Baum Consult

This qualitative study explores how nurses managed communication challenges in linguistically complex Saudi Arabian acute care hospitals. A secondary analysis of transcripts from interviews with 21 nurses in Riyadh revealed the use of informal and creative strategies, including translation apps, non-verbal signaling, family interpreters, and an ad hoc system of sharing translation work among team members. In the absence of formal interpretation services, these strategies were essential but paradoxical, contributing to delays, errors, and team tension. Findings underscore the need for interventions prioritizing inclusivity, formal interpretation services, and clear guidelines, affirming nurse and patient rights to understand and be understood.

Background/Objectives: Individuals with substance use disorders are at risk of displaying suicidal behavior with suicide occurring more frequently compared to the general population. This article gives an overview of the existing literature on the association of substance use disorders, especially alcohol use disorder (AUD), with suicidal behavior. Studies indicate that individuals with AUD report a lifetime prevalence of 40% for at least one instance of attempted suicide. They also have a 10 to 14 times higher risk of suicidal behavior compared to the general population. Methods: The protocol and preliminary data from an ongoing study focused on the prevalence and clinical correlations of suicidal ideation and attempts in treatment-seeking inpatients with AUD are presented. The objective of this study is to address open questions regarding the clinical factors and psychiatric comorbidities associated with suicidality in patients with AUD. In a pilot and feasibility study in an inpatient rehabilitation facility for the treatment of substance use disorders, 150 patients with AUD were examined. For assessment, the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II), the Symptom Check-list-90 (SCL-90), and the Scale Suicidal Experience and Behavior (SSEV) were used as standardized questionnaires. In addition, psychosocial and sociodemographic variables were recorded. A total of 257 items were surveyed for each respondent. The statistical analysis was carried out using IBM SPSS. Results: The initial evaluation indicates the feasibility of the study with a high number of responders (90% response rate). Of the participants surveyed, 50.7% (N = 76) were at risk of suicide and 40.7% (N = 61) had already made at least one suicide attempt. Even with a small sample size, a significant, moderate-to-large correlation between alcohol use disorder and suicidality could be demonstrated. Conclusions: This confirms that suicidality is a risk factor for patients with AUD. The role of psychiatric comorbidity, clinical correlations and consequences of AUD, Gender and treatment outcome will be studied in a larger sample of 700 patients.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to promote the utilization of electronic health records (EHRs) to support population health management and reduce disparities. However, access to EHRs with capabilities to disaggregate data or generate digital dashboards is not always readily available in rural areas. With funding from CDC's DP-18-1815, the Division of Diabetes and Heart Disease Management (Division) at the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control designed a quality improvement initiative to reduce health disparities for people with hypertension and high blood cholesterol in rural areas. With support from a nonprofit partner, the Division used qualitative evaluation methods to evaluate the extent to which practices were able to disaggregate data and report quality measures.

Abstract The development of algorithmic differentiation (AD) tools focuses mostly on handling floating point types in the target language. Taping optimizations in these tools mostly focus on specific operations like matrix vector products. Aggregated types like std::complex are usually handled by specifying the AD type as a template argument. This approach provides exact results, but prevents the use of expression templates. If AD tools are extended and specialized such that aggregated types can be added to the expression framework, then this will result in reduced memory utilization and improve the timing for applications where aggregated types such as complex number or matrix vector operations are used. Such an integration requires a reformulation of the stored data per expression and a rework of the tape evaluation process. We will demonstrate the overheads on a synthetic benchmark and show the improvement when aggregated types are handled properly by the expression framework of the AD tool.