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PubMed2004

Steric control of coordination number: A series of Mo(VI) dioxo diaryloxide complexes bearing 4-, 5-, and 6-coordinate environments.

The design, synthesis, and structure determination of a series of Mo(VI) dioxo diaryloxide complexes have been reported. By varying the steric bulk of the aryloxide ligand, control of the coordination number around the Mo(VI) center was achieved. All the complexes are characterized by analytical and spectroscopic techniques. Preliminary reactivity tests indicate that the 4-coordinate compound is the most stable and the 6-coordinate compound is the least stable.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1999

Comparison of five methods used to determine low back disorder risk in a manufacturing environment.

STUDY DESIGN: Five methods for quantifying work-related low back disorder (LBD) risk were used to assess 178 autoworkers from 93 randomly selected production jobs. OBJECTIVE: To determine if five occupational LBD risk evaluation methods yielded similar assessments of manual material handling tasks. SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA: Several techniques are available for quantifying LBD risk in the workplace and are used in industry for job evaluation and redesign. It is unknown whether the methods yield similar results. METHODS: The five job evaluation methods were the 1993 National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health model, the Static Strength Prediction Program, the Lumbar Motion Monitor model, and two variations of the United Auto Workers (UAW)-General Motors Ergonomic Risk Factor Checklist. These methods were selected because they represent common practice within the automotive industry, the result of governmental efforts to protect the workforce, or models thought to be the most scientifically advanced. RESULTS: Intercorrelations between methods ranged between 0.21 and 0.80. Pairwise analysis of risk group classifications identified biases on the part of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health equation, which considered jobs to be of higher risk relative to other methods, and on the part of the Static Strength Prediction Program, which considered nearly all the jobs sampled to be low risk. CONCLUSIONS: There is little agreement among the five quantitative ergonomic analysis methods used. In part, this may be because of their differential focus on acute versus cumulative trauma, thereby suggesting that greater consideration needs to be given to the underlying causes of LBD within a facility before selecting an ergonomic evaluation method.

Ergonomics↗
PubMed1995

Can GPs co-operate after hours in a competitive urban environment?

Before designing an intervention aimed at improving the quality of after-hour general practice services to the residents of a relatively isolated outer suburb of Brisbane, a survey of 247 residents was conducted to assess the provisions of after-hours care. The results of the survey were presented to the suburb's general practitioners (GPs). Meetings with the GPs led to attempts at improved communication, using patient-held Health Summary Cards and doctor-to-doctor clinical feedback forms. Forty-four per cent of the 27 GPs participated in the co-operative scheme. One year later the community was resurveyed to assess the impact of the changes in medical services. There was a small but insignificant increase in satisfaction with the provision of after-hours care from 45% to 48%.

Competitive Behavior↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The impact of work environment, utility, and sampling design on occupational magnetic field exposure summaries.

Most recent epidemiologic studies investigating the potential health effects of occupational magnetic field (MF) exposure have relied on MF measurement data linked to job titles. These measurements are summarized by occupational categories, which represent similar groups of job titles. However, job titles alone explain only a small proportion of exposure variability. A comprehensive MF occupational exposure database was used to (1) develop summary job-specific estimates of magnetic field exposure, (2) evaluate the impact of incorporating work environment data to improve electric and magnetic field exposure assessment, and (3) evaluate the use of random versus nonrandom sampling when estimating mean MF exposure levels by occupational categories. Uniform classification systems were developed for occupational and work environment data. A factorial design was used to summarize and calculate arithmetic means and 95% confidence intervals for occupational MF data, assuming that the total variation in MF exposure resulted from variation in occupation, work environment, utility, worker, and day. Occupation-specific means varied across different work environments, particularly for craft workers. Although within-worker and between-worker variability account for a large proportion (over 50%) of exposure variation, work environment (24%) accounted for more exposure variability than occupation (4.9%) or utility (15%). Some differences were observed when results were compared from surveys that used random and nonrandom sampling; however, these differences were not consistent or systematic. It was concluded that MF exposure assessment should consider work environment in addition to job title to reduce exposure misclassification.

Data Collection↗
PubMed2005

Accessibility of health clubs for people with mobility disabilities and visual impairments.

