<p>The aim of this paper is to get a deeper understanding if research about international relations has any practical meaning. The main focal point is about the importance of the scholar idea soft power, and its meaning on foreign policy actions through expressions. A quantity and quality method is used. The point of the main theory that concerns international relations takes a rationalistic perspective, and expands it to the notion that ides can have an impact on policy outcomes. Three different types of research utilization can be traced to determine in which way an idea is getting implemented. Why certain ideas can be used lies in the foreign policy preferences with the political institutions and its policymakers. In the last ten years, policymaking preferences in the USA, Great Britain and Sweden have shifted due to change of governments, challenges by expanding institutions as the European Union (EU) and terror alerts. Soft power is an upcoming idea that can be traced in the countries policies. In conclusion, the concept is expressed in the political agendas on the margins. For the American and the British policy the importance with the idea seems to be utilized for mediation for the retention and the legitimating of there existing policies regarding hard power. The main purpose with the idea for Sweden seems to be the utilization for guidance to promote EU: s ability to act as a prominent actor in international relations. The idea is, acts and expressed foremost as a positive symbol for the countries, rather than a ground-breaking new idea that changes policies. Due to is variables already exist in the policymaking processes.</p>

<p>Only 12% of the patients died at home. When the period between diagnosis and death was less than one month, every patient died in an institution. Younger patients, married</p><p>patients, and those living within the 40 km radius of the hospital utilized more hospital days. The "length of terminal hospitalisation" and the "proportion of days at home/ total inclusion days" seemed to be feasible outcome varibles when evaluating a palliative support service. The hospital-based palliative support service in this study defrayed its own costs due to a median saving of 10 hospital days/patient, compared with matched historical controls.</p><p>A 19-item quality of life questionnaire (AQEL) was developed which evidenced good signs of reliability and validity. The item most closely correlated to global quality of life was the sense of meaningfulness. This was true for both patients and their spouses. Patients´ levels of pain and anxiety did not increase at the end of life. In this study we could not find convincing evidence for an additive analgesic effect of paracetamol in morphine therapy of pain in cancer patients.</p>

<p>The number of persons who are not employed has increased in Sweden since the early 1990s. Unemployment has been found to influence health, especially when unemployment rates are low. The extent to which unemployment affects health when unemployment is high is less clear, and this needs to be further studied. To improve health in the population, the health care system should offer equal access to health care according to need. It is important to study whether the employment status hinders the fulfilment of this goal. </p><p>This thesis is based on four papers: Paper I and II aimed at analysing self-rated health versus mortality risk in relation to employment status, during one period of low unemployment and one period of high unemployment. Paper III and IV assessed the use of medical health care services and unmet care needs among persons who were unemployed or otherwise not employed. The goal was to analyse what health problems lead people to either seek or abstain from seeking care, and what factors encumber or facilitate this process. </p><p>The overall results indicate that being unemployed or outside the labour force was associated with an excess risk of poor self-rated health, symptoms of depression, mental and physical exhaustion and mortality. The differences in self-rated health between the unemployed and employed were larger when unemployment levels were high, than when they were low. More groups of the unemployed were also afflicted with poor health when unemployment was high. Thus, poor health among the unemployed seems to be a public health problem during high levels of unemployment. Lack of employment was related to abstaining from seeking care, despite perceiving a need for care, and this was related to psychological symptoms. To deal with the needs of the unemployed and others who are outside the labour force it would be useful to develop and implement interventions within the health care system. These should focus on psychological and psychosocial problems. Future research should analyse how to facilitate health-promoting interventions among persons who are not anchored in the labour market. </p>

