OBJECTIVE This study aimed to investigate patient safety attitudes amongst health care providers in Norwegian primary care by using the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire, in both out-of-hours (OOH) casualty clinics and GP practices. The questionnaire identifies five major patient safety factors: Teamwork climate, Safety climate, Job satisfaction, Perceptions of management, and Working conditions. ...

Background Understanding the abundance of adverse environmental conditions e.g. frost, drought, and heat during critical crop growth stages, which are assumed to be altered by climate change, is crucial for an accurate risk assessment for cropping systems. While a lengthening of the vegetation period may be beneficial, higher frequencies of heat or frost events and drought spells are generally ...

Extreme weather events are likely to occur more often under climate change and the resulting effects on ecosystems could lead to a further acceleration of climate change. But not all extreme weather events lead to extreme ecosystem response. Here, we focus on hazardous ecosystem behaviour and identify coinciding weather conditions. We use a simple probabilistic risk assessment based on time ser...

The American Southwest has experienced a series of severe droughts interspersed with strong wet episodes over the past decades, prompting questions about future climate patterns and potential intensification of weather disruptions under warming conditions. Here we show that interannual hydroclimatic variability in this region has displayed a significant level of non-stationarity over the past m...

This study aimed to determine whether there was any association between the regional climate and the proportion of people with joint pain. Regional climate data between 1971 and 2000 were obtained from the Japan Meteorological Agency. The variables used in the cluster analysis included sunlight hours, amount of precipitation, number of days with precipitation, and temperature. The regional prop...

A new and simple greenhouse crop transpiration model enabling predictions from outdoor conditions is presented and the parameters involved are discussed with respect to different types of greenhouse-crop systems. This transpiration model was validated against experimental data measured in a soil-less tomato crop cultivation in Avignon in summer conditions, when the greenhouse is open, and early...

Improvements in understanding how climate change may influence chemical and physical processes in soils, how this may affect nutrient availability, and how plants may respond to changed availability of nutrients will influence crop breeding programmes. The effects of increased atmospheric CO2 and warmer temperatures, both individually and combined, on soil microbial activity, including mycorrhi...

Current information on broad-scale climatic conditions is essential for assessing potential distribution of forest pests. At present, sophisticated spatial interpolation approaches such as the Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) are used to create high-resolution climatic data sets. Unfortunately, these data sets are based on 30-year normals and rarely incorporat...

BACKGROUND Nosocomial infections constitute a global health problem. OBJECTIVES To explore the relationship between nosocomial infection rates (NIRs) and climatic factors including temperature and relative humidity in Guangzhou area of China. METHODS 30892 patients in our hospital in 2009 were investigated for nosocomial infection status, and the contemporaneous temperature and relative hum...