadal sensitivity to seasonal temperatures, a physiological mechanism which principally functions to synchronize reproduction with a favorable time of year.

Heart failure mortality among older Medicare beneficiaries: association with left ventricular function evaluation and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor use.

Background: Left ventricular function evaluation and angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor use are the two basic indicators of heart failure quality of care. In this retrospective follow-up study, we analyzed the association between these two quality indicators and mortality in elderly hospitalized heart failure patients.

Methods: The patients in our study were older Alabama Medicare beneficiaries discharged with a diagnosis of heart failure in 1994.