<p>One of the most vulnerable groups in Swedish society today is single parent families, a group that has increased over the last thirty years in proportion to married and cohabiting parents. The aims of this thesis are to study inequality and inequity in health and health care utilization with regard to whether parents are single or couple (married/cohabiting), to investigate whether the concept of social capital may provide us with further understanding when analyzing inequality and inequity in health and to investigate how the mental health of single parent children may differ from couple parent children and to what extent this difference may be due to parental socio-economic and socio-demographic characteristics, including social capital. The results from the papers on which this thesis is based indicate that both single mothers and single fathers have poorer health than couple mothers and fathers. Single mothers also refrain from seeking medical care to a greater extent. The financial advantage of single fathers, in comparison with single mothers, might have an impact on their medical care utilization, since they seemingly seek and consume health care to an extent that matches their poorer health. Social capital has as robust an association with self-rated health as any traditional social determinant of health. Four parental characteristics were found to be independently associated with children’s mental health; being a single parent, ‘poor parental health’, limited social support and low levels of social capital. The uneven distribution of all investigated determinants of health, including social capital, gives us reason to conclude that our findings indeed raise concerns about equity. Action taken by society to enable single parents to increase their social capital might improve their and their children’s health. It may also be clearly stated that financial status has a major impact on both health and health care utilization. This particular characteristic is also rather accessible to alteration, for example through financial transfers between groups in society. </p>

This study was unique in that it focused on the rural elderly of both Black and White ethnicity's, explored differences between groups by comparing use and knowledge of health services, and controlled for gender, income, educational attainment, health status, age, and health beliefs - the independent variables of the study. Knowledge and use of health services were dependent factors. The Anderson behavioral model (Anderson, 1995) has been extensively used to examine health service utilization. It conceptualizes health care use as the outcome of a complex pattern of interactions between predisposing, enabling, and need-for care characteristics. The literature has supported the utility of the behavioral model for assessing the health care practices of rural older adults. Four questions were posed. These were translated into hypotheses for statistical testing purposes. Black and White elderly residents of one rural county in South Carolina comprised the target population. A sample of 150 elderly residents, 75 Black and 75 White, were randomly selected for participation. The multidimensional health locus of control scales were modified and used in the test instrument to assess health beliefs (both internal and external). Descriptive and background data were gathered from administration of the survey. Data were analyzed using SPSS statistical software. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the LSD (least significant differences) test, in addition to regression analysis, were used to compute and identify differences between and among groups of data. This research concluded that there was no correlation between use of services and knowledge of facilities. There were differences in utilization by race, with Whites making greater use of health care facilities. Educational levels, health status, income, household composition, type of insurance, and age influenced health care use. It was not influenced by gender, distance from facilities, and health beliefs. There was a statistically significant difference between knowledge and race, with Blacks having higher knowledge scores. Gender, health status, income, distance from facilities, and health beliefs did not influence knowledge. However, educational attainment, type of insurance, household composition, and age did. Service use and knowledge were adequate, in contrast to findings in the literature. Recommendations for further study were formulated. / Graduation date: 1999

Thesis (M.Ing. (Development and Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

Objective - To assess the relationship between schizophrenia and cardiovascular disease by evaluating metabolic risk associated with treatment for schizophrenia, prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors (CV-RF) and disease (CV-D), and health care utilization in people with schizophrenia compared to the non-schizophrenic population. Methods Four studies were completed to evaluate the dissertation objectives. A systematic review was completed to quantify the change in metabolic parameters associated with use of atypical antipsychotic agents. The second study utilized a period prevalence design to compare prevalence of CV-RF (diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia) and CV-D in people with and without schizophrenia using the administrative databases of Alberta Health and Wellness. General and cardiac specialist health care utilization was evaluated in people with schizophrenia using data from Alberta Health and Wellness. Lastly, results from the Canadian Community Health Survey were used to evaluate prevalence of CV-RF and CV-D while controlling for important lifestyle and demographic variables unavailable in the databases of Alberta Health and Wellness. Results Use of atypical agents, particularly clozapine, resulted in statistically significant weight gain and increases in total cholesterol and blood glucose compared to typical agents. Having schizophrenia was associated with a significantly higher prevalence of diabetes, obesity, smoking, and CV-D compared to people without schizophrenia. Individuals with schizophrenia visited a general practitioner and the emergency department more often, and were more likely to be hospitalized than those without schizophrenia. Despite having a higher prevalence of coronary artery disease, individuals with schizophrenia were significantly less likely to visit a cardiologist or undergo revascularization compared to people with coronary artery disease who did not have schizophrenia. Conclusion Individuals with schizophrenia have a considerable burden of cardiovascular disease compared to people without schizophrenia. This is likely a result of a number of factors, including medications used to treat schizophrenia, the increased prevalence of smoking and other unhealthy lifestyle factors, and the increased prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors in people with schizophrenia. Individuals with schizophrenia utilize the general health care system more frequently than their non-schizophrenic counterparts, therefore the opportunity exists for monitoring for and management of modifiable cardiovascular risk factors in this vulnerable population.

