To effectively address medication adherence and improve cardiovascular health among older adults, a deeper understanding is needed of the barriers that this age group faces and of approaches that would be most effective and feasible for improving adherence. We conducted a focus group study (n = 25) in a diverse population of older adults with…

Context: Rural women in the United States experience disparity in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment when compared to their urban counterparts. Given the 11% chance of lifetime occurrence of breast cancer for women overall, the continuum of breast cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment, and recovery are of legitimate concern to rural women and…

Simulation games are becoming increasingly popular in education, but more insight in their critical design features is needed. This study investigated the effects of fidelity of open patient cases in adjunct to an instructional e-module on students' cognitive skills and motivation. We set up a three-group randomized post-test-only design: a…

While governing bodies have mandated that all students have the right to an education, with disabled students treated to the same rights and opportunities as non-disabled students, policymakers do not always agree on what all-inclusive education should look like. "Challenges Surrounding the Education of Children with Chronic Diseases"…

This study examined the capability of computer simulation as a tool for assessing the strategic competency of emergency department nurses as they responded to authentically computer simulated biohazard-exposed patient case studies. Thirty registered nurses from a large, urban hospital completed a series of computer-simulated case studies of…

We illustrate the value of the Bilingual Aphasia Test in the diagnostic assessment of a trilingual speaker post-stroke living in England for whom English was a non-native language. The Comprehensive Aphasia Test is routinely used to assess patients in English, but only in combination with the Bilingual Aphasia Test is it possible and practical to…

Introduction: Self-audit involves self-collection of personal performance data, reflection on gaps between performance and standards, and development and implementation of learning or quality improvement plans by individual care providers. It appears to stimulate learning and quality improvement, but few physicians engage in self-audit. The…

Objective: This project examined health literacy efforts among adult basic education providers in Central Texas. Methods: A survey was conducted with all adult literacy providers in Central Texas (N = 58). Results: Most programs provide health-related information. Literacy programs see needs for helping students communicate with doctors, filling…

Hopelessness has become an increasingly important construct in palliative care research, yet concerns exist regarding the utility of existing measures when applied to patients with a terminal illness. This article describes a series of studies focused on the exploration, development, and analysis of a measure of hopelessness specifically intended…

The affect regulation model of binge eating, which posits that patients binge eat to reduce negative affect (NA), has received support from cross-sectional and laboratory-based studies. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves momentary ratings and repeated assessments over time and is ideally suited to identify temporal antecedents and…

The psychometric structure of the Brief Symptom Inventory-18 (BSI-18; Derogatis, 2001) was investigated using Mokken scaling and parametric item response theory. Data of 487 outpatients, 266 students, and 207 prisoners were analyzed. Results of the Mokken analysis indicated that the BSI-18 formed a strong Mokken scale for outpatients and…

Objective: To examine the dependability of alliance scores at the patient and therapist level, to evaluate the potential causal direction of session-to-session changes in alliance and depressive symptoms, and to investigate the impact of aggregating the alliance over progressively more sessions on the size of the alliance-outcome relationship.…

Processing and/or hemispheric differences in the neural bases of word recognition were examined in patients with long-standing, medically-intractable epilepsy localized to the left (N = 18) or right (N = 7) temporal lobe. Participants were asked to read words that varied in the frequency of their spelling-to-sound correspondences. For the right…

This paper examines the relationship between therapeutic progress and the patient's family or residential situation with reference to the intensive treatment of an adolescent boy who had a severe learning disability and moved placement five times within four years. The idea is explored that the capacity to be thoughtful about emotional distress…

Sulfur mustard is an alkylating agent with highly cytotoxic properties even at low exposure. It was used widely against both military and civilian population by Iraqi forces in the Iraq-Iran war (1983-1988). Although various aspects of mustard gas effects on patients with chemical injury have been relatively well characterized, its effects on…