Tag: warmth

The Role of Empathy In Improving Patient Care and Decreasing Medical Liability

Studies reveal that more than half of all practicing physicians demonstrate signs of burnout. Contemporary physicians face tremendous pressures due to a confluence of factors, including balancing heavy patient loads within constrained schedules, the increasing complexity of patient health problems, and increasingly burdensome COVID-related documentation requirements.

These circumstances—and more—challenge physician empathy, and even to some extent dampen it even further. Multiple research studies document a decline in empathy that appears to begin in the third year of medical school and persists during residency.  The pandemic has exacerbated this deterioration. In the past, empathy rebounded after the rigors of training were over, but today, empathy needs to be refreshed to help both patients and providers. Physicians who lose sight of the meaning, purpose, and rewards of their roles in patients’ lives suffer more from burnout than those who remain connected to their purpose.

The role of empathy training

In response to patients’ pleas for more empathic care and national media headlines calling for more compassion in medicine, which have been growing since about 2005, empathy training courses grounded in the neuroscience of emotions and emotional intelligence can be helpful. In fact, recent neuroscience research on the brain’s plasticity in up-regulating and down-regulating empathy provided evidence that empathy could be taught.

The research team in the Empathy and Relational Science program at Massachusetts General conducted a study of the effectiveness of the three, 60-minute empathy training courses in physicians. Researchers found statistically significant improvement in patient perception of physician empathy on a validated and reliable empathy rating scale called the “CARE measure.” Another study by the same team show that empathic physician behaviors resulted in higher ratings of both physician warmth and competence.

One of the most frequently asked questions about empathy training is, “Doesn’t this just add even more time to a busy doctor’s day?” Actually, it does not. Empathic care does not have to take more time. Courses on empathy training help health care professionals detect subtle emotional cues and nuances that indicate patient concerns so they can be addressed right away.

In addition, when physicians convey empathy, they put patients at ease, increasing trust in the provider-patient relationship. This creates a dynamic that ensures that small problems are addressed before they become bigger problems. Multiple studies have demonstrated that better medical outcomes are also correlated with strong empathy and relational skills.

Empathy training offers many benefits 

Courses based on empathy research and principles provide training for each of the following predictors of risk of increasing medical professional liability claims:

  1. Physicians’ uncaring attitudes, attitudes of superiority, or callousness
  2.  Communication failures including not listening, interrupting, or not being clear about availability or backup coverage
  3. Disparagement of previous care
  4. Failure to learn and manage patient expectations

Physicians can learn how to perceive patient emotions, manage difficult interactions, and communicate bad news. Empathy education teaches how to respond with empathy and compassion even in challenging situations, including informed consent conversations and inter-team conflicts.

In addition to greater patient satisfaction, doctors also discover the personal satisfaction that connecting with their patients in a more meaningful way provides.  “After empathy training, I feel that I like my work again, and instead of resenting all the demands, I’m remembering why I chose this profession in the first place,” a physician reported.

Interviews and research around empathy-based practices reveal that greater empathy not only improves patient satisfaction, but also helps to reduce physician burnout and improve physician job satisfaction. By using empathy-based skills, physicians, nurses, and other providers become more attuned to the needs of patients and their families. With this greater perception and shifts in attitudes, communication between providers and patients improves.

More empathic conversations will enable patients to trust their care to physicians who are confident in their skills without demeaning prior care they may have received. Patients will appreciate physicians who explain things clearly, ask about and understand their expectations, and form alignment about what is desired, likely, and possible.

Empathy-based training brings rewards

Through empathy-based training, physicians and other health care providers learn the skills to have honest informed consent discussions without causing undo fear, while also preparing patients for all possible outcomes. Empathic skills make for better physicians, better communications, and better conversations for all outcomes.

With a strong alliance, a reduction in medical professional liability claims is the result of increased trust, better understanding and expectations of all possible outcomes, and knowledge that physicians deeply care about their patients, because, when it comes to health care, empathy matters.

Helen Riess is a psychiatrist and author of The Empathy Effect: Seven Neuroscience-Based Keys for Transforming the Way We Live, Love, Work, and Connect Across Differences. This article originally appeared in Inside Medical Liability.

