Characteristics and analysis of PM2.5 particles in a light-polluted atmosphere in winter.

To study the micro-morphological characteristics of PM2.5 and its effect on ambient air quality, a 7500F scanning electron microscope (SEM) was utilized in this study to examine the micromorphology and elemental composition of PM2.5 and its impact on ambient air quality during heavily polluted weather in Yining City in the winter of 2018-2019.

The Financial Impact of an Employee Wellness Program Focused on Cardiovascular Disease Risk Reduction.

Background: Evidence for the effectiveness and cost-savings of workplace wellness programs (WWPs) is varied, likely due to the variability in program design, as not all WWPs meet the five-point criteria of a "comprehensive WWP" set by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Learning health system linchpins: information exchange and a common data model.

Objective: To demonstrate the potential for a centrally managed health information exchange standardized to a common data model (HIE-CDM) to facilitate semantic data flow needed to support a learning health system (LHS).

Materials And Methods: The Rhode Island Quality Institute operates the Rhode Island (RI) statewide HIE, which aggregates RI health data for more than half of the state's population from 47 data partners. We standardized HIE data to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) CDM.

Research Progress on the Quality, Extraction Technology, Food Application, and Physiological Function of Rice Bran Oil.

Rice bran oil is recommended by the World Health Organization as one of the three major healthy edible oils (along with corn and sesame oils), owing to its unique fatty acid composition and functional components. This study screened, organized, and analyzed a large number of studies retrieved through keyword searches, and investigated the nutritional value and safety of rice bran oil. It reviews the stability of raw rice bran materials and the extraction and refining process of rice bran oil and discusses food applications and sub-health regulations.

An Intersectional Approach to Cervical Cancer Screening Disparities by Race/Ethnicity and Immigrant Status.

Disparities in cervical cancer (CC) screening exist within racial/ethnic minority and immigrant groups. However, few studies have explored the joint influence of race/ethnicity and immigrant status on screening, and the disparities that have been identified by existing studies remain incompletely explained. This study aims to identify the joint influence of race/ethnicity and immigrant status on CC screening and elucidate the barriers contributing to identified disparities.

Reducing catheter-associated urinary tract infections in a large health system: a quality improvement approach using a fractal management system.

Objective: Although preventable through established infection control practices, catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) remain prevalent in acute-care settings. Our goal was to improve the CAUTI rates through multiple hospitals through implementing sustainable practices, including enhancing communication, provider engagement, accountability, and transparency in reporting to achieve long-term improvements.

Design: Quality improvement with multiple levels of interventions.

Modeling freshwater plankton community dynamics with static and dynamic interactions using graph convolution embedded long short-term memory.

Given the frequent association between freshwater plankton and water quality degradation, several predictive models have been devised to understand and estimate their dynamics. However, the significance of biotic and abiotic interactions has been overlooked. In this study, we aimed to address the importance of the interaction term in predicting plankton community dynamics by applying graph convolution embedded long short-term memory networks (GC-LSTM) models, which can incorporate interaction terms as graph signals.

Gene synthesis design: a pythonic approach.

Researchers often need to synthesize genes of interest in this era of synthetic biology. Gene synthesis by PCR assembly of multiple DNA fragments is a quick and economical method that is widely applied. Up to now, there have been a few software solutions for designing fragments in gene synthesis.

Who's in control? Situating expertise, (mis)trust, and power among the Latine/Hispanic community in COVID-19's liminal moments.

Background: Research has established the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Indigenous, and People of color (BIPOC) communities, and the barriers to vaccine trust and access among these populations. Focusing on perceptions of safety, access, and trustworthiness, studies often attach barriers to community-members, and discuss vaccines as if developed from an objective perspective, or "view from nowhere" (Haraway).

Objective: We sought to follow Haraway's concept of "situated knowledges," whereby no one truth exists, and information is understood within its context, to understand the exertions of expertise surrounding vaccines.

Methods to Increase Reliability in Quality Improvement Projects.

Although many quality improvement initiatives in health care see early and laudable success, 1 of the greatest challenges is sustaining the gains and avoiding the natural tendency of systems to revert to their original state, function, and outcomes. Reliability science describes a mathematical and systematic framework for understanding the level of reliability of interventions, and therefore the anticipated success and failure rate of both the steps of a process and the cumulative process overall. Successful utilization of this framework, along with the mindful organizing principles of high-reliability organizations, will facilitate ongoing and long-lasting improvement in outcomes.

Augmenting bacterial similarity measures using a graph-based genome representation.

Unlabelled: Relationships between bacterial taxa are traditionally defined using 16S rRNA nucleotide similarity or average nucleotide identity. Improvements in sequencing technology provide additional pairwise information on genome sequences, which may provide valuable information on genomic relationships. Mapping orthologous gene locations between genome pairs, known as synteny, is typically implemented in the discovery of new species and has not been systematically applied to bacterial genomes.

Activation and modulation of the AGEs-RAGE axis: Implications for inflammatory pathologies and therapeutic interventions - A review.

Chronic inflammation is a common foundation for the development of many non-communicable diseases, particularly diabetes, atherosclerosis, and tumors. The activation of the axis involving Advanced Glycation End products (AGEs) and their receptor RAGE is a key promotive factor in the chronic inflammation process, influencing the pathological progression of these diseases. The accumulation of AGEs in the body results from an increase in glycation reactions and oxidative stress, especially pronounced in individuals with diabetes.

