Commensality and Individual Eating: Mediating Social Relationships during Work Breaks

Based on an analysis of eating during work hours, this article looks at the issue of maintaining informal social relations. Various forms of the gathering together of individuals are important in the maintenance of social relations. Very often, casual or leisure-time gatherings, whether they are to mark an important event or celebration, or are just a coffee or lunch break during work hours, involve eating or drinking. However, colleagues and co-workers do not always eat at the same time, especially regarding day-to-day eating during work hours. In this paper, the focus is on the relative importance of eating alone or eating in a group when researching the maintenance of informal relations. The first objective of this research is to clarify the social aspects in research on eating and to survey the scientific literature on commensality and eating alone. Second the paper looks at how eating in a group as opposed to individual eating are expressed as part of the daily eating routine with ones co-workers. By going through these objectives, the question is raised – how would ways of maintaining informal relations change if there an ever greater number of co-workers decided to eat alone?

Occupation and working outcomes during the Coronavirus Pandemic

Using data from the first wave of the SHARE COVID-19 Survey and additional information collected from the previous waves of SHARE (Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe), we explore the effects of job characteristics on two outcomes: (i) the probability of work interruptions and (ii) the length of such interruptions during the first phase of the Coronavirus Pandemic. In order to assess the relationship between job features and labour market outcomes, we define two indexes proxying the pre-COVID-19 technical remote work feasibility as well as the level of social interaction with other people while working. Moreover, we use an indicator that classifies ISCO-08 3-digit job titles based on the essential nature of the good or service provided. We find that job characteristics have been major determinants of the probability of undergoing work interruptions and their duration. In addition, we show that women have been negatively affected by the Pandemic to a much larger extent than men, suggesting the relevance of the intrinsic characteristics of jobs they are mainly involved in, and the role of gender selection into specific activities. Not only females were more likely to have undergone work interruptions but they also exhibited larger probabilities of longer work breaks. A similar impact is seen for self-employed and less-educated workers.

MODERN CHALLENGES AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR MAINTAINING THE HEALTH OF DENTISTS IN THE FACE OF NEW OCCUPATIONAL RISKS CAUSED BY CORONAVIRUS INFECTION

The monitoring of the activities of dentists in the context of the continuing high risk of the spread of a new coronavirus infection from the point of view of occupational medicine made it possible to identify a number of key points that distinguish the work of dental doctors at the moment. Working in a mode of increased epidemiological danger is a factor that aggravates the neuro-emotional stress of doctors; the predominant use of chlorine-containing agents for cleaning and disinfection leads to an increase in the concentration of chemically active substances in the air of the working area and causes a deterioration in performance, can be the cause of specific, acute, subacute and chronic poisoning; changing the vector of using modern personal protective equipment (special protective suits, respirators, gloves, eye protection), solving issues of continuous updating of the knowledge of dentists on labor protection issues; an increase in the workload of working hours due to the collection and analysis of the patient's epidemiological history, and, as a consequence, a decrease in the possibility of rational use of work breaks aimed at preserving the health of dentists.

Regulation of Work Breaks in Hungary with a European Perspective

The basis for the review of the Hungarian and European rules of the rest break during the working day was the fact that there was a lawsuit to establish the illegitimacy of termination, in which I represented the plaintiff. The reason for the summary dismissal on the part of the employer was that the employee was playing cards while on a rest break during the working day. In his action, the plaintiff sought a declaration that his employer had unlawfully terminated his employment. By the judgment of the Court of First Instance, the action was dismissed, and the plaintiff was ordered to bear the court costs. By the judgment of the Court of Law proceeding by the plaintiff’s appeal, the judgement was reversed, and it ordered the defendant to pay the plaintiff severance pay as well as compensation. The defendant presented an application for review, which was not upheld. After completing the matters of fact, the Court of Appeal correctly stated that, at the time of the inspection, the plaintiff availed himself of a rest break during the working day, which was lawful; moreover, it was not disputed by the defendant. The Court of Appeal rightly concluded that the employer may prohibit the employee from playing cards during breaks in the workplace, but this must be communicated unequivocally to him, and this expectation must be consequently carried out. The Court of Appeal also rightly pointed out that in the case of explicit prohibition of some behaviours, employees must also be informed of the legal consequences, which are applicable in case of infringement of the rule. However, in the present case, this was not established, so that the lawsuit ended with the full recovery of a favourable judgment of the employee plaintiff at the Supreme Court of Justice.