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How an Ancient Design Technique Could Help Us Survive Extreme Heat

In late June, when temperatures climbed to 115 degrees in Portland, Oregon, homes and buildings throughout the Pacific Northwest had been caught method off guard. Most had been designed for a lot cooler temperatures, with insulation and air flow tuned to deal with reasonable highs and lows. Usually, even on sizzling days, the night lows can be chilly sufficient to deliver down the general temperature of buildings, protecting them from turning into roasting ovens. Air con was sometimes irrelevant, and buildings could often keep snug passively, or with out a lot intervention.

However that was earlier than. The warmth wave confirmed that temperatures can and possibly will proceed to be increased than in earlier a long time. The low- or no-effort temperature management that has been designed into the area’s houses seemingly gained’t have the ability to sustain, based on Mike Fowler, an architect at Seattle-based Mithun. “We’re going to part out of that by the tip of the last decade. And this has been eye-opening for lots of oldsters,” he says.

A brand new sort of constructing design might be wanted within the Pacific Northwest before most individuals anticipated, he says, however design approaches which are usually utilized in hotter, extra extreme climates provide some clues for a way structure might want to evolve.

Architects all over the world are designing options to rising temperatures and extra frequent warmth waves. New supplies, superior warmth modeling strategies, and a few longstanding design ideas are exhibiting that even when temperatures hit sudden peaks, our houses and buildings will have the ability to keep cool with out consuming enormous quantities of vitality.

One formal strategy is a constructing customary often known as Passive House. Initially developed in Germany within the Nineties and now modified for nations and climates all over the world, Passive Home is a performance-based customary that depends on creating tight and energy-efficient constructing “envelopes”—the partitions, roof, and home windows which have the next than regular stage of insulation and seal.

With triple-paned home windows, energy-efficient warmth pumps, and extremely insulated wall methods, Passive Home buildings are virtually air tight and scale back the quantity of temperature change inside when it’s extremely popular or very chilly, resulting in long-term financial savings on vitality prices. The concept of passive constructing goes back centuries throughout continents, and it’s an idea that’s taking up new relevance in locations just like the Pacific Northwest.

Fowler is a member and former president of Passive House Northwest, a regional group working to get extra architects and builders to use these ideas. “The pitch is that you simply’ve obtained one likelihood to put money into your constructing envelope—the home windows, roof, and partitions,” Fowler says. “Do it proper in order that one thing you construct now could be going to be resilient into the long run.”

He says the variety of Passive Home tasks within the area is rising. Mithun, the place Fowler is a senior affiliate, has 4 tasks within the works which are being designed to satisfy the U.S. Passive House standard. “There’s much more curiosity, there’s much more data,” he says. “Would like to see it go sooner, however it’s definitely trending upward.”

Even with out assembly the official customary, most of the concepts behind Passive Home are exhibiting up in locations the place extreme warmth is a matter of each day life. In Phoenix, the structure agency Studio Ma has specialised in designing parts into their buildings that passively maintain them cool, utilizing shading, overhangs, and cantilevers to protect them from the warmth of the desert.

Utilizing thermal-imaging software program, the agency has analyzed surfaces in Phoenix and located that present buildings with heavier supplies like stone and masonry on their exterior surfaces maintain way more warmth than buildings with lighter exteriors, akin to wooden. Through the use of lighter, higher insulated supplies on the skin of buildings and limiting the warmth that falls on them, buildings can have way more manageable inside temperatures, based on Christopher Alt, the agency’s co-founder.

“Some individuals name it ‘outsulation’ as a result of the insulation is on the skin, however it’s very depending on the local weather you’re in,” says Alt. “As individuals in Oregon are experiencing 115 levels, their options most likely look completely different than ours, however the identical form of pondering applies.”

They put these concepts into apply in a brand new 16-floor residence hall in Phoenix for Arizona State College. The agency used daylight and vitality evaluation instruments to optimize the orientation of the home windows, and added small aspects to the facade to permit a part of it to shade itself. This permits sufficient daylight to return in for the constructing to cut back its lighting wants whereas additionally minimizing how a lot the solar heats up the constructing.

Christiana Moss, the agency’s co-founder and managing accomplice, says that particularly for big buildings, architects might want to pay extra consideration to the warmth getting into buildings by means of their home windows. “At this level, it’s nearly obviously irresponsible to not contemplate your glazing ratios and scale back the glass in your facades,” she says.

These sorts of passive cooling ideas may also be inexpensive. Marlene Imirzian runs an architecture firm with places of work in Phoenix and Escondido, California, and she or he’s used passive cooling parts in lots of her tasks, together with methods that mix shading, low-lying operable home windows that pull cool air into buildings, and a photo voltaic chimney that vents sizzling air out on the prime.

