This study aims to describe primary care professionals' self-reported attitudes towards evidence-based practice (EBP), attention to information sources, perceptions of the barriers to EBP and strategies to improve insight in EBP and patient care. An e-mail invitation with link to an Internet-based survey was sent to Belgian medical doctors (MDs), nurses and paramedics. Under paramedics, we've i...

arthquakes, hurricanes, fires, toxic spills, and terrorist attacks are examples of natural and man-made calamities that are a tragic fact of life. Emergency personnel such as firemen, paramedics, and police officers who arrive on the scene immediately after the event are referred to as first respon-ders. Their primary goals are to find and rescue survivors and to prevent damage from spreading. ...

The aim was to study hearing loss in a population of aircraft technicians and mechanics and indentify predictors. Equivalent noise levels during a working day were measured and were 70-91 dB (A). Maximal noise level was 119 dB(A). A total of 336 aircraft maintenance personnel answered a self-administered work environment questionnaire (response rate 76%) and underwent audiometric test. The mean...

enjoyed much more than work. “I’m so busy I don’t know how I had time to work!” Others are adrift. One of my physician colleagues, recently retired due to illness, and still adjusting, reported that he met another retired doctor, who summed up his retirement this way: “I used to be important.” Retirement and disability are quite different but may overlap. The person who retires because of a dis...

Introduction The first detailed report about the consequences of the Chernobyl accident was presented to IAEA from the USSR government in August 1986, about 4 months later since the beginning of the accident [1]. According to this report, more than two hundred cases of acute radiation syndrome (ARS) occurred as a result of the accident, among which 29 persons died (besides, two persons died on ...

Bacillus anthracis, the cause of anthrax, has been used as a bioterrorism agent. Because the isolation and identification of B. anthracis by culture can take days, first response units (hazardous materials [HAZMAT], firemen, police, and hospital personnel) desire a quick and easy test that can be done in the field to detect possible B. anthracis contamination (1, 4). To our knowledge, there are...

Moore, S. R. W. (1969). Brit. J. industr. Med., 26, 25-46. The mortality and morbidity of deep sea fishermen sailing from Grimsby in one year. The injuries, illnesses, and deaths of Grimsby deep sea fishermen in the year 1963 have been studied using the trawler log-book as the basic source of information. Additional information has been obtained from other sources. The numbers of man-days saile...

Biological, chemical, and radiological agents can tamper with the activities of medical care providers, patient samples, and medicine administration. This results in a shut down of all medical care, leaving patients at a major risk. The technical challenge is to develop sensors to detect and monitor any violations in the medical care environment before threat to life occurs. Wireless devices mu...

In this paper we present a system that is able to perform cooperative information-seeking dialogues for the interrogation of a text knowledge base. In our system each event (utterance) is represented by logic programming facts which are used to dynamically update the previous user model. Using this approach it is possible to represent new events as update logic programs and to obtain the new “m...

In this paper we present a web based legal information retrieval system which is able to support cooperative interactions between users and a legal knowledge base. The legal knowledge base is composed by four levels of knowledge: Text knowledge; Domain knowledge; Information-retrieval knowledge; and Interaction Knowledge. The Text Level has knowledge about the words and sequence of words that a...