Nursing home performance on select publicly reported quality indicators and resident risk of hospitalization: grappling with policy implications

This study examines how resident risk of hospitalization varies in relation to facility performance on select quality indicators (QIs). Using a 15% sample, three years of Medicaid reimbursement data from over 525 nursing homes (NHs) were linked with four years of hospital claims data and facility-level data to investigate whether residents of NHs with worse (better) than expected performance on QIs experienced increased (decreased) risk of hospitalization. Logistic regression results indicate that variations in hospitalization risk among NH residents are explained in part by facility performance on QIs. Residents from NHs with more decubitus ulcers, with greater use of physical restraints, and with a higher than expected incidence of unexplained weight loss/gain experienced increased risk of hospitalization.     

Holding Mutual Vulnerability in Brilliant Sanity

Others’ suffering impacts the body-mind of the clinician, thus exposing his or her own vulnerability during the encounter. Self-defensive reactions naturally arise, probably reflecting one’s own embodied relational history and thus the difficulty to hold difficult affects. Reflecting on some contemplative aspects of Francisco Varela’s life, this paper explores how mindfulness and compassion practice may help therapists in establishing an open and nondissociated relation toward inner and intersubjective worlds. It suggests how particular qualities of being present may act as implicit modeling to mutually regulate and integrate experience. A clinical case investigates the interest of acknowledging mutual embodied vulnerability co-emerging in the encounter, fostering the therapeutic space potential for deep dialogue, connection, and mutual transformation.     

On Being Bad and Good: My Brilliant Friend Muriel Dimen

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on Muriel Dimen’s work on ambivalence as an important factor in female identity formation through a parallel with Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend novels.     

巾帼奋进新征程

March 8 marks International Women's Day each year.To commemorate the occasion this year,Chinese President Xi Jinping on March 6 extended festive greetings and best wishes to Chinese women,from all ethnic groups,and from all walks of life,when he participated in a joint group meeting during the fifth session of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference(CPPCC),the nation's top political advisory body.     

The hunt for a cure for Parkinson's disease

Several exciting new scientific advances have been made in the past decade toward both understanding the causes of and finding a cure for Parkinson's disease. Heartened by an acceleration in research findings in the past several years, the government has recently called for an infusion of funds from both the National Institutes of Health and private foundations into this burgeoning area of biomedical research. Most currently available conventional treatments for the disease only temporarily delay symptom presentation while doing nothing to halt disease progression. However, the rapidly accelerating pace of research in this field has left researchers hopeful that Parkinson's will be the first major age-related neurodegenerative disease for which we have a viable cure. In this article, advances in various areas of Parkinson's disease research are reviewed.     

Two deadly diseases and one nearly fatal cure: The sorry state of American sociology

Recent diagnoses of the contemporary crisis in American sociology generally fail to address some of the discipline's most deeply rooted problems and therefore cannot provide an effective remedy. If sociology is to escape from its current moribund condition in the United States, it must move away from prevalent “biologizing” and “naturalizing” attitudes, while also rejecting the false cure of “postmodernism.” A true renaissance will require a critical approach that combines moderate empiricism and moderate relativism with a strong human-rights perspective. Larry T. Reynolds, is the author of over one hundred publications, including twelve books. A senior fellow of the Rockport Institute, he is also past president of the North Central Sociological Association and former chair of the Marxist section of the American Sociological Association.     

混凝土承重砌块建筑墙体裂缝的防治

承重砌块建筑在我国为刚刚起步发展的新生事物,由南方几个大中城市传入天津地区只不过两三年时间.但由于混凝土承重砌块建筑墙体较之其他体系墙体产生裂缝的几率较大,成为阻碍和制约砌块建筑推广的不利因素.主要原因是混凝土承重砌块建筑刚刚推广,属于新事物,而新事物又往往容易引起人们的特别关注,加之混凝土砌块建筑比普通黏土砖建筑产生裂缝的几率大,而且难以修理,因此混凝土承重砌块建筑遭到种种非议是完全可以理解的.通过对建筑施工及售后服务的实际观察,分析和归纳出砌块墙体产生裂缝的几个原因:     

AZT kill or cure? The social essences of scientific authority

This paper examines differing institutional responses to and interpretation of the same scientific and medical data, and looks at the way in which policies, ostensibly based upon these interpretations, are presented to public audiences. The case study concerns the use of AZT as a prophylactic for injured health care workers. Data was collected from personal in depth interviews in two health authorities and telephone interviews with a further 35 health authorities. Observations include the fact that widely different interpretations of scientific data by scientific and medical experts is likely to be presented to the lay audience in terms of scientific certainty, based on an institutional need for certainty and consensus. Contrary to conventional perspectives which would suggest that scientific knowledge was completed in its expert arena, then applied in different settings, this analysis suggests that the scientific knowledge is socially ‘completed’ or ‘closed’ in each of the different situations in which it is interpreted into practice. Ideal models of both the science and of organisational working practice, appear to have been used as the basis of these different constructions.     

Disability identity and attitudes toward cure in a sample of disabled activists

This study investigates the assumption that disabled people want improvements in their functional abilities, or complete cures. Contrary to this assumption, many disabled activists are found to have attitudes in which they refuse treatment that promises a cure. In order to explain this attitude, different sources of disability identity are isolated as potential predictor variables. A multivariate model reveals that self-identity related to a personal affirmation of disability is a significant predictor of refusal of treatment, as is the age of onset of disability. Implications for interactions with medical professionals and utility-based modeling of medical treatment seeking are discussed.     

Feral pigeon (Columba livia var. domestica) management in low-density urban areas: prevention is better than cure

Urban Ecosystems - Currently, there are naturalized populations of feral pigeon (Columba livia var. domestica) worldwide with an estimated global population between 165 and 330 million individuals....     

建立问责机制,医治城市建筑“短命症”

一、城市建筑“短命”是对资源环境和财富的巨大浪费 我国的城市化．正处于加速进程中。在新一轮城市建设热潮中。频频爆出建筑“短命症”问题．值得高度关注。而这些至少可以使用100年的高楼大厦．仅仅使用了十几年．便因与当期的城市规划不符或影响了其他大型公建等原因．而被草草结束了“生命”。     

Book Review: Private Charity and Public Inquiry: A History of the Filer and Peterson Commissions,by Eleanor L. Brilliant. Indiana University Press,Bloomington, IN 2000

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Work as a cure for mental illnesses? Opportunism and seeking ways in psychology and psychiatry in the first decades of state socialism in Hungary

ABSTRACT

In Hungary, until the end of the 1940s, there were two main established methods of occupying the mentally ill who were fit for work. From the end of the nineteenth century, a lesser number of patients underwent work therapy in mental asylums, whereas the others were treated with so-called family therapy (otherwise known as the heterofamilial system), exploiting the capacities of families in the countryside. As an important part of this, the mentally ill helped in housekeeping and agricultural work. However, following the political and ideological turn of 1948, the latter form of treatment became debated, and then it was gradually superseded. Parallel to this process, work therapy came to be the most popular type of treatment for mental illnesses, as work formed the basis of the ideology of the communist state, and thus, healing through work harmonized with the general tendencies of the era. This article examines texts related to work therapy published in neurological–psychiatric and psychological journals and monographs between 1954 and 1964. However, although work therapy appeared to be the “handmaiden of ideology,” and even though it was supposed to fulfil a particular role, in reality, the role and perception of work therapy were a lot more complicated.     

Diversity with a Difference:

No abstract available for this article.