Imirzian says these design parts can slash vitality use to a couple of quarter of what present houses use. “It’s not about extremely specialised methods. It’s about utilizing pure flows, defending the glazing from direct photo voltaic achieve and designing the [enclosed space] to permit for air motion,” she says.

Imirzian’s agency utilized this concept in its successful entry within the Metropolis of Phoenix’s internet zero vitality dwelling design competitors. They discovered that implementing these ideas right into a 2,100-square-foot dwelling would find yourself costing about the identical to construct as a typical air conditioned dwelling, with out the necessity to use the air conditioner almost as typically. “Value per sq. foot turns into a non issue. It’s actually about designing with this efficiency in thoughts from the start,” Imirzian says. “If we begin doing these single household houses effectively, we are able to considerably scale back vitality use.”

However there are nonetheless some hurdles to implementing these sorts of passive design strategies. Ben Caine is an architect in Perth, Australia, who designs houses to satisfy the Passive Home customary, and he says that a few of the lighter exterior and insulation supplies generally used on Passive Home tasks are nonetheless exhausting to get in Australia. For issues like wooden fiber and hemp insulation, he says, getting supplies despatched over from Europe can take 4 to 5 months, and be 4 to 5 instances as costly as typical supplies. “The availability chains and distribution channels for lots of those supplies simply don’t exist but,” he says.

He’s nonetheless been in a position to implement some passive cooling strategies in tasks, together with a home he’s now having constructed for himself. By specializing in protecting the constructing envelope tight, including excessive ceilings in some areas of the house and utilizing environment friendly ceiling followers, he says he’s been in a position to scale back warmth from entering into the house and likewise lower down on the necessity for air-con, although not fully.

Although air-con is condemned for losing vitality, Caine says that it’s not essentially evil; cooling a home down truly takes less energy than heating it up. That doesn’t imply he’s turning the A/C on full blast, although. By specializing in air-tightness and passive cooling strategies, even houses in sizzling environments like Australia can lower down on the period of time they want air-con to remain snug.

“What we’re seeking to do is enhance what’s referred to as part shift, that’s the time it takes for the extreme warmth on the skin to move by means of the constructing envelope and attain the within,” Caine says. “Even should you do have air-con put in as a backup, you’re utilizing it rather a lot much less by means of the usage of these supplies.”

With extra locations starting to see increased temperatures, these design ideas might quickly develop into extra of a mainstream a part of structure. Imirzian, who’s presently in talks with builders to develop her internet zero dwelling design for Phoenix, says that it’s solely a matter of time earlier than these sorts of design concepts unfold out past extremely popular climates. “I feel it’s very, very transferable all over the world,” she says.

By: Nate Berg

Source: How an ancient design technique could help us survive extreme heat, no

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Critics:

The history of construction embraces many other fields like structural engineering, Civil engineering, cities growing and Population growth that are relatives to branches of Technology science, history, and architecture to investigate the buildings conservation and recorded their accomplishments. Those fields permit use to analyze modern or Latest construction and prehistoric constructions, as their structures, building Materials, and tools used.

History of building is evolving by different trends in time, marked by few key principles : durability of the materials used, the increasing of height and span, the degree of control exercised over the interior environment and finally the energy available to the construction process.

With the Second Industrial Revolution in the early 20th century, elevators and cranes made high rise buildings and skyscrapers possible, while heavy equipment and power tools decreased the workforce needed. Other new technologies were prefabrication and computer-aided design.

Trade unions were formed to protect construction workers’ interests and occupational safety and health. Personal protective equipment such as hard hats and earmuffs also came into use, and have become mandatory at most sites.

From the 20th century, governmental construction projects were used as a part of macroeconomic stimulation policies, especially during the Great depression (see New Deal). For economy of scale, whole suburbs, towns and cities, including infrastructure, are often planned and constructed within the same project (called megaproject if the cost exceeds US$1 billion), such as Brasília in Brazil, and the Million Programme in Sweden.

By the end of the 20th century, ecology, energy conservation and sustainable development had become important issues of construction.

References

 

How To Keep Your Plants Alive When You’re on Vacation

If you have a home full of plants, it can be hard to have friends reliably take care of them while you’re gone. Plus, what if no one is available to come by every day to give your plants the specific care they need? Here are a few hacks that will keep your plants happy and healthy while you take time away.

