scholarly journals Quality in a psychotherapy service

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 80-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Denman

General audit of psychotherapy services is slowly becoming a more regular part of practice in psychotherapy departments. Parry (1992) in her key review article states that “unmonitored practice is no longer defensible”. Audit specifically targeted at the quality of psychotherapy performed has been recommended (Fonogy ft Higgitt, 1989) but it is not often reported in psychotherapy (although a notable exception is Feldman, 1992). The beneficial effects of an ad hoc audit of the quality of psychotherapy using tape recorded sessions are reported.

Author(s):  
Shahin Pashaie ◽  
Fatemeh Estebsari ◽  
Mahsa Matbouei ◽  
Malihe Nasiri

Background: Currently, cancer is a major problem of human societies. Different methods are used for cancer treatment including radiotherapy. Radiotherapy affects patients in different ways and makes changes to the quality of life of cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy. Objectives: The purpose of this article is to assess the effect of education on the quality of life of cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy. Methods: This is a review article with key words including “Education”, “Quality of life”, “Patients”, “Cancer”, and “Radiotherapy” in some Data bases such as Medline, Scopus, Science direct and Ovid during 2000 to 2019. Results: Of the 928 original articles, six papers were selected based on the main criteria, such as English and Persian language, articles of clinical relevance, and articles after 2000. In this study, articles were based on clinical trials on women and men patients with different cancers. Results of this study proved that education is the major component in improving these patients’ quality of life.  Conclusion: Radiotherapy, alone or in combination with other therapeutic methods, is among main treatments of cancer patients. Despite its beneficial effects, it is associated with some side effects reducing the quality of life of these patients. Physical and mental complications were equally involved in reducing their quality of life. Based on this finding, it is suggested that the use of educational methods and training and rehabilitation programs can influence the quality of cancer patients treated with various methods, especially radiation therapy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 675-688
Author(s):  
Shamsi Abbasalizadeh ◽  
Behzad Ebrahimi ◽  
Aslan Azizi ◽  
Rogaye Dargahi ◽  
Maryam Tayebali ◽  
...  

Constipation is a common public health concern experienced by all individuals during their life affecting the quality of life. In this paper, we aimed to provide an overview of the existing evidence regarding the role of food ingredients, including bran, prune, fig, kiwifruit, and flax-seed in constipation treatment. We searched Scopus, Pub Med, and Science Direct by using the keywords, “laxative foods” and “constipation”, for searching studies assessing laxative food ingredients and their beneficial effects on constipation treatment and/or control. Lifestyle modifications such as increasing dietary fiber and fluid intake and daily exercise are the proposed first line treatments for constipation. Optimizing ‘diet’ as an efficient lifestyle factor may contribute to the well-being of patients. The use of laxative food ingredients including bran, prune, fig, kiwifruit, flax-seed, probiotics, and prebiotics is a convenient alternative to cope with constipation. According to previous findings, laxative food ingredients could be considered as effective treatments for subjects suffering from constipation. Many studies have assessed the pharmacological and non-pharmacological roles of these ingredients in treating constipation, however, their importance has not been thoroughly investigated.


Author(s):  
Priyanka Bharadwaj ◽  
Surjeet Balhara

Background & Objective: There are some challenging issues such as providing Quality of Service (QoS), restricted usage of channels and shared bandwidth pertaining to ad-hoc networks in a dynamic topology. Hence, there is a requirement to support QoS for the application environment and multimedia services in ad-hoc networks with the fast growing and emerging development of information technology. Eventually, bandwidth is one of the key elements to be considered. Methods: Energy aware QoS routing protocol in an ad-hoc network is presented in this article. Results and Conclusion: The simulation results indicate that the improved protocol outperforms Adhoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol in terms of QoS metric such as throughput, packet delivery ratio, loss rate and average delay.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynda Grine ◽  
Niels Hilhorst ◽  
Nathalie Michels ◽  
Souheila Abbedou ◽  
Stefaan De Henauw ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Psoriasis is a complex disease associated with multiple comorbidities, including metabolic syndrome and leaky gut syndrome. Dietary lifestyle interventions have been reported to affect the disease in terms of lesional severity. It remains unclear how diets affect these comorbidities and the general health in psoriasis patients. Modified Intermittent Fasting (MIF) on 2 non-consecutive days has shown beneficial effects on metabolic parameters. A significant advantage of MIF over the currently investigated dietary changes is its feasibility. OBJECTIVE Here, we aim to study the effects of MIF on skin, gut and metabolic health in psoriasis patients. METHODS A two-arm pilot prospective cross-over randomized control trial (RCT) will be performed in 20 patients with psoriasis as a pilot study. Patients will be randomized 1:1 to either start with MIF and subsequent regular diet for 12 weeks each or to start with regular diet and subsequent MIF for 12 weeks each. The following parameters will be assessed: demographics, disease phenotype, medical and familial history, psoriasis severity, dermatology-specific and general quality of life, nutritional and physical habits, mental and intestinal health, intestinal and cutaneous integrity, inflammatory and metabolic markers, and satisfaction. RESULTS The aim is to uncover the effects of MIF on psoriasis severity and gut health integrity through clinical and molecular investigation. More precisely, we want to map the evolution of the different markers in response to MIF as compared to the regular diet, such as psoriasis severity, permeability and inflammation. CONCLUSIONS Understanding how dietary lifestyles can affect epithelial lineages such as the skin and gut, will greatly improve our understanding on the development of psoriasis and may pose a non-pharmacological venue for treatments. CLINICALTRIAL ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04418791. Registered June 5 2020, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04418791. Current protocol date/version: May 20 2020


