Asthma is a major public health concern, with an estimated 18.8 million adults in the United States having the disease. Asthma can be controlled with a variety of effective treatment options; however, only half the people with asthma report their asthma is well controlled. Uncontrolled asthma leads to high direct and indirect costs as well as decreased quality of life. The pathophysiology of as...

INTRODUCTION Recently, public and professional emphasis has been placed on addressing the increasing prevalence of childhood overweight. METHOD This survey study was conducted with two cohorts of pediatric nurse practitioners (N = 413) to explore differences in self-reported practice skills over time. RESULTS Significant improvements in assessment, screening, and laboratory evaluations were...

This paper reviews the barriers to large-scale use of small-scale energy systems. It places the review in the context of the size of the challenge both in terms of the numbers of people who still need access to modern energy carriers and in the levels of finance to provide this access. It concludes that the main problems related to access are not technical but are motivational, financial and in...

Rating systems not only provide information to users but also motivate the rated agent. This paper solves for the optimal (effort-maximizing) rating system within the standard career concerns framework. It is a mixture two-state rating system. That is, it is the sum of two Markov processes, with one that reflects the belief of the rater and the other the preferences of the rated agent. The rati...

Little is known about the types of physical activities that older individuals with lower-limb loss perform, correlates of regular physical activity (PA), and barriers and facilitators to PA. We conducted an exploratory study in 158 older Veterans from the Pacific Northwest with a partial foot (35%), below-knee (39%) and above-knee (26%) amputation. Ninety-eight percent of survey respondents wer...

BACKGROUND Heroin use is associated with many serious consequences.While effective treatments exist, barriers to services persist. Understanding service use and barriers to treatment can structure treatment practice and target interventions for those who are most at risk. OBJECTIVES To describe patterns and correlates of substance abuse service utilization and treatment barriers among a natio...

Prior studies have identified that working in an addiction treatment unit with higher levels of organizational capacity is a factor associated with positive staff attitudes about evidence-based addiction treatment practices (EBPs). The study presented here explored whether staff perceptions about the organizational capacity of their treatment unit are also associated with staff experience of ba...

In this paper we construct an information-theoretic model of architectural drawings. This model is then used to quantify and measure the complexities and similarities of drawings. The approach is applied within a linear qualitative shape representation but can be generalized to other types of representation. The descriptive and analytic power of the proposed methods are demonstrated by studying...

INTRODUCTION Continuing education (CE) can support health care professionals in maintaining and developing their knowledge and competencies. Although lack of motivation is one of the most important barriers of pharmacists' participation in CE, we know little about the quality or the quantity of motivation. We used the self-determination theory, which describes autonomous motivation (AM) as orig...