Pracademia: an answer but not the answer to an enduring question

PurposeThe pracademia movement is gaining increasing traction in education, particularly in educational leadership. Offered as a means to bridge practice and academia, questions remain as to whether it resolves or perpetuates the theory–practice divide. This paper systematically approaches this problem.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically informed by the relational approach, this conceptual paper articulates the preliminaries and underlying assumptions of pracademia before exploring the implications for the field of educational leadership.FindingsHaving established the underlying assumptions, this paper offers three standards – description, explanation and alternative – for assessing knowledge claims in the field that does not default to distinct knowledge worlds (e.g. academic, practice) or categories of knowledge generators (e.g. academics, practitioners, pracademics).Originality/valueThrough a relational approach, this work breaks down the boundaries of theory and practice to offer a new way of thinking about knowledge claims. The new approach is consistent with the intent of bridging theory and practice without the need to assume them to be separate in the first place.

Wafer-Scale Single-Crystal Monolayer Graphene Grown Directly on Insulating Substrates

Currently, the direct synthesis of inch-scale single-crystal graphene on insulating substrates is limited by the lack of metal catalysis, suitable crystallization conditions, and self-limiting growth mechanisms. In this study, we investigated a direct growth of adlayer-free ultra-flat wafer-scale single-crystal monolayer graphene on insulating substrates by the multi-loop plasma-etching-assisted chemical vapor deposition (MPE-CVD) method. Firstly, an atomic-thick growth nanochamber was created by fabricating single-crystal Cu(111) foils on Al2O3(0001) substrates, in which graphene was directly synthesized by MPE-CVD. After growth, the Cu(111) foil was detached using a liquid-nitrogen-assisted separation method, and the ultra-high-quality single-crystal graphene film was experimentally achieved on Al2O3(0001). The field-effect transistors fabricated on the directly grown graphene exhibited excellent electronic transport properties with high carrier mobilities. This work breaks the bottleneck in the direct synthesis of single-crystal graphene on insulating substrates and paves the way for next-generation carbon-based atomic electronics and semiconductor nanodevices.

No evidence for an effect of working from home on neck pain and neck disability among Swiss office workers: Short-term impact of COVID-19

Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of working from home on neck pain (NP) among office workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Participants from two Swiss organisations, aged 18–65 years and working from home during the lockdown (n = 69) were included. Baseline data collected in January 2020 before the lockdown (office work) were compared with follow-up data in April 2020 during lockdown (working from home). The primary outcome of NP was assessed with a measure of intensity and disability. Secondary outcomes were quality of workstation ergonomics, number of work breaks, and time spent working at the computer. Two linear mixed effects models were fitted to the data to estimate the change in NP. Results No clinically relevant change in the average NP intensity and neck disability was found between measurement time points. Each working hour at the computer increased NP intensity by 0.36 points (95% CI: 0.09 to 0.62) indicating strong evidence. No such effect was found for neck disability. Each work break taken reduced neck disability by 2.30 points (95% CI: − 4.18 to − 0.42, evidence). No such effect was found for NP intensity. There is very strong evidence that workstation ergonomics was poorer at home. Conclusion The number of work breaks and hours spent at the computer seem to have a greater effect on NP than the place of work (office, at home), measurement time point (before COVID-19, during lockdown) or the workstation ergonomics. Further research should investigate the effect of social and psychological factors. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04169646. Registered 15 November 2019—Retrospectively registered, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04169646.

