Effectiveness of using clinical guidelines for conducting palliative care family meetings in Japan

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to pilot test the effectiveness of using recently developed clinical guidelines from Australia for conducting palliative care family meetings in Japan. METHODS: Palliative care family meetings were conducted using clinical guidelines with 15 primary family carers of cancer patients who were admitted to an acute care hospital in Japan. Using the pre-family meeting questionnaire, the primary carers were asked to write key concerns to discuss during the family meetings and rate their concerns via a numerical rating scale: how upset/worried they were about the problem, frequency in which problem occurs, life interference with the problem, and the confidence to deal with the problem. Within 3 days after the meeting, the primary carers were asked to complete the post-meeting questionnaire to evaluate the effectiveness of the family meeting. RESULTS: There was a significant improvement in family carers' psychological well-being in the post-meeting questionnaires compared to the pre-meeting questionnaires as follows: how upset/worried they were about the problem, t(14)?=?3.1071, p?

Introducing the CTA concept

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a new observatory for very high-energy (VHE) gamma rays. CTA has ambitions science goals, for which it is necessary to achieve full-sky coverage, to improve the sensitivity by about an order of magnitude, to span about four decades of energy, from a few tens of GeV to above 100 TeV with enhanced angular and energy resolutions over existing VHE gamma-ray observatories. An international collaboration has formed with more than 1000 members from 27 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America. In 2010 the CTA Consortium completed a Design Study and started a three-year Preparatory Phase which leads to production readiness of CTA in 2014. In this paper we introduce the science goals and the concept of CTA, and provide an overview of the project. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.