BACKGROUND The introduction of home-based care in rural communities in the 1980s contributed immensely toward the upliftment of the personal and environmental health of communities. Women's groups provided health promotion skills and health education to communities and made a difference in health-related behaviour change. OBJECTIVE The purpose of the study was to explore and describe the home...

BACKGROUND This paper's starting point is the recognition (descriptive not normative) that, for the vast majority of day-to-day clinical decision-making situations, the 'evidence' for decision-making is experiential knowledge. Moreover, reliance on this knowledge base means that nurses must use cognitive shortcuts or heuristics for handling information when making decisions. These heuristics en...

the concept of comprehensive grobner bases was introduced by weispfenning. montes has proposed an efficient algorithm for computing these bases. but he has not explicitly used buchberger's criteria in his algorithm. in this paper we prove that we can apply these criteria on montes algorithm. we propose a modified version of montes algorithm and evaluate its performance via some examples.

The Nursing Process is a care technology that guides the sequence of clinical reasoning and improves the quality of care. This article reports the development of a Computerized Nursing Process (CNP) for the Intensive Care Unit. The study was conducted in three main steps: discussion and understanding of the International Organization for Standard 18104; theoretical expertise regarding the ICNP®...

In the last decade a strong need for Quality Assurance has emerged among professionals in model based water management. The manifold of reasons for this can be summarised as follows. There is a lack of mutual understanding between modellers, model study clients, model auditors, stakeholders and concerned members of the public. Furthermore, malpractice (careless handling of input data, insuffici...

Climate adaptation is a dynamic social and institutional process where the governance dimension is receiving growing attention. Adaptive governance is an approach that promises to reduce uncertainty by improving the knowledge base for decision making. As uncertainty is an inherent feature of climate adaptation, adaptive governance seems to be a promising approach for improving climate adaptatio...

Rich collections of biodiversity data are now synthesized in publically available databases and phylogenetic knowledge now provides a sound understanding of the origin of organisms and their place in the tree of life. However, these knowledge bases are poorly linked, leading to underutilization or worse, an incorrect understanding of biodiversity because there is poor evolutionary context. We a...

BACKGROUND Women approach birth using various methods of preparation drawing from conventional healthcare providers alongside informal information sources (IIS) outside the professional healthcare context. An investigation of the forms in which these informal information sources are accessed and negotiated by women, and how these disconnected and often conflicting elements influence women's dec...

The aim of this chapter is to describe the process of medical knowledge acquisition from a historical context and to define the requirements for producing knowledge which is able to be trusted and applied in a clinical setting. This is related to modern data mining approaches which do not yet adequately address these requirements. This is believed to be the most critical issue in the acceptance...

Doctors require knowledge of the potential benefits and harms of different treatment options to inform clinical decision making. Patients also require this information to make an informed choice between different treatment options. This knowledge base is generated from robust clinical research such as randomised controlled trials. For this knowledge base to advance, doctors and patients must be...