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Readiness to adopt a new technology is one factor that contributes to the success of a telehealth programme. Since one goal of telehealth is to improve care, it is appropriate to determine its success through a quality-of-care framework that addresses structure, process and outcome. A qualitative case study of home care in the Calgary Health Region in Alberta set out to understand how clients, nurses, physicians and managers perceived their readiness to use video-visits for home care. Focus groups, home visits, and telephone and face-to-face interviews were used to collect data. Readiness to adopt home telecare was compared between groups, as well as with behaviour predicted in the literature. Differences in perceptions were identified among the four participant groups. Clients and managers identified a higher degree of readiness-clients because of the potential to support independence in their homes and managers because of the potential efficiencies in the system.

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Readiness to adopt a new technology is one factor that contributes to the success of a telehealth programme. Since one goal of telehealth is to improve care, it is appropriate to determine its success through a quality-of-care framework that addresses structure, process and outcome. A qualitative case study of home care in the Calgary Health Region in Alberta set out to understand how clients, nurses, physicians and managers perceived their readiness to use video-visits for home care. Focus groups, home visits, and telephone and face-to-face interviews were used to collect data. Readiness to adopt home telecare was compared between groups, as well as with behaviour predicted in the literature. Differences in perceptions were identified among the four participant groups. Clients and managers identified a higher degree of readiness - clients because of the potential to support independence in their homes and managers because of the potential efficiencies in the system.

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Since 1995, the Canadian Association of Nurses in AIDS Care (CANAC), the Canadian Nurses Association, the Victorian Order of Nurses of Canada, and the Ordre des Infirmières et Infirmiers du Québec have collaborated on several HIV/AIDS initiatives supported by the AIDS Care, Treatment, and Support Program, Health Canada (the national health organization). CANAC is the lead and sponsoring association in this collaboration. Phases I and II of the collaboration (December 1996 to March 1999) identified, promoted, and evaluated 17 nursing projects in HIV/AIDS care across Canada. This article describes the goals and outcomes of two of the collaboration's main projects: the identification of HIV/AIDS nursing research priorities and the mentorship program in HIV/AIDS care for Francophone nurses practicing in the province of Québec.

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As drug use in Canada rises and more and more intravenous drug users become HIV positive, nursing the addicted client takes on a whole new meaning. However, nurses may not have had the opportunity, during basic training, to cover the subject of substance abuse in depth. This article explores addictions nursing and provides information that will help nurses ensure quality nursing care for this population. The first part of the article provides statistics on drug consumption, followed by a classification of the various drugs and a definition of substance abuse. Nursing interventions to deal with clients' specific health needs are presented, as are innovative projects illustrating nursing achievements in the field.

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Adaptive resonance architectures are neural nets that are capable of classifying arbitrary input patterns into stable category representations. A hybrid optoelectronic implementation utilizing an optical joint transform correlator is proposed and demonstrated. The resultant optoelectronic system is able to reduce the number of calculations compared to a strictly computer-based approach. The result is that, for larger images, the optoelectronic system is faster than the computer-based approach.

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This study examined the characteristics of pain experienced by burned patients. Sources of inter-individual variations were also studied and the interrelationships between anxiety, depression, and pain were investigated. Forty-two adult patients hospitalized for burn injuries participated in the study. The McGill Pain Questionnaire and a visual analogue scale were employed to measure the pain experienced at rest and during therapeutic procedures. Anxiety and depression levels were assessed with the Spielberger State Anxiety Inventory, the Beck Depression Inventory, and visual analogue scales. The results showed that the pain varies greatly from patient to patient and undergoes wide fluctuations over time in each patient. The greatest pain is usually experienced during therapeutic procedures, the patients reporting significantly more pain on these occasions than at rest. Variations in pain severity were not related to socio-demographic characteristics of the patients, the length of time elapsed since the injury, or the quantity of analgesics administered. The extent of the burns was a significant predictor of pain but only in the first week after the injury. High levels of anxiety or depression were not necessarily associated with higher pain scores during therapeutic procedures but the patients who were more anxious or depressed tended to report more pain when at rest. These results are discussed in relation to pain management strategies, with particular emphasis on the need for the analgesic therapy to be highly individualized and frequently adjusted.

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This study identified five stable dimensions that judges utilized in making similarity judgments of a set of 26 psychopathology descriptors from a diverse domain representing traditional psychopathology descriptions such as lay labels, and diagnostic categories from the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM II), as well as stimuli from a new nosology of psychopathology based on behavioral descriptions derived from a technique known as modal profile analysis. These five dimensions were interpreted as: Mental Illness, Social vs. Psychological Deviance, Depression vs. Impulse Control, Anxiety vs. Impulse Control, and Paranoid vs. Impulse Control. Results did not, overall, support the superiority of the DSM II descriptors over labels, nor the beneficial influence of diagnostic qualifiers, but did suggest that specific personality information, as exemplified in the modal profile stimuli, reduces the influence of stigmatizing conceptualizations on psychopathology judgments.

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This study utilized a model of inferential accuracy to study the effects of deviant labels on clinical judgments. It was hypothesized that labels would lower both treshold and sensitivity, the key components of the model. Analyses of variance yielded significant effects for labels and specific patterns of psychopathology suggested that labels have differential effects on inferences drawn with regard to various types of psychological disorders. Evidence in support of the generalizability of sensitivity and treshold also was obtained.

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