OBJECTIVES To investigate capacity to consent to medical treatment (competency) in cognitively impaired patients with PD. BACKGROUND Although competency has been studied empirically in patients with cortical dementia (AD), no empirical studies have examined competency in patients with PD or other subcortical neurodegenerative disorders. METHODS Patients with PD with cognitive impairment (n ...

OBJECTIVE To determine the construct validity of the Australian College of Critical Care Nurses (ACCCN) competency standards as a tool for assessing the clinical practice of specialist level critical care nurses in Australia. DESIGN A comparative descriptive design was used to examine the relationship between the domains, competencies and elements of the ACCCN competency standards. Participan...

OBJECTIVE This study investigated the current state of health sciences libraries' provision of culturally competent services to support health professions education and patient care and examined factors associated with cultural competency in relation to library services and professional development. METHODS This was a cross-sectional study. Data were collected with a survey questionnaire that...

The contribution of this paper is the identification and testing of factors important for the success of Open Source Software (OSS) projects. We present an analysis of OSS communities as virtual organizations and apply Katzy and Crowston’s competency rallying (CR) theory to the case of OSS development projects. CR theory suggests that project participants must develop necessary competencies, id...

Aims of course/workshop Because the urinary bladder can contract voluntarily through myogenic excitation, it would be reasonable to predict that the bladder has the potential for self-excitation. The physiological effects of the hyperpolarization-activated nucleotide-gated (HCN) channel in initiating and modulating bladder excitability need to be investigated. Moreover, the interstitial cells o...

Over the past decades it has been claimed that young people have become less engaged in political parties and that youth sections of political parties are declining. However, there is little comparative international evidence about the extent to which students in junior secondary school form preferences for political parties and intend to align with parties as adults. The International Civic an...

The competency of psychiatric patients to give informed consent is important in respecting patients' decisions as well as protecting patients from undue exploitation. A total of 176 members of the Japanese Society of Psychiatry and Neurology gave a clinical judgment in a questionnaire of competency in five case transcriptions. Their interrater reliability of competency judgment was slight (gene...

A core mission of health professions schools is to educate and train a workforce that will be optimally prepared to provide health care and public health services for the diverse communities that they serve. It is important to create and develop a health care workforce who can understand and assist in the battle against health care disparities. For health care workers and health profession scho...

OBJECTIVES To determine the emergency preparedness competency specific to public health inspectors (PHIs), preparedness limitations and needs of the workforce, as well as to identify important factors that affect the preparedness competency of PHIs. SETTING Cross-sectional survey was conducted in Heilongjiang, a province in northeastern China. PARTICIPANTS A questionnaire was administered t...

The pioneer work of image compression/reconstruction based onfuzzy relational equations (ICF) and the related works are introduced. TheICF regards an original image as a fuzzy relation by embedding the brightnesslevel into [0,1]. The compression/reconstruction of ICF correspond to thecomposition/solving inverse problem formulated on fuzzy relational equations.Optimizations of ICF can be consequ...