Effects of a Systems-Level Intervention to Improve Trainer Integrity in a Behavioral Healthcare Organization.

Objectives: Direct support professionals (DSPs) play a critical role in health-related outcomes for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) who reside in congregate living settings. Large behavioral healthcare organizations often rely on staff to function as peer trainers for newly hired DSPs. Organizations should adopt empirically supported training techniques to prepare peer trainers for their role and develop systems to ensure ongoing integrity of the training system.

Evaluating the Effects of Technology-Based Self-Monitoring on Positive Staff-Consumer Interactions in Group Homes.

The quality and frequency of positive interactions between staff and consumers are related to reductions in consumer problem behavior and increases in other desired outcomes, such as leisure and self-help skills. Unfortunately, the frequency with which group home staff positively interact with consumers is often low and regularly requires intervention. We evaluated the effects of technology-based self-monitoring on positive interactions between staff and consumers during consumer leisure time.

Evidence-Based Performance Management: Applying Behavioral Science to Support Practitioners.

The science of behavior has effectively addressed many areas of social importance, including the performance management of staff working in human-service settings. Evidence-based performance management entails initial preservice training and ongoing staff support. Initial training reflects a critical first training component and is necessary for staff to work independently within an organization.

Clinical neuropathy scales in neuropathy associated with impaired glucose tolerance.

Aims: Disagreement exists on effective and sensitive outcome measures in neuropathy associated with impaired glucose tolerance (IGT). Nerve conduction studies and skin biopsies are costly, invasive and may have their problems with reproducibility and clinical applicability. A clinical measure of neuropathy that has sufficient sensitivity and correlates to invasive measures would enable significant future research.

HIV-1 reverse transcriptase variants: molecular modeling of Y181C, V106A, L100I, and K103N mutations with nonnucleoside inhibitors using Monte Carlo simulations in combination with a linear response method.

The energies and physical descriptors for the binding of 21 novel 1-(2,6-difluorobenzyl)-2-(2,6-difluorophenyl)-benzimidazole (BPBI) analogs to HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (RT) variants Y181C, L100I, V106A, and K103N have been determined using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. The crystallographic structure of the lead compound, 4-methyl BPBI, was used as a starting point to model the inhibitors in both the mutant bound and the unbound states. The energy terms and physical descriptors obtained from the calculations were reasonably correlated with the respective experimental EC50 values for the inhibitors against the various mutant RTs.