OBJECTIVE: We sought to examine the accessibility of health clubs to persons with mobility disabilities and visual impairments. METHODS: We assessed 35 health clubs and fitness facilities as part of a national field trial of a new instrument, Accessibility Instruments Measuring Fitness and Recreation Environments (AIMFREE), designed to assess accessibility of fitness facilities in the following domains: (1) built environment, (2) equipment, (3) swimming pools, (4) information, (5) facility policies, and (6) professional behavior. RESULTS: All facilities had a low to moderate level of accessibility. Some of the deficiencies concerned specific Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines pertaining to the built environment, whereas other deficiency areas were related to aspects of the facilities' equipment, information, policies, and professional staff. CONCLUSIONS: Persons with mobility disabilities and visual impairments have difficulty accessing various areas of fitness facilities and health clubs. AIMFREE is an important tool for increasing awareness of these accessibility barriers for people with disabilities.

Persons with Disabilities↗
PubMed1998

Sustainable production: a proposed strategy for the work environment.

BACKGROUND: In the future, competitive industries will need to design for environment, health and safety as well as for productivity. Although the new areas of pollution prevention and clean production have evolved to address the design of production processes with concerns for the ambient environment, current pollution prevention models do not include explicit concerns for health, safety, and the work environment. The field of occupational health and safety has much to contribute to improve current pollution prevention approaches and solutions. METHODS: The application of work environment disciplines will need to be expanded from the conventional focus on "end-of-pipe" assessment and solutions, which take the production processes and resulting hazards as a given, to include a new focus on materials selection and process redesign. To make this shift, a new framework called "sustainable production" is proposed. The basic unit of sustainable production is the production process. The framework integrates a focus on the ambient and work environment along with a focus on productivity and the economic viability of the business enterprise in setting production process design parameters. RESULTS: By shifting the focus of occupational and environmental health and safety from exposure control to process design, sustainable production reduces the likelihood that concerns for health, safety, and the environment will be seen as antagonistic to productivity and economic development. To move a firm toward sustainable production, occupational health and safety professionals will need to participate in interdisciplinary workplace teams that design and build new production processes and that continuously evaluate and redesign existing processes. CONCLUSIONS: This new strategy requires an expansion of the role of the occupational health and safety professional to include evaluation and redesign of processes that produce goods and services as well as the conventional evaluation of chemical, physical, and biological agents, work practices, and ergonomics. This expansion of occupational and environmental health and safety requires new research to develop the scientific and public policy basis of sustainable production.

Economic Competition↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Evaluation and recommendations from a study of a critical-care waiting room.

The intensive care unit (ICU) waiting room is a dynamic place that influences the satisfaction of families of critically ill patients. Waiting-room comfort and amenities are important, because families often spend a great deal of nonvisiting time there. A quality improvement evaluation of the ICU waiting room at Lehigh Valley Hospital, Allentown, PA, was conducted. Methods included distribution of an 18-item family survey, ethnographic observations, interviews, and assessment of the physical environment. Findings suggest that the role of the receptionist and access to food and other services were important to families and influenced their assessment of the quality of services provided by the ICU.

Academic Medical Centers↗
PubMed2000

Interventions for preventing falls in the elderly.

BACKGROUND: Fractures in the elderly often result from a simple fall. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effects of programmes designed to reduce the incidence of falls in community dwelling, institutionalised, or hospitalised elderly people. SEARCH STRATEGY: We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycLIT, Social Science Citation Index, Dissertation Abstracts, Index to UK Theses, the Cochrane Register of Controlled Trials, and bibliographies of identified studies. We contacted known workers in the field. Trials were also obtained from the Cochrane Musculoskeletal Injuries Group trials register. Date of the most recent search: May 1997. SELECTION CRITERIA: Randomised trials of interventions designed to minimise the effect of, or prevent exposure to, any putative risk factor for falling in elderly individuals living in the community, in institutional care, or in hospital. The main outcomes of interest were number of fallers or falls, or the number sustaining a fall resulting in injury. Trials that focused on intermediate outcomes such as improved balance or did not report fall outcomes, were excluded. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: Two reviewers selected trials for inclusion. For each included trial, quality assessment and data extraction was carried out independently by two reviewers. Results of trials of similar design were pooled. MAIN RESULTS: Eighteen trials and one pre-planned meta-analysis were included. The analysis of four trials which studied the effect of exercise alone did not establish protection against falling (Peto odds ratio 1.05; 95% confidence interval 0.74 to 1.48). Based on one trial, there was no evidence to support exercise in conjunction with health education classes (Peto odds ratio 1.72; 95% confidence interval 0.78 to 3.75), or of health education classes alone (Peto odds ratio 1.25; 95% confidence interval 0.51 to 3.03) for the prevention of falls. However, significant protection against falling was apparent from interventions which targeted multiple, identified, risk factors in individual patients (Peto odds ratio 0.77; 95% confidence interval 0. 64 to 0.91), and from interventions which focused on behavioural interventions targeting environmental hazards plus other risk factors (Peto odds ratio 0.81; 95% confidence interval 0.71 to 0.93). REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS: Health care purchasers and providers contemplating fall prevention programmes should consider health screening of at risk elderly people, followed by interventions which are targeted at both intrinsic and environmental risk factors of individual patients. There is inadequate evidence for the effectiveness of single interventions such as exercise alone or health education classes for the prevention of falls.

