Sharps injuries can transmit fatal blood-borne infections to injured health care workers. These blood-borne infections have serious consequences, including long-term illness, disability and death. The operating room is a fast-paced, hazardous working environment, where personnel are constantly exposed to sharps injuries. The psychological aspects of these injuries have received little attention. The emotional impact of a sharps injury can be severe and long lasting, even when a serious infection is not transmitted. Furthermore, according to literature, the mean rates of underreporting sharps injuries vary between twenty two and seventy five percent. The research objectives of this qualitative, explorative and descriptive study were to explore and describe the experiences of operating room personnel in the southern district of the North-West province in South Africa after sharps injuries, to explore and describe the reasons why they do not always report these incidents, to explore and describe what could be done to increase reporting of sharps incidents in operating rooms by personnel and to propose guidelines to support operating room personnel after a sharps injury. In order to achieve these objectives, the researcher gathered data by conducting semi-structured interviews with operating room personnel who had experienced sharps injuries in hospitals of the southern districts of the North-West in South Africa. Ethical considerations were adhered to by the researcher. Permission to conduct research was negotiated by the researcher with management of the hospitals in the target area. Voluntary, informed consent in writing was obtained from all participants before interviews were conducted. Data saturation was reached after 17 interviews were conducted with participants. Data were analysed with the help of an experienced co-coder. The researcher and co-coder reached consensus during a meeting organised for the purpose. Then the data were related to relevant literature. Seven categories emerged from the data analysis: Mechanisms of sharps injuries in the operating room, practical measures taken after a sharps injury, reasons for not reporting all sharps injuries, emotions experienced after a sharps injury, impact of sharps injuries on relationships, the support received by participants after a sharps injury and their coping mechanisms after a sharps injury. Several conclusions were drawn by the researcher from the data. Although all hospitals in this study had a reporting system in place, operating room personnel participating in this study did not report all their sharps injuries. They received no or insufficient support from hospital management after a sharps injury. No or insufficient communication existed between hospital management and participants in this study after these incidents. From these findings the researcher proposed guidelines for support to operating room personnel after sharps injuries and to increase the reporting of these incidents. The researcher also compiled recommendations for nursing practice, nursing education and nursing research in the operating room. / Thesis (M.Cur.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

Thesis (MEd (Human Resource Studies)) -- University of South Australia, 1990

Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1987. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2004. / Supervisor: Lizy K. John. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available from UMI.

Operating room nursing skills are some of the most demanding skills in the nursing profession. At the moment nurses trained in operating room technique are in very short supply in Ethiopia, due to the exodus of nurses to better working environments with more reasonable payment. This is especially noticeable in one of the state hospitals in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as emerged in conversations with the head nurse of the operating room in this hospital about the high turnover rate, as well as the high absenteeism rate amongst the nurses working in the operating room. Nurses working in the operating room also expressed unhappiness in their work environment which could cause them to look for other jobs or to be absent from duty. The nurses were facing numerous problems in their work environment such as work overload due to staff shortage, stress due to shortage of supplies because they are not able to do their job as much as the need requires. The researcher identified the need to explore the challenges that the operating room nurses are experiencing in their work environment. The researcher used the following questions to meet the research objectives: What are the experiences of the operating room nurses in their work environment?; What potential assistance would such nurses need to better cope with the problems they experience in their work environment? The research study aimed to explore and describe the experience of operating room nurses in their work environment and on the basis of the findings to develop guidelines to assist the operating room nurses in coping more effectively with their work environment. The researcher used a qualitative approach with an explorative, descriptive and contextual design. Fifteen registered nurses were selected using purposive sampling. Informed consent was obtained from the participants and permission from the Ethics Committee of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, as well as Yekatit 12 Hospital. Data were gathered using face to face interviews and field notes were taken to determine the experiences of the participants. Data were analyzed using Tesch's method of descriptive data analysis (in Creswell, 2003:13). Two main themes with two sub-themes related to the experience of the registered nurses working in the operating room of the state hospital were identified. Main theme one focused on the non-conducive work environment and it focused on the lack of support from management and the problems experienced in the environment. It was found that OR nurses had good working relationships among the nursing staff. Main theme two focused on the limited training opportunities in OR techniques. The sub-themes described the limited exposure to new technology and the quality of nursing education which the participants felt was not taken seriously in Ethiopia. Based on the identified themes guidelines were formulated to assist the registered nurses working in the operating room of a state hospital in Ethiopia. Utilization of these guidelines should assist the registered nurses to cope more effectively with their work environment. Recommendation were made, further research and limitations identified.

ITC/USA 2005 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2005 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Near real-time telemetry acquisition, processing and analysis on a desktop PC have always been difficult. Many factors complicate working with real-time data, including operating system latencies, design inefficiencies and hardware limitations. These problems are further compounded when data from multiple sources had to be integrated, increasing design complexity. Current design solutions for analyzing data in near real-time now utilize the latest hardware implementations and software designs, taking advantage of new hardware and language features. This paper will discuss several issues found with PC-based telemetry systems and how new designs are addressing these issues.

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Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / The subversion technique of attacking an operating system is often overlooked in information security. Operating Systems are vulnerable throughout their lifecycle in that small artifices can be inserted into an operating system's code that, on command, can completely disable its security mechanisms. To illustrate that this threat is viable, it is shown that it is not difficult for an attacker to implement the framework for the "two-card loader" type of subversion, a trap door which enables the insertion of arbitrary code into the operating system while the system is deployed and running. This framework provides several services such as memory allocation in the attacked system, and mechanisms for relocating, linking and loading the inserted attack code. Additionally, this thesis shows how Windows XP embedded designers can use Intel's x86 hardware more effectively to build a higher assurance operating system. Principles of hardware support are discussed and recommendations are presented. Subversion is overlooked because critics believe the attack is too difficult to carry out. It is illustrated in this thesis that this is simply not the case. Anyone with access to the operating system code at some point in its lifecycle can design a fairly elaborate subversion artifice with modest effort. / Ensign, United States Navy Reserve

This thesis proposes a new dynamic resource management architecture, Magnet, to meet the requirements of users in flexible and adaptive systems. Computer systems no longer operate in centralized isolated static environments. Technological advances, such as smaller and faster hardware, and higher reliability of networks have resulted in the growth of mobility of computing and the need for run-time reconfigurability. The dynamic management of this diversity of resources is the central issue addressed in this thesis. Applications in environments with frequently changing characteristics are required to participate in dynamic resource management, to adapt to ever-changing conditions, and to express their requirements in terms of quality of service. Magnet enables dynamic trading of resources which can be requested indirectly by the type of service they offer, rather than directly by their name. A dedicated component, the Trader, matches requests for services against demands and establishes a component binding - resource allocation. In addition, the architecture is extensible - it does not constrain the information on services and allows user-customization of the matching process. Consequently, this allows resource definitions to be parametrized (to include QoS-based characteristics), and the matching process to be user-customized (to preform QoS-based negotiation). In order to fulfill the requirements of users relying on ever-changing conditions, Magnet enables runtime adaptation (dynamic rebinding) to changes in the environment, constant monitoring of resources, and scalability of the architecture. The generality of the Magnet architecture is illustrated with several examples of resource allocation in dynamic environments.