Errors in Veterinary Practice: Preliminary Lessons for Building Better Veterinary Teams

Case studies in two typical UK veterinary practices were undertaken to explore teamwork, including interprofessional working. Each study involved one week of whole team observation based on practice locations (reception, operating theatre), one week of shadowing six focus individuals (veterinary surgeons, veterinary nurses and administrators) and a final week consisting of semistructured interviews regarding teamwork. Errors emerged as a finding of the study. The definition of errors was inclusive, pertaining to inputs or omitted actions with potential adverse outcomes for patients, clients or the practice. The 40 identified instances could be grouped into clinical errors (dosing/drugs, surgical preparation, lack of follow-up), lost item errors, and most frequently, communication errors (records, procedures, missing face-to-face communication, mistakes within face-to-face communication). The qualitative nature of the study allowed the underlying cause of the errors to be explored. In addition to some individual mistakes, system faults were identified as a major cause of errors. Observed examples and interviews demonstrated several challenges to interprofessional teamworking which may cause errors, including: lack of time, part-time staff leading to frequent handovers, branch differences and individual veterinary surgeon work preferences. Lessons are drawn for building better veterinary teams and implications for Disciplinary Proceedings considered

Theoretical prediction of spectral and optical properties of bacteriochlorophylls in thermally disordered LH2 antenna complexes

A general approach for calculating spectral and optical properties of pigment-protein complexes of known atomic structure is presented. The method, that combines molecular dynamics simulations, quantum chemistry calculations and statistical mechanical modeling, is demonstrated by calculating the absorption and circular dichroism spectra of the B800-B850 BChls of the LH2 antenna complex from Rs. molischianum at room temperature. The calculated spectra are found to be in good agreement with the available experimental results. The calculations reveal that the broadening of the B800 band is mainly caused by the interactions with the polar protein environment, while the broadening of the B850 band is due to the excitonic interactions. Since it contains no fitting parameters, in principle, the proposed method can be used to predict optical spectra of arbitrary pigment-protein complexes of known structure.Comment: ReVTeX4, 11 pages, 9 figures, submitted to J. Chem. Phy

WavePacket: A Matlab package for numerical quantum dynamics. III: Quantum-classical simulations and surface hopping trajectories

WavePacket is an open-source program package for numerical simulations in quantum dynamics. Building on the previous Part I [Comp. Phys. Comm. 213, 223-234 (2017)] and Part II [Comp. Phys. Comm. 228, 229-244 (2018)] which dealt with quantum dynamics of closed and open systems, respectively, the present Part III adds fully classical and mixed quantum-classical propagations to WavePacket. In those simulations classical phase-space densities are sampled by trajectories which follow (diabatic or adiabatic) potential energy surfaces. In the vicinity of (genuine or avoided) intersections of those surfaces trajectories may switch between surfaces. To model these transitions, two classes of stochastic algorithms have been implemented: (1) J. C. Tully's fewest switches surface hopping and (2) Landau-Zener based single switch surface hopping. The latter one offers the advantage of being based on adiabatic energy gaps only, thus not requiring non-adiabatic coupling information any more. The present work describes the MATLAB version of WavePacket 6.0.2 which is essentially an object-oriented rewrite of previous versions, allowing to perform fully classical, quantum-classical and quantum-mechanical simulations on an equal footing, i.e., for the same physical system described by the same WavePacket input. The software package is hosted and further developed at the Sourceforge platform, where also extensive Wiki-documentation as well as numerous worked-out demonstration examples with animated graphics are available

Secondary literacy across the curriculum: Challenges and possibilities

This paper discusses the challenges and possibilities attendant upon successfully implementing literacy across the curriculum initiatives – or ‘school language policies’ as they have come to be known - particularly at the secondary or high school level. It provides a theoretical background to these issues, exploring previous academic discussions of school language policies, and highlights key areas of concern as well as opportunity with respect to school implementation of such policies. As such, it provides a necessary conceptual background to the subsequent papers in this special issue, which focus upon the Secondary Schools’ Literacy Initiative (SSLI) – a New Zealand funded programme that aims to establish cross-curricular language and literacy policies in secondary schools

Diurnal ocean surface layer model validation

The diurnal ocean surface layer (DOSL) model at the Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center forecasts the 24-hour change in a global sea surface temperatures (SST). Validating the DOSL model is a difficult task due to the huge areas involved and the lack of in situ measurements. Therefore, this report details the use of satellite infrared multichannel SST imagery to provide day and night SSTs that can be directly compared to DOSL products. This water-vapor-corrected imagery has the advantages of high thermal sensitivity (0.12 C), large synoptic coverage (nearly 3000 km across), and high spatial resolution that enables diurnal heating events to be readily located and mapped. Several case studies in the subtropical North Atlantic readily show that DOSL results during extreme heating periods agree very well with satellite-imagery-derived values in terms of the pattern of diurnal warming. The low wind and cloud-free conditions necessary for these events to occur lend themselves well to observation via infrared imagery. Thus, the normally cloud-limited aspects of satellite imagery do not come into play for these particular environmental conditions. The fact that the DOSL model does well in extreme events is beneficial from the standpoint that these cases can be associated with the destruction of the surface acoustic duct. This so-called afternoon effect happens as the afternoon warming of the mixed layer disrupts the sound channel and the propagation of acoustic energy

Permutative categories, multicategories, and algebraic K-theory

We show that the $K$-theory construction of arXiv:math/0403403, which preserves multiplicative structure, extends to a symmetric monoidal closed bicomplete source category, with the multiplicative structure still preserved. The source category of arXiv:math/0403403, whose objects are permutative categories, maps fully and faithfully to the new source category, whose objects are (based) multicategories

Thermal broadening of the J-band in disordered linear molecular aggregates: A theoretical study

We theoretically study the temperature dependence of the J-band width in disordered linear molecular aggregates, caused by dephasing of the exciton states due to scattering on vibrations of the host matrix. In particular, we consider inelastic one- and two-phonon scattering between different exciton states (energy-relaxation-induced dephasing), as well as elastic two-phonon scattering of the excitons (pure dephasing). The exciton states follow from numerical diagonalization of a Frenkel Hamiltonian with diagonal disorder; the scattering rates between them are obtained using the Fermi Golden Rule. A Debye-like model for the one- and two-phonon spectral densities is used in the calculations. We find that, owing to the disorder, the dephasing rates of the individual exciton states are distributed over a wide range of values. We also demonstrate that the dominant channel of two-phonon scattering is not the elastic one, as is often tacitly assumed, but rather comes from a similar two-phonon inelastic scattering process. In order to study the temperature dependence of the J-band width, we simulate the absorption spectrum, accounting for the dephasing induced broadening of the exciton states. We find a power-law (T^p) temperature scaling of the effective homogeneous width, with an exponent p that depends on the shape of the spectral density of host vibrations. In particular, for a Debye model of vibrations, we find p ~ 4, which is in good agreement with experimental data on J-aggregates of pseudoisocyanine [J. Phys. Chem. A 101, 7977 (1997)].Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure