Browsing by Subject "manage"
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Item Discovering the Current Wound Management Practices of Rural Africans: a Pilot Study(2013-06-03) Benskin, Linda 1959-; Bishop, Sheryl L; Hill, Alice; Melby, Peter C; Bolton, Laura LUnrelenting heat, poor sanitation, lack of knowledge, and poverty contribute to a disabling wound prevalence that often exceeds 20% in rural areas of tropical developing countries. Wounds in this environment are usually poorly managed at very high cost. Traditional health practitioners and village health workers, rather than health professionals, provide health care in most villages. Wound management education for these nonprofessional health providers should include only sustainable practices which prove to be safe and effective in tropical villages. However, usual practice data, needed for comparison studies, is absent from the published literature. This pilot study introduced an innovative data collection method to overcome cultural obstacles which have prevented researchers from obtaining meaningful quantitative data in this challenging setting. Between August and October of 2012, seventy-five participants from 25 diverse villages in Ghana provided detailed descriptions of their current usual topical wound management methods by completing the stories of patients representing each of seven wound types commonly found in this setting. Responses were tabulated and categorized as congruent or not congruent with modern topical wound management principles within three domains and six subcategories (two for each domain). Four research questions organized the data analysis. The wound management practices of nonprofessional health care providers were identified and described in detail for the first time. These results are foundational to the process of developing culturally and environmentally appropriate wound management protocols for indigenous wound care providers in rural areas of tropical developing countries. In addition, several significant differences in the wound management of the three nonprofessional provider groups were found. The unique data collection method introduced in this study can easily be adapted to rural areas of other tropical developing countries. When sufficient data have been accumulated, the information can be utilized to design comparison studies so that the ecological validity of the wound management protocols in planned educational programs can be ensured.Item The Effectiveness of the Hybrid Graphical Representation Method in Visually Combining and Communicating Logical and Spatial Relationships between Scheduled Activities(2012-07-16) Nageeb, MeenaThis research endeavor investigated the possibility to combine the visual advantages of both graphical schedule visualization methods, the Linked Gantt Charts (LGC) and Flowline graphs (FLG), derived from the activity-based and location-based scheduling systems, to help resolve some of their shortcomings by capitalizing on their combined strengths. In order to accomplish the goal of the research, a graphical representation system that combines these two scheduling visualization methods, LGC and FLG, is developed. Afterwards, the research attempted to empirically validate the ability of the proposed tool to visually communicate and combine logical and spatial relationships between scheduled activities. This is compared to comprehending the same information by looking at a stand-alone LGC or FLG. The accuracy and time, of deciphering various details of a sample project schedule, are used as parameters to evaluate the proposed scheduling visualization tool, and compare it to the existing LGC and FLG systems. The Hybrid Graphical Representation (HGR) is the tool developed by this research to combine Linked Gantt Chart bars from the activity-based scheduling approach, and flow-lines from the location-based scheduling approach. The HGR concept is founded on the basic idea that both LGC and FLG share a common X-axis, Time. The only difference is in a LGC the Activities are listed on the Y-axis, while the FLG shows Locations on the Y-axis. This research proposed adding a third dimension to the FLG, listing the project Activities on a Z-axis. Viewing the HGR 3D graph from the top, the user will observe the Gantt bars with Time on the X-axis and the Activities listed on the Z-axis. Observing the schedule from the front view, the user will see the flow-lines developed from the location-based scheduling approach with Locations on the Y-axis and Time on the X-axis. After conducting a series of online surveys measuring the time and accuracy of using a prototype HGR schedule, it was found that the users were able to reap the benefits of both scheduling approaches (LGC and FLG), and visually link and communicate information concerning the activities' logical relationships and spatial relationships. However, it took the participants a relatively longer time to achieve that higher accuracy utilizing the HGR tool.