How to water your plants while you’re on vacation

The biggest concern people have when leaving their plants alone is regular watering; and if you have a huge family of varying plants, they’ll need to be cared for differently. Thankfully, you can outfit different watering systems for your plants’ needs.

Use a wine bottle to water your plants

For larger plants that require regular watering, the wine bottle option is a great choice. Grab an empty twist-off wine bottle, then poke a hole in the metal cap and fill the bottle with water. Screw the (now pierced) cap back on top. Turn the wine bottle cap-side down into your potted plant and position it deep enough that the bottle will stand up on its own. The water will slowly release over time, feeding your plant while you’re away.

Put plants in a bathtub or kiddie pool as a water reservoir

If you have several tropical plants and perhaps not enough wine bottles, you can give your plants the hydration they need in the bathtub. Garden writer Barbara Pleasant told House Beautiful the best way to care for multiple indoor plants while on vacation is to fill your bathtub with one to two inches of water. Remove any saucers from the bottom of the plants’ pots and place each plant in the tub together. The plants will soak up the water through the drainage hole, drinking as needed while you’re away. The same process works using a kiddie pool for your outdoor plants.

Group plants together by type

Rearrange your plants by type before you head out on your trip. Succulents and cacti should be together with other plants that won’t need any attention while you are gone. Water those before you leave, and they’ll be all set. Keep the more tropical plants together so they can feed off of each other’s moisture and warmth.

How to regulate your plants airflow when you’re gone

The next concern for your plants is oxygen and airflow. (I am not one to leave my windows open when I know I’ll be away for an extended period of time.) There are ways to give your plant the humid or dry environment they need when you can’t regulate the temperature day by day.

Make a temporary greenhouse

Put a plastic container over small plants that love humidity. The plastic container will create a mini greenhouse, allowing the cycle of water and humidity to be maintained while you’re gone. This also works with a plastic bag as a small terrarium.

Move plants away from windows until you get back

Grouping your plants together is the easiest way you can control the airflow and temperature for your plants while you’re gone. The tropical plants go in your tub, and the succulents drying out in a corner as they like. But you’ll want to make sure all plants are away from any variables that could change the temperature at a moment’s notice. Keep plants away from air vents, sunny windows, and heaters. Without you there to move them around, these things could dry out your more sensitive plants faster than you think.

Adjust the heat or AC before you leave plants alone

This step might boost your utility bill for the time you’re gone, not to mention it’s not the most environmentally friendly, but if needed, your plants will thank you for spending a little extra cash on them by adjusting your heat or AC to control the temperature while you’re gone. This could mean coming home to a higher electric bill, but your plants have a better chance of being alive when you get back home.

By: Aisha Jordan

Source: How to Keep Your Plants Alive When You’re on Vacation

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Critics:

Important structures in plant development are buds, shoots, roots, leaves, and flowers; plants produce these tissues and structures throughout their life from meristems[1] located at the tips of organs, or between mature tissues. Thus, a living plant always has embryonic tissues. By contrast, an animal embryo will very early produce all of the body parts that it will ever have in its life. When the animal is born (or hatches from its egg), it has all its body parts and from that point will only grow larger and more mature. However, both plants and animals pass through a phylotypic stage that evolved independently[2] and that causes a developmental constraint limiting morphological diversification.[3][4][5][6]

According to plant physiologist A. Carl Leopold, the properties of organization seen in a plant are emergent properties which are more than the sum of the individual parts. “The assembly of these tissues and functions into an integrated multicellular organism yields not only the characteristics of the separate parts and processes but also quite a new set of characteristics which would not have been predictable[by whom?] on the basis of examination of the separate parts.

Important structures in plant development are buds, shoots, roots, leaves, and flowers; plants produce these tissues and structures throughout their life from meristems located at the tips of organs, or between mature tissues. Thus, a living plant always has embryonic tissues. By contrast, an animal embryo will very early produce all of the body parts that it will ever have in its life. When the animal is born (or hatches from its egg), it has all its body parts and from that point will only grow larger and more mature. However, both plants and animals pass through a phylotypic stage that evolved independently and that causes a developmental constraint limiting morphological diversification.

According to plant physiologist A. Carl Leopold, the properties of organization seen in a plant are emergent properties which are more than the sum of the individual parts. “The assembly of these tissues and functions into an integrated multicellular organism yields not only the characteristics of the separate parts and processes but also quite a new set of characteristics which would not have been predictable[by whom?] on the basis of examination of the separate parts.

References

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