Why Assuring the Quality of Antimicrobials Is a Global Imperative.

Poor-quality antimicrobial medicines continue to proliferate across supply chains, threatening patients' health and safety, especially in low- and middle-income regions. This article discusses consequences and risks of antimicrobial resistance and other ways in which antimicrobial medicines can be of poor quality and recommends regulatory and policy reforms to help maintain supply chain resilience and quality of antimicrobial medicines.

Occurrence, removal, and prioritization of organic micropollutants in four full-scale wastewater treatment plants in Korea.

This study investigated the occurrence, removal rate, and potential risks of 43 organic micropollutants (OMPs) in four municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in Korea. Results from two-year intensive monitoring confirmed the presence of various OMPs in the influents, including pharmaceuticals such as acetaminophen (pain relief), caffeine (stimulants), cimetidine (H-blockers), ibuprofen (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs- NSAIDs), metformin (antidiabetics), and naproxen (NSAIDs) with median concentrations of >1 μg/L. Some pharmaceuticals (carbamazepine-anticonvulsants, diclofenac-NSAIDs, propranolol-β-blockers), corrosion inhibitors (1H-benzotriazole-BTR, 4-methyl-1H-benzotriazole-4-TTR), and perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) were negligibly removed during WWTP treatment.

Improving Employee Safety Through a Comprehensive Patient Behavioral Program.

Background: Health care workers in the United States are facing increasing rates of exposure to aggressive behavior, resulting in an increase in employee injuries related specifically to patient behavioral events. By leveraging interprofessional collaboration and system-level innovation, we aimed to reduce the rate of employee injuries related to patient behavioral events at a children's hospital by 50% over a 3-year period.

Methods: An interdisciplinary quality improvement team comprising physicians, behavior analysts, nursing, and other key stakeholders developed a comprehensive behavior program in our children's hospital.

Mapping a Way to Displaced Persons' Access to Quality Medicines.

Reliable, adequate supply of essential items, including quality-assured medicines, is hard to maintain in refugee camps in low- and middle-income countries. Disruption of medicine supply chains delays treatment for displaced persons and drives procurement of poor-quality products, often from unauthorized or unlicensed sellers. This article explains how current strategies and policies disrupt reliable flow of safe medicines to refugee camps and calls on stakeholders to rigorously map medicine supply chains to refugee camps, which would help identify strategies to improve displaced persons' access to quality-assured medicines.

Can pain be self-managed? Pain change in vulnerable participants to a health education programme.

Chronic pain exerts a significant impact on the quality of life, giving rise to both physical and psycho-social vulnerabilities. It not only leads to direct costs associated with treatments, but also results in indirect costs due to the reduced productivity of affected individuals. Chronic conditions can be improved by reducing modifiable risk factors.

GJ Express: an improvement initiative to decrease sedation and anesthesia for gastrojejunostomy tube exchanges.

Background: Overuse of sedation and anesthesia causes delays in gastrojejunostomy tube (GJ) exchanges, increased risk of complications, unnecessary use of resources, preventable hospital admissions, and an adverse impact on patient and family experience. Our hospital was over-utilizing sedation and anesthesia, and we aimed to decrease this use from 78% to 20% within two years.

Methods: An interdisciplinary quality improvement team comprehensively evaluated current processes for GJ tube exchanges through a retrospective chart review for baseline data with prospective time series analysis after improvement implementation.

Multiuser immersive virtual reality simulation for interprofessional sepsis recognition and management.

Introduction: Sepsis is a leading cause of pediatric mortality. While there has been significant effort toward improving adherence to evidence-based care, gaps remain. Immersive multiuser virtual reality (MUVR) simulation may be an approach to enhance provider clinical competency and situation awareness for sepsis.

Assessment of bioactive chemicals in wastewater effluents and surface waters using in vitro bioassays in the Nakdong River basin, Korea.

Organic micropollutants present in effluents of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) can negatively affect the quality of receiving waters or drinking water sources. The present work monitored the concentration of bioactive chemicals using a battery of in vitro bioassays in 14 WWTP effluents, 2 effluent-dominant streams, and 5 river waters in the Nakdong River basin, Korea, for a two-year period. The WWTP effluents showed AR/ERα/TRβ (androgen/estrogen/thyroid hormone) activities at a few to tens ng/L, PAH/PPARγ/p53 (polycyclic-aromatic-hydrocarbon/lipid metabolism/genotoxicity) activities at hundreds ng/L, and PXR/Nrf2 (xenobiotic metabolism/oxidative stress) activities at tens to hundreds μg/L as bioanalytical equivalent concentrations.

Interventions to Reduce Electronic Health Record-Related Burnout: A Systematic Review.

Background: Electronic health records are a significant contributing factor in clinician burnout, which negatively impacts patient care.

Objectives: To identify and appraise published solutions that aim to reduce EHR-related burnout in clinicians.

Methods: A literature search strategy was developed following the guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses.

LNAPL migration processes based on time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography.

Contamination from light non-aqueous phase liquids (LNAPLs) and their derivatives, arising from exploration, production, and transportation, has become a prevalent pollution source. This poses direct threats to human health. However, conventional investigative methods face limitations when applied to studying the extent and migration process of LNAPL contamination, as well as the redistribution of LNAPL during groundwater level fluctuations.