Real-time system refers to the computing, communication, and information system with deadline requirements. To meet these deadline requirements, most systems use a mechanism known as the schedulability test which determines whether each of the admitted tasks can meet its deadline. A new task will not be admitted unless it passes the schedulability test. Schedulability tests can be either direct or indirect. The utilization based schedulability test is the most common schedulability test approach, in which a task can be admitted only if the total system utilization is lower than a pre-derived bound. While the utilization bound based schedulability test is simple and effective, it is often difficult to derive the bound. For its analytical complexity, utilization bound results are usually obtained on a case-by-case basis. In this dissertation, we develop a general framework that allows effective derivation of schedulability bounds for different workload patterns and schedulers. We introduce an analytical model that is capable of describing a wide range of tasks' and schedulers'€™ behaviors. We propose a new definition of utilization, called workload rate. While similar to utilization, workload rate enables flexible representation of different scheduling and workload scenarios and leads to uniform proof of schedulability bounds. We introduce two types of workload constraint functions, s-shaped and r-shaped, for flexible and accurate characterization of the task workloads. We derive parameterized schedulability bounds for arbitrary static priority schedulers, weighted round robin schedulers, and timed token ring schedulers. Existing utilization bounds for these schedulers are obtained from the closed-form formula by direct assignment of proper parameters. Some of these results are applied to a cluster computing environment. The results developed in this dissertation will help future schedulability bound analysis by supplying a unified modeling framework and will ease the implementation practical real-time systems by providing a set of ready to use bound results.

This thesis examines young people's attitudes to some aspects of sustainable development.The focus is on attitudes to preservation and to utilization of nature and also to solidarity andto equal distribution of resources. Hence the ecological, social and economic dimensions ofsustainable development are examined in the same survey. The study is aiming to examinehow the attitudes are distributed according to sex, educational programmes and urban/ruralliving as well as to examine how the values, from which the attitudes emanate, are correlatedwith each other.The results show that young female students in theoretical programs and students who livein larger cities are most supportive of nature preservation. The same pattern recurs with evengreater clarity on the attitudes to solidarity. Attitudes to utilization of nature can also be distinguishedclearly between the sexes by young men having more positive attitudes to utilizationthan young women. However, the differences between educational programmes andbetween students from urban and rural areas are clearly smaller than when it comes to attitudesto preservation and to solidarity. Attitudes to equal distribution of recources exhibitirregular patterns. Young women have more positive attitudes than young men but the linksbetween attitudes to equality and educational programme or rural/urban living, are not pointingin any clear direction. The results also show that there is a clear and positive correlationbetween positive attitudes to nature preservation and a willingness to show solidarity with awide circle of people. Those who say they care for nature also say that they are prepared tocare for other people.

<p>It is not mandatory for the student to declare a pregnancy to her educational institution. It does however become more complicated for the student nurse, because she has to provide a health service while she is a student during her clinical placement. The researcher has noticed that student nurses do fall pregnant during their undergraduate studies at the University of the Western Cape. The researcher was unsure why this phenomenon is occurring amongst undergraduate nursing students. He identified the need to measure the level of knowledge of pregnancy prevention amongst undergraduate nurses, their level of utilization of such services and their attitudes towards falling pregnant during their studies. This study is of a quantitative nature whereby the researcher made use of a descriptive design. The method of data collection utilized was an anonymous self administered questionnaire form. The population under study was the registered undergraduate nursing students in 2008 at the University of the Western Cape. This population consisted of 1031 individuals. Their ethnic background represents the South African demography. An exhaustive sampling approach was used and 401 individuals gave consent to participate in the study. Through this research the researcher hypothysed and proved that the level of knowledge of contraception amongst undergraduate student nurses is indeed inadequate and that this low level of knowledge on the subject area leads to incorrect and inconsistent and non use of contraception in their own lives.</p>