A discovery of the neutron's permanent electric dipole moment larger than the standard model prediction of dn ≈ 10-31 e·cm would signal a new source of CP-violation and help explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. Tightening the limits on dn constrain extensions to the standard model in a complementary fashion to the atomic and electron EDM searches. The recent upgrade of the Los Alamos ultracold neutron source makes it possible for a new room temperature search with the statistical reach to improve upon current limits by a factor of 10 or more. During the 2018 LANSCE cycle a prototype apparatus was used to demonstrate the capability to transport and manipulate polarized neutrons and perform Ramsey and Rabi sequence measurements. I will report on the measurements made over the last year, efforts underway to upgrade the prototype chamber, and possible future upgrades of the ultracold neutron source.

The lack of nurses and the increasing turnover rate have been the main subjects when looking at the news about the health care sector. The constant lack of nurses can cause a lack of motivation and the nurses are leaving the workplaces, as the stress level rises. Nurses have also been discovered to have an impact on the patient satisfaction, which is why it is important to keep the nurses satisfied in their work. To understand what motivates the nurses and what could be done in order to make the situation better, more research is needed.  Non-financial motivation has been seen as a preferred way of motivating nurses in the hospital environment, which is why this study has a focus on it. Earlier studies have mainly focused on the nurse viewpoint of motivation and to further develop the understanding on the area, the viewpoint of managers is needed to be taken into consideration, to understand the issue more in-depth. To research the subject more, a study was conducted focusing on the emergency room at the University Hospital of Umeå and the nurses and managers working there.  The aim of this study is to understand how the views and preferences regarding non-financial motivation meet between the nurses and managers in the emergency room at the University Hospital of Umeå and which factors are the most preferred. Further, it is of interest to understand how this meeting of thoughts affects the everyday work and the motivation of the nurses. The following research questions was formed to answer the question:  How do nurses and their managers in the emergency room assess non-financial motivation factors?  The study has been conducted using qualitative methods and semi-structured face-to-face interviews. Additional data was gathered through e-mail interviews, as well as over telephone, and a reflective interviewee from another hospital was interviewed to gain more insight on the subject from another viewpoint.  The results from the study highlight the common importance for effective and emotionally intelligent leaders, who listen and have time for the subordinates. Further, work colleagues and the possibility for competence development were seen as commonly important factors to affect to the non-financial motivation of the nurses.  Practical implications from the study provide new data concerning the non-financial preferences and how the viewpoints meet and differ between nurses and managers who work in different roles in the hospital. Furthermore, this study could be of use to help to understand what could be done to better in order to motivate the nurses. Although, as the study is focusing on a specific department, it is important to acknowledge the impact and possible differences between the personnel chemistry and recent position changes.

Portable smart speakers with wireless connections have in recent years become more popular. These speakers are often moved to new locations and placed in different positions in different rooms, which affects the sound a listener is hearing from the speaker. These speakers usually have microphones on them, typically used for voice recording. This thesis aims to provide a way to compensate for the speaker position’s effect on the sound (so called room correction) using the microphones on the speaker and the speaker itself. Firstly, the room frequency response is estimated for several different speaker positions in a room. The room frequency response is the frequency response between the speaker and the listener. From these estimates, the relationship between the speaker’s position and the room frequency response is modeled. Secondly,an algorithm that estimates the speaker’s position is developed. The algorithm estimates the position by detecting reflections from nearby walls using the microphones on the speaker. The acquired position estimates are used as input for the room frequency response model, which makes it possible to automatically apply room correction when placing the speaker in new positions. The room correction is shown to correct the room frequency response so that the bass has the same power as the mid- and high frequency sounds from the speaker, which is according to the research aim. Also, the room correction is shown to make the room frequency response vary less with respect to the speaker’s position.