Accidental Falls↗
PubMed1999

Asymptotic bias and efficiency in case-control studies of candidate genes and gene-environment interactions: basic family designs.

Case-control designs that use population controls are compared with those that use controls selected from their relatives (i.e., siblings, cousins, or "pseudosibs" based on parental alleles) for estimating the effect of candidate genes and gene-environment interactions. The authors first evaluate the asymptotic bias in relative risk estimates resulting from using population controls when there is confounding due to population stratification. Using siblings or pseudosibs as controls completely addresses this issue, whereas cousins provide only partial protection from population stratification. Next, they show that the conventional conditional likelihood for matched case-control studies can give asymptotically biased effect estimates when applied to the pseudosib approach; the asymptotic bias is toward the null and disappears with disease rarity. They show how to reparameterize the pseudosib likelihood so this approach gives consistent effect estimates. They then show that the designs using population or pseudosib controls are generally the most efficient for estimating the main effect of a candidate gene, followed in efficiency by the design using cousins. Finally, they show that the design using sibling controls can be quite efficient when studying gene-environment interactions. In addition to asymptotic bias and efficiency issues, family-based designs might benefit from a higher motivation to participate among cases' relatives, but these designs have the disadvantage that many potential cases will be excluded from study by having no available controls.

Bias↗
PubMed2001

A new design of equilibrator to monitor carbon dioxide in highly dynamic and turbid environments.

A new design of equilibrator for carbon dioxide monitoring in natural waters is described. It consists in a vertical tube filled with marbles through which water is flowing while equilibrating with a closed air circuit. It offers several advantages compared with classical equilibrators, among which is a fast response time (half-life constant approximately 30 s) and the potential to work in very turbid water. The proposed equilibrator is of particular interest to monitor carbon dioxide in coastal ecosystems, such as estuaries, which are known to be turbid and highly dynamic. Two performance tests and some field results are presented to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed system.

Carbon Dioxide↗
PubMed2001

Design of a CSCL environment for clinical reasoning learning and problem-based learning in medicine.

The medical curriculum is changing, student-centered learning is currently used in medical schools. Problem-based Learning and Clinical Reasoning Learning develop the students' reasoning strategies. CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) technology is used in Problem-Based Learning systems. We have designed a CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) environment for improving group coordination and communication in Clinical Reasoning Learning sessions. To support these new educative technologies, a prototype has been developed.

Clinical Medicine↗
PubMed1997

Object-oriented developmental environment for image-analysis applications: implementation for 2D gel electrophoretogram analysis.

MOTIVATION: The principal motivation was to design an environment for the development of image-analysis applications which would allow the integration of independent modules into one frame and make available tools for their build-up, running, management and mutual communication. RESULTS: The system was designed as modular, consisting of the core and work modules. The system core focuses on overall management and provides a library of classes for build-up of the work modules, their user interface and data communication. The work modules carry practical implementation of algorithms and data structures for the solution of a particular problem, and were implemented as dynamic-link libraries. They are mutually independent and run as individual threads, communicating with each other via a unified mechanism. The environment was designed to simplify the development and testing of new algorithms or applications. An example of implementation for the particular problem of the analysis of two-dimensional (2D) gel electrophoretograms is presented. The environment was designed for the Windows NT operating system with the use of Microsoft Foundation Class Library employing the possibilities of C++ programming language. AVAILABILITY: Available on request from the authors.

Computer Graphics↗