Teaching family carers about home based palliative care: Final results from a group education program

Without the considerable support provided by family carers, many patients receiving palliative care would be unable to remain at home. However, family carers typically lack the required information and skills to prepare them for such a role. Pilot work has demonstrated that group education programs for family carers can be readily developed; they are feasible, accessible, and useful. This project sought to build on our pilot research to further examine the effectiveness of a group education program by evaluating the outcomes with a larger number of participants. The program aimed to prepare primary family carers for the role of supporting a relative with advanced, noncurative cancer at home. The psycho-educational program consisted of three consecutive weekly sessions presented in a group format, conducted at six home-based palliative care services across metropolitan and regional Victoria, Australia. The following dependent variables were measured at three time points: carer competence, preparedness, rewards, and information needs. The three time points were: commencement of the program (Time 1), upon completion (Time 2), and two weeks later (Time 3). A total of 156 participants (including the pilot phase) completed Time 1 questionnaires and 96 completed all three time periods (62%). Between Time 1 and Time 2, the intervention had a statistically significant positive effect on preparedness, competence, rewards, and having informational needs met. Outcomes were maintained at Time 3. There was no difference in the effectiveness of the intervention for participants in regional areas compared to participants in metropolitan areas.

This study demonstrated that a group education program to prepare family carers for the role of supporting a dying relative at home was effective. Implications for further research and practice are outlined.

Effects of an integrated medicines management program on medication appropriateness in hospitalized patients

Purpose. The effects of an integrated medicines management (IMM) program on medication appropriateness are discussed.

Individual and Public-Program Adaptation: Coping with Heat Waves in Five Cities in Canada

Heat Alert and Response Systems (HARS) are currently undergoing testing and implementation in Canada. These programs seek to reduce the adverse health effects of heat waves on human health by issuing weather forecasts and warnings, informing individuals about possible protections from excessive heat, and providing such protections to vulnerable subpopulations and individuals at risk. For these programs to be designed effectively, it is important to know how individuals perceive the heat, what their experience with heat-related illness is, how they protect themselves from excessive heat, and how they acquire information about such protections. In September 2010, we conducted a survey of households in 5 cities in Canada to study these issues. At the time of the survey, these cities had not implemented heat outreach and response systems. The study results indicate that individuals' recollections of recent heat wave events were generally accurate. About 21% of the sample reported feeling unwell during the most recent heat spell, but these illnesses were generally minor. Only in 25 cases out of 243, these illnesses were confirmed or diagnosed by a health care professional. The rate at which our respondents reported heat-related illnesses was higher among those with cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses, was higher among younger respondents and bore no relationship with the availability of air conditioning at home. Most of the respondents indicated that they would not dismiss themselves as

Automatic Parallelization in the Paralax Compiler

The efficient development of multi-threaded software has, for many years, been an unsolved problem in computer science. Finding a solution to this problem has become urgent with the advent of multi-core processors. Furthermore, the problem has become more complicated because multi-cores are everywhere (desktop, laptop, embedded system). As such, they execute generic programs which exhibit very different characteristics than the scientific applications that have been the focus of parallel computing in the past.
Implicitly parallel programming is an approach to parallel pro- gramming that promises high productivity and efficiency and rules out synchronization errors and race conditions by design. There are two main ingredients to implicitly parallel programming: (i) a con- ventional sequential programming language that is extended with annotations that describe the semantics of the program and (ii) an automatic parallelizing compiler that uses the annotations to in- crease the degree of parallelization.
It is extremely important that the annotations and the automatic parallelizing compiler are designed with the target application do- main in mind. In this paper, we discuss the Paralax approach to im- plicitly parallel programming and we review how the annotations and the compiler design help to successfully parallelize generic programs. We evaluate Paralax on SPECint benchmarks, which are a model for such programs, and demonstrate scalable speedups, up to a factor of 6 on 8 cores.