HealthCare Interactive

In 2014, the state of Oregon established Oregon Care Partners to provide high quality, free training to all dementia caregivers. This study evaluated participants' changes in knowledge, sense of competency in dementia caregiving, and ability to identify person-centered caregiving techniques after completing CARES® Dementia Basics online program, one of the educational resources available through this initiative. A convenience sample of informal and formal caregivers (N = 51) provided data at three points in time; pre-test, post-test, and a follow-up test after an additional 30-day period to determine sustained changes in knowledge, sense of competency, and person-centered care. From pre-test to post-test, modest improvements were detected in sense of competence in performing dementia care (ps < 0.01) and dementia-based knowledge, F(2, 150) = 7.71, p < 0.001, a multivariate effect size of w 2 = 0.09. Even though improvements in sense of competency were not universal, three out of five individual items demonstrated positive growth from pre-test to post-test as well as four out of the five items from pre-test to follow-up test. Importantly, gains observed in dementia-based knowledge from pre-test to post-test were largely maintained at the 30-day follow-up. No significant changes were found in the correct identification of person-centered techniques after the training F(5, 150) = 1.63, p = 0.19. Future research should investigate how best to maintain educational interventions within the caregiving environment and to assess subsequent skill change.

ABSTRACTCertified nurse assistants (CNAs) spend the most staff time with nursing home residents, yet they receive little training in addressing the mental health needs of residents with serious mental illness (SMI). Forty CNAs from four long-term-care facilities took the online interactive CARES-® Serious Mental Illness™ training consisting of two modules guided by the Recovery Movement philosophy of care. Responses from pre–post testing, Likert-type items, and open-ended questions indicated that CNAs gained information, changed their perspectives, and had more confidence in dealing with SMI. Although there were minor concerns regarding length, clarity of content, and technical issues, CNAs found the online format acceptable and easy to use, and many said they would recommend the training. CARES Serious Mental Illness online training appears to be a viable way of helping CNAs address the mental health needs of long term care residents. Additional testing on CARES Serious Mental Illness is planned.

It is well known that consensus algorithms are fundamental building blocks for fault tolerant distributed systems. In the literature of consensus, many algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem in different system models but few attempts have been made to analyze their performance. In this paper we present a new leader-based consensus algorithm (FLC algorithm) for the crash-stop failure model. Our algorithm uses the leader oracle Ω and adapts a decentralized communication pattern. In addition, we analyze and compare the performance of our algorithm to four of the most well-known consensus algorithms among asynchronous distributed systems of the crash-stop failure model. Our results give a global idea of the performance of these algorithms and show that our algorithm gives the best performance when process crashes take place in a system using a multicast network model. At the same time, our algorithm also gives a very acceptable performance, even when crashes occur in a unicast network model and in the case where no process crashes happen within the system.