In common with other healthcare systems, many UK hospitals are moving to shifts of 12 hours or longer as a strategy to reduce costs while maintaining or even enhancing quality. For staff, adopting these longer shifts offers a compressed week, meaning that the work-week is fitted into fewer days by extending daily hours. This change appears to allow organisations to achieve savings on staffing b...

This article is not about your library’s intelligence quotient. It’s about its image quotient—the image that your library projects to its clients. Like the stereotypical “nerd” from our high school years (strong on knowledge, weak on packaging), many information service providers ignore their library’s image. But just as the nerds, despite all their intelligence and personality, often went lone...

MATERIAL AND METHOD All full-term infants (excluding twins) born at McCord's Zulu Hospital, Durban, between June 1, 1950, and January 31, 1951, were weighed daily by one ofus (E.J.S.); 598 babies born by normal vertex delivery, who were well during their stay in hospital, were studied. All were breast-fed on an elastic 3-hourly schedule with a night feed. The babies shared their mothers' beds, ...

BACKGROUND On-call duty among medical interns is characterized by sleep deprivation and stressful working conditions, both of which alter cardiac autonomic modulation. We hypothesized that sleep stability decreased in medical interns during on-call duty. We used cardiopulmonary-coupling (CPC) analysis to test our hypothesis. METHODS We used electrocardiogram (ECG)-based CPC analysis to quanti...

Quality sleep is a problem for the critically ill who are cared for in an environment where interventions night and day are common, staff members are constantly present in relatively high numbers, and treatment is accompanied by a range of changing warning tones and alarms and lights. These critical care units are generally designed without a focus on patient comfort, sleep, and rest and often ...

Services for youth experiencing homelessness (YEH) are designed with limited input from the themselves. This study explored experiences and recommendations services aimed at mitigating negative effects of among youth. A total 45 interviews were conducted YEH (ages 15 to 24, M = 21.5 years) who experienced least one night homelessness. Transcripts coded by using a modified constructivist grounde...

Background: Sleep quality in hospitalized medicine patients is poor, with environmental factors among the most frequently cited reasons. Objective: We tested the efficacy of a non-pharmacologic intervention on the sleep quality of medicine inpatients. Design/Methods: A controlled study to evaluate our non-pharmacologic multidisciplinary 'TUCK-in' protocol (which includes timed lights-off period...

OBJECTIVES To study the relation between irregular work hours, nitrous oxide (N2O) exposure, and the risk of spontaneous abortion. METHODS All 3985 female members of the Swedish Midwives Association in 1989, born in 1940 or later, received a questionnaire on exposure before and during all of their pregnancies. Questions on work conditions covered occupation, extent of employment, workplace, w...

OBJECTIVES This cross-sectional study aimed to explore job satisfaction among healthcare staff in Guangdong following the health system reforms in 2009, and to investigate the association between job satisfaction and work stress, work-family conflict and doctor-patient relationship. DESIGN Cross-sectional survey. SETTING The Fifth National Health Service Survey was carried out in Guangdong,...