One list to rule them all and many semantics to bind them: Building a shared, scalable and sustainable source for the problem oriented medical record (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Since the creation of the Problem Oriented Medical Record, the building of problem lists has been the focus of many researches. To this day, this issue is not well resolved, and building an appropriate contextualized problem list is still a challenge. OBJECTIVE This paper presents the process of building a shared multi-purpose common problem list at the University Hospitals of Geneva, a consortium of all public hospitals and 30 outpatient clinics of the state of Geneva. This list aims at bridging the gap between clinicians’ language expressed in free text and secondary usages requiring structured information. METHODS The strategy focuses on the needs of clinicians by building a list of uniquely identified expressions to support their daily activities. In a second stage, these expressions are connected to additional information, building a complex graph of information. A list of 45,946 expressions manually extracted from clinical documents has been manually curated and encoded in multiple semantic dimensions, such as ICD-10, ICPC-2, SNOMED-CT or dimensions dictated by specific usages, such as identifying expressions specific to a domain, a gender, or an intervention. The list has been progressively deployed for clinicians with an iterative process of quality control, maintenance and improvements, including addition of new expressions, or dimensions for specific needs. The problem management of the electronic health record allowed to measure and correct the encoding based on real-world usage. RESULTS The list was deployed in production in January 2017 and was regularly updated and deployed in new divisions of the hospital. In 4 years, 684,102 problems were created using the list. The proportion of free text entries reduced progressively from 37.47% (8,321/22,206) in December 2017 to 18.38% (4,547/24,738) in December 2020. In the last version of the list, over 14 dimensions were mapped to expressions, among them 5 international classifications and 8 other classifications for specific usages. The list became a central axis in the EHR, being used for many different purposes linked to care such as surgical planning or emergency wards, or in research, for various predictions using machine learning techniques. CONCLUSIONS This work breaks with common approaches primarily by focusing on real clinicians’ language when expressing patient’s problems and secondly by mapping whatever is required, including controlled vocabularies to answer specific needs. This approach improves the quality of the expression of patients’ problems, while allowing to build as many structured dimensions as needed to convey semantics according to specific contexts. The method is shown to be scalable, sustainable and efficient at hiding the complexity of semantics or the burden of constraint structured problem list entry for clinicians. Ongoing work is analyzing the impact of this approach at influencing how clinicians express patient’s problems.

Anesthesiologists’ occupational wellbeing and support during COVID-19 pandemic

Anesthesiologists have been at the forefront of COVID-19 pandemic and are particularly at risk of suffering both physical and emotional effects. There have been several individual and organizational strategies that can be put in place to tackle their well-being. Self-strategies that are recommended are adequate rest and sleep, consistent work breaks, help seeking behavior, emotional control and acceptance of limitations of their own competence and healthcare systems. Several online training programs are available for individual guidance. Organizations can also support their staff in different ways. It is important to recognize those who are more vulnerable physically and emotionally. Institution should implement stress reduction strategies, provide adequate PPE, should be able to communicate with their employees in a clear and honest manner and enforce infection control policies. In addition, institutions must take other physical measures where resources permit, like provision of negative pressure rooms and to provide updated and accurate information. Both personal and psychological support is needed. Several different models have been suggested for emotional support. One particularly vulnerable group that requires additional assistance are those in quarantine. Last but not least, in addition to the implementation of all these measures it is imperative to sustain these activities. Key words: Anesthesiology; Anesthesiologists; COVID-19; Stress, Psychological Citation: Khan FA. Anesthesiologists’ occupational wellbeing and support during COVID-19 pandemic. Anaesth. pain intensive care 2021;25(2):122-125. DOI: 10.35975/apic.v25i2.1459 Received: 21 February 2021, Accepted: 25 February 2021

Warming from tropical deforestation reduces worker productivity in rural communities

The accelerating loss of tropical forests in the 21st century has eliminated cooling services provided by trees in low latitude countries. Cooling services can protect rural communities and outdoor workers with little adaptive capacity from adverse heat exposure, which is expected to increase with climate change. Yet little is still known about whether cooling services can mitigate negative impacts of heat on labor productivity among rural outdoor workers. Through a field experiment in Indonesia, we show that worker productivity was 8.22% lower in deforested relative to forested settings, where wet bulb globe temperatures were, on average, 2.84 °C higher in deforested settings. We demonstrate that productivity losses are driven by behavioral adaptations in the form of increased number of work breaks, and provide evidence that suggests breaks are in part driven by awareness of heat effects on work. Our results indicate that the cooling services from forests have the potential for increasing resilience and adaptive capacity to local warming.