Author(s):  
Inmaculada Méndez ◽  
Esther Secanilla ◽  
Juan P. Martínez ◽  
Josefa Navarro

In a global approach about the need of paying attention to staff working with and for older people with dementia and other diseases in residential care, it is necessary to investigate their emotional well-being to provide strategies to improve their quality of life and therefore their quality of patient care. Professional caregivers of people with dementia and other diseases have specific psycho-sociological problems. They are more prone to stress which can sometimes lead to the “burnout” due to specific functions in the workplace. To define the sample was decided to compare two residential centers of two regions, Murcia and Barcelona. We proceeded to the administration of the following measuring instruments: the scale Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) and an ad hoc survey conducted for professional caregivers. Finally, the results offer the possibility of carrying out programs to prevent emotional exhaustion in professional carers, as well as the possibility of designing psychoeducational programs for staff care and even future proactive and reactive interventions.


Nutrients ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1070
Author(s):  
Maike Wolters ◽  
Annkathrin von der Haar ◽  
Ann-Kristin Baalmann ◽  
Maike Wellbrock ◽  
Thomas L. Heise ◽  
...  

N-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) have been suggested to affect depressive disorders. This review aims to determine the effect of n-3 PUFAs on depressive symptoms in people with or without diagnosed depression. Medline, PsycINFO, and Cochrane CENTRAL databases were searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the association between n-3 PUFAs and depressive symptoms or disorders as outcomes. A random-effects meta-analysis of standardized mean difference (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) was performed. Twenty-five studies (7682 participants) were included. Our meta-analysis (20 studies) indicated that n-3 PUFA supplementation lowered depressive symptomology as compared with placebo: SMD = −0.34, 95% CI: −0.55, −0.12, I2 = 86%, n = 5836, but a possible publication bias cannot be ruled out. Subgroup analyses indicated no statistically significant difference by treatment duration of <12 vs. ≥12 weeks, presence of comorbidity, or severity of depressive symptoms. Nevertheless, beneficial effects were seen in the subgroups of studies with longer treatment duration and with no depression and mild to moderate depression. Subgroup analysis by eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) dosage revealed differences in favor of the lower EPA dosage. Sensitivity analysis including studies with low risk of bias seems to confirm the overall result. Supplementation of n-3 PUFA appears to have a modest beneficial effect on depressive symptomology, although the quality of evidence is still insufficient.


Author(s):  
Pierpaolo Vittorini ◽  
Stefano Menini ◽  
Sara Tonelli

AbstractMassive open online courses (MOOCs) provide hundreds of students with teaching materials, assessment tools, and collaborative instruments. The assessment activity, in particular, is demanding in terms of both time and effort; thus, the use of artificial intelligence can be useful to address and reduce the time and effort required. This paper reports on a system and related experiments finalised to improve both the performance and quality of formative and summative assessments in specific data science courses. The system is developed to automatically grade assignments composed of R commands commented with short sentences written in natural language. In our opinion, the use of the system can (i) shorten the correction times and reduce the possibility of errors and (ii) support the students while solving the exercises assigned during the course through automated feedback. To investigate these aims, an ad-hoc experiment was conducted in three courses containing the specific topic of statistical analysis of health data. Our evaluation demonstrated that automated grading has an acceptable correlation with human grading. Furthermore, the students who used the tool did not report usability issues, and those that used it for more than half of the exercises obtained (on average) higher grades in the exam. Finally, the use of the system reduced the correction time and assisted the professor in identifying correction errors.


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