Search

Worker mothers still struggle to find a good balance between their care and work identities. Most research on motherhood at work focuses on how organizational structures can enable professional women to find a balance between caring and work identities neglecting their personal experiences and how they understand themselves in relation to both motherhood and work. We propose to use a liminal identity work perspective to explore the identity tensions that professional women experience during their transition into motherhood and how they manage it. To explore this question, we conducted a qualitative study over 2 years with worker mothers in Latin and North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Africa. The thematic and narrative analysis of 80 individual narrative interviews shows the emergence of two coexisting identity narratives. The first narrative understands motherhood as a linear process, where women experience liminality, uncertainty, and identity loss but eventually return to work after having aggregated their new worker mother identities during maternity leaves. The second coexisting narrative challenges this linear and finite view by highlighting the transition to motherhood as a continuous, liminoid, and never‐ending process. The two narratives are contextualized and managed differently according to the different cultural, historical, and social contexts where they are developed; the overall results present motherhood as a 'liminoid' experience that requires constant identity work to navigate the tensions emerging between potentially new and customary identities and behaviors in work contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forty right-handed high school and college students were trained to operate calculators with their left hands. Results suggest the possibility of improving office machine operating speed, without significant loss of accuracy, by instructing trainees to operate the keyboard with the alternate hand while recording information with the dominant hand. (Author/SJL)

Purpose: To explore the effectiveness of scuba diving in providing therapeutic and rehabilitative benefit to ex-service personnel who have experienced traumatic physical and/or psychological injuries resulting from combat. Methods: This study took the form of a service evaluation of Deptherapy, a UK-based niche charity offering support to military veterans who have experienced life-changing injuries. Deptherapy provides scuba diving qualifications, consisting of theory and practical diving experience, to participants alongside a Peer Support Buddy scheme that provides continuing support to servicemen involved with the charity. A total of 15 male veterans were invited to take part in the study. The methodology comprised retrospective and current quantitative measures of mental well-being and functional ability, utilising the General Health Questionnaire-28, and subsequent semi-structured interviews with participants, their families and health professionals. Results: Participants reported an improvement in levels of anxiety, depression and social functioning, and a reduction in insomnia, following their involvement in organised scuba diving activities. There was a mean average difference of 14.3 points improvement on the General Health Questionnaire-28 scale variants between prior interaction with Deptherapy and current perceptions following engagement with the programme. The positive perceptions, as indicated from the semi-structured interviews, were more pronounced in those whose injuries were predominantly psychological, rather than physical. Conclusion: Scuba diving can offer significant therapeutic benefits, particularly for ex-military amputees experiencing co-morbid anxiety and/or chronic psychological adjustment disorders, notably in terms of improvements in social dysfunction and symptomology of depression. Military combat can result in devastating, chronic physical and/or psychological injury. Current research suggests that a combination of medical and psychological therapy may prove to be the most beneficial for military veterans. Scuba diving has the potential to benefit injured veterans due the requirement of complete focus and the feeling of weightlessness when underwater. This article evaluates whether scuba diving is an effective physical and psychological therapy through GHQ-28 analysis and veteran interviews. Scuba diving benefited injured veterans in terms of chronic pain relief and depression symptoms alleviation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Bacterial lower respiratory tract infections (bLRTIs) are common and potentially life threatening in cats and dogs. Antibiotic treatment is often initiated before the diagnosis of bLRTI; therefore improved knowledge of the aetiology and antibiotic susceptibility patterns of these infections is essential to inform empiric antibiotic choices. Methods: A retrospective study of microbiological, cytological results and their drug susceptibilities from lower respiratory samples (n = 1989) processed in a UK commercial laboratory between 2002 and 2012 was carried out. Results: Thirty‐nine per cent of feline samples and 50% of canine samples were positive for bacterial growth with most yielding a single organism (72 % and 69%, respectively). Bordetella bronchiseptica (20.2% from dogs and 2.3% from cats), Pasteurella spp. (23.2%, 31.8%), E. coli (16.2%, 13.6%) and Pseudomonas spp. (11.1%, 11.4%) were most frequently isolated from cytologically positive samples which contained intracellular bacteria (10%, 14%). Amoxycillin‐clavulanate, cephalothin, cefovecin, oxytetracycline and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole showed modest in vitro activity against E. coli from dogs (approximately 70% susceptibility). Pseudomonas spp. were resistant to enrofloxacin (50%), ticarcillin (25%) and marbofloxacin (13%) but showed lower or zero resistance to aminoglycosides (approximately 7%) and ciprofloxacin (0%). Multi drug resistance (acquired resistance to three or more antimicrobial drug classes) was particularly common among E. coli isolates, with 23% from feline samples and 43% from canine samples. Conclusion: Resistance to certain first‐choice antibiotics was detected in bLRTIs highlighting the need for continued monitoring and sound evidence to inform decision‐making in the management of these infections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melanoma metastatic to the larynx is an extremely rare entity. This paper describes two patients previously treated for cutaneous melanoma who developed recurrent melanoma involving their larynges. Surgical excision of these lesions was accomplished with the carbon dioxide laser. Apparently, these two patients are the first reported cases of successful management of melanoma metaslatic to the larynx using laser surgery. The paper also discusses the evolving history and diagnosis of laryngeal melanoma, the use of the carbon dioxide laser in the treatment of other laryngeal and tracheobronchial lesions, the incidence of cutaneous and mucosal melanoma of the head and neck, and the diagnostic evaluation and management of melanoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]