Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Psychology, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Francisco, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-95). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-223).

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala University, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 21-25).

Magister Curationis - MCur / Infections (including healthcare-associated infections) are one of the leading causes of neonatal morbidity and mortality, yet these deaths could be prevented by cost-effective interventions. Handwashing (HW) is crucial to preventing the spread of antimicrobial resistance and reducing healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs). However, healthcare workers' compliance with optimal practices remains low in most settings.The purpose of this study was to determine the compliance with HW among nurses and midwives caring for newborn babies at Rwamagana Health Facilities, and the extent to which demographic and cognitive characteristics predict nurses' HW compliance. The study’s methodology involved a cross-sectional approach encompassing descriptive and quantitative methods. The data was collected over a period of 3 weeks from a total sample of 139 nursemidwives. An anonymous self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data; out of 139 questionnaires distributed 134 were returned back completed, giving a rate of 96.4%. The data analysis was done using SPSS software version 21.The results demonstrate that a mean self-reported HW compliance rate was 82.00% (SD= 13.60). A compliance rate of 80% or greater was confirmed by most of the participants in the study (79.1%). The highest reported rate of hand washing was HW after exposure to the newborn's body fluids (M= 89.33%; SD= 14.878),while results revealed that nurses tend to perform less HW after touching an object in the vicinity of the patient(73.43%; SD=22.81). A multiple regression analysis revealed that attitudes, subjective norms and intentions were unique independent predictors of HW compliance. However, results did not show any relationship between HW and nurses' demographic characteristics.This study recommends that, strategies aiming to improve HW compliance must be focused on concepts that predict HW. Further research ought to be conducted using observational approach.

In this thesis, we classified user comments posted on online forums related to “Newborn Genome Sequencing” (NGS). User comments were annotated as irrelevant, positive, negative, or mixed by two annotators. The objective was to create a classification model that could predict the sentiment of each user comment with a high accuracy. To compare classifiers, a baseline classifier (Accuracy 52%) was created. We created a single classifier (called flat comment-level classifier with accuracy of 65.14%) to classify comments into irrelevant, positive, negative, or mixed. A more sophisticated classifier, named two-level comment classifier, consisting of two classifiers, was created (Accuracy 69.81%): - The first classifier that classified each comment into relevant or irrelevant ones. - The second classifier that classified each relevant comment (predicted by the first classifier) as positive, negative, or mixed. 18 extra features were generated to improve the accuracy of the flat classification compared to baseline classifier (from 52% to 65.14% for flat comment classification, and 69.48% to 69.81% for two-level comment classification). Attempts were made to enhance the result of the two-level comment classifier by using the discourse structure of each sentence in a comment. The accuracy achieved by this enhanced two-level classifier was 64.24%. Therefore, removing irrelevant EDUs did not improve the accuracy. To achieve the above-mentioned enhancement, all comments were segmented into their consisting elementary discourse units (EDUs). We removed irrelevant EDUs from the relevant comments before running the second classifier. Furthermore, we performed EDU-level classification by creating two classifiers: - A flat classifier: classified all EDUs into irrelevant, positive, negative, or neutral - A two-level EDU: classified EDUs, first, into relevant or irrelevant and then classified the relevant EDUs (predicted by the first classifier) into positive, negative, or neutral ones. The accuracy achieved for the flat EDU-level classifier was 81.84%. However, due to the highly imbalanced nature of the EDU dataset, the F-measure for positive, negative, and neutral class was very low. Under-sampling was performed to improve the F-measure for positive, negative, and neutral class. Another topic investigated was to know why forum users supported or rejected NGS. To extract the arguments, the comments were segmented into EDUs. Following segmenting, each EDU was annotated as relevant or irrelevant to NGS. Each relevant EDU was annotated as for or against NGS. Topic related EDUs were selected as well as two EDUs before and after the topic-related EDUs. Bigrams, trigrams, four-grams and five-grams were created from extracted EDUs. Five-grams were more meaningful for human annotators, and were therefore favoured and ranked based on frequency in the dataset. Following ranking of the five grams, the top five were selected as the possible arguments.

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A research report submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master in Audiology, Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand September 2018 / Newborn hearing screening (NHS) has been successfully implemented in developed countries such as the United States of America and the United Kingdom. This is however not the case in developing countries such as South Africa. The challenges impact on the implementation of such programmes include lack of suitably trained personnel, financial resources for staff and equipment, institutional support and political will. The lack of NHS programmes in South Africa has resulted in the late detection of hearing loss in infants and children and subsequently delayed intervention. In order to address the lack of NHS, a rural clinic-based NHS programme was implemented in July 2014 at three primary health care (PHC) clinics in the Limpopo Province. The main aim of the study was to describe the parental/caregiver perspectives regarding the effectiveness of this rural clinic-based NHS programme. The effectiveness of the programme was also evaluated in terms of meeting national (HPCSA, 2007) and international (JCIH, 2007) benchmarks. A retrospective review of 2 302 audiological records of babies who underwent NHS between July 2014 to June 2015 was conducted. Concurrently, 18 parents of infants who underwent hearing screening as part of the programme were purposefully selected and semistructured interviews were conducted to explore the parental perspectives regarding the programme. The results of the retrospective record review revealed that the mean age of the infants screened during the review period was 112 days (2 – 341; ± 40.26). The overall coverage rate was 87% and the referral rate, 7%. The overall follow-up return rate was 32% and only 15% the infants who failed both the initial and rescreening underwent comprehensive diagnostic assessment to confirm their hearing status. The overall prevalence rate for significant sensorineural hearing loss was 0.4/1000 and 7.8/1000 for middle ear effusion. The parents/caregivers confirmed the perceived effectiveness of the NHS programme. All the participants were satisfied with the programme and confirmed the credibility of the screening programme and screeners. Parents indicated that they were empowered with knowledge regarding the importance of early detection of hearing loss in infants and young children. Accessibility was both a facilitator and a barrier with travel distance and cost the most often cited obstacles to attending follow-up appointments. The findings indicate it is feasible to implement clinic-based NHS programmes that effectively meet the needs of parents/caregivers of infants residing in rural areas of South Africa. Although not all the benchmarks were met within the first year of implementation, the high coverage- and low referral rates are the first steps in improving the outcomes of the screening programme. The study highlight the importance of regular monitoring and evaluation of the NHS programmes to keep track of key outcomes and impacts related to the different components of the programme / MT 2019

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