Challenge of culture, conscience, and contract to general practitioners' care of their own health: qualitative study

Objective: To explore general practitioners' perceptions of the effects of their profession and training on their attitudes to illness in themselves and colleagues. Design: Qualitative study using focus groups and indepth interviews. Setting: Primary care in Northern Ireland. Participants: 27 general practitioners, including six recently appointed principals and six who also practised occupational medicine part time. Main outcome measures: Participants' views about their own and colleagues' health. Results: Participants were concerned about the current level of illness within the profession. They described their need to portray a healthy image to both patients and colleagues. This hindered acknowledgement of personal illness and engaging in health screening. Embarrassment in adopting the role of a patient and concerns about confidentiality also influenced their reactions to personal illness. Doctors' attitudes can impede their access to appropriate health care for themselves, their families, and their colleagues. A sense of conscience towards patients and colleagues and the working arrangements of the practice were cited as reasons for working through illness and expecting colleagues to do likewise. Conclusions: General practitioners perceive that their professional position and training adversely influence their attitudes to illness in themselves and their colleagues. Organisational changes within general practice, including revalidation, must take account of barriers experienced by general practitioners in accessing health care. Medical education and culture should strive to promote appropriate self care among doctors.

Other uses of the program 'ARGON.f90'

The purpose of this communication is to show that the program 'ARGON.f90' can be simply extended to model ionization from the excited states of atoms where the active electron has a principal quantum number less than or equal to 3. This fact is illustrated by considering a relatively simple collision involving a proton and a neutral hydrogen atom with principal quantum number n = 2. (C) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Probabilistic program analysis for parallelizing compilers

Parallelizing compilers have difficulty analysing and optimising complex code. To address this, some analysis may be delayed until run-time, and techniques such as speculative execution used. Furthermore, to enhance performance, a feedback loop may be setup between the compile time and run-time analysis systems, as in iterative compilation. To extend this, it is proposed that the run-time analysis collects information about the values of variables not already determined, and estimates a probability measure for the sampled values. These measures may be used to guide optimisations in further analyses of the program. To address the problem of variables with measures as values, this paper also presents an outline of a novel combination of previous probabilistic denotational semantics models, applied to a simple imperative language.