In the cutting age of industrial 4.0, automation has developed rapidly in all aspects. The emergence of the modern industrial control room has provided a new horizon to the large operation. However, the problem facing the operators is too many screens that they need to monitor at the same time which could result in fatal mistakes such as missing important alerts or failing to act on important information. With that being said, this thesis explores the possibilities of developing a visual aid system to help guide operators’ attention. With the knowledge gained from a literature review and previous efforts from ABB, a visual aid system has been developed with implementations such as unreadable screen and blinking cue guiding the operators’ attention. An experiment to evaluate the solution has also been designed and conducted with 29 participants. Both quantitative data and qualitative data have been collected and analyzed. The results suggest a strong benefit in using such a visual aid to help guide operators’ attention.

The contamination of sterile pharmaceutical products is a serious event which has in the worst case scenario led to patient death. Operators are the primary source of clean room contamination, with the majority of their detritus being identified as skin squames and their related microorganisms. The ability of operator associated bacterial contamination to disseminate through specialist garments worn in the clean room environment is apparent in the literature. However, despite the fibres of such garments being identified as a suitable substrate for bacteria to adhere to and grow upon, the bacterial bioburden of the surface of clean room operators’ garments is an area which severely lacks in published research. Reported here is the recovery, enumeration and comparison of the levels of bacteria on the surface of reusable antistatic carbon filament polyester clean room garments, using the direct agar contact method, following their laundering with and without terminal gamma sterilisation, immediately following their donning with operators dressing wearing either no gloves, non – sterile gloves or sterile clean room gloves, and following their wear within the clean room environment, with respect to gender. The aforementioned method, with its recovery efficiency shown to be unaffected by agar composition (NA or TSA), recovered bacteria from the surface of garments laundered with and without gamma sterilisation. Such terminal decontamination was shown to reduce the surface bacterial bioburden of the garments, especially at the chest and umbilicus regions, which were shown to harbour higher levels of bacteria than the other sites tested. The direct agar contact method, showing an increase in recovery efficiency following a 48 hour agar incubation period as opposed to a 24 hour period, also recovered bacteria from the surface of clean room garments donned by operators dressing wearing either no gloves, non – sterile gloves and sterile clean room gloves. Bacteria were transferred onto the surface of these garments via the hand borne route, with the chest and oral cavity regions being found to harbour more bacteria than the other sites tested. Overall, glove type was shown to have no effect upon the resultant bacterial bioburden of the surface of the garments, suggesting expensive clean room gloves could be substituted for their cheaper non – sterile equivalents or no gloves during the donning process without subsequently increasing the surface bacterial bioburden of the garment. The direct agar contact method also recovered bacteria from the surface of clean room garments worn by male and female operators, following their working period within a clean room environment. Gender was found to significantly affect the surface bacterial bioburden of the garments, with the surface of those garments worn by male operators being more contaminated than the surface of those worn by their female counterparts. In addition, the donning of a clean room hood was shown to reduce the levels of bacteria at the chest and posterior cervicis regions of suits worn by both genders. Overall, the direct agar contact method was identified as a successful tool to recover, enumerate and estimate the surface bacterial bioburden of reusable antistatic polyester carbon filament clean room garments. Finally, using 16S rRNA gene sequencing, found to be more reliable and accurate at identifying unknown isolates than traditional phenotypic first - stage tests, which were subsequently found to misidentify > 85 % of the isolates tested, a self - selected representative number of isolates recovered from the surface of garments during the laundering and gender comparison studies were predominantly identified as skin commensal species of Staphylococcus and Micrococcus, as well as environmental species of Bacillus. The knowledge contained within this thesis, with respect to clean room operators and their specialist garments, contributes towards improving contamination control standards within clean room facilities.

abstract: Lithium metal is a promising anode for the next generation lithium batteries owing to its high capacity (3860 mAh g-1) and the lowest negative reduction potential (-3.04 V). Commercial produced lithium anodes have a native rough surface which deteriorates the cycling performance of the battery. Here, an attempt has been made to deposit lithium on copper from an electrolytic cell consisting of simple electrolyte of pyridine and lithium chloride at room temperature. Water is known to react aggressively with the lithium metal, however in the electrochemical plating process, it has a significant beneficial effect in catalyzing the electrochemical reactions. The effect of trace amounts of water was investigated in air as well as in controlled atmosphere of argon, nitrogen, breathing grade dry air and ultra-zero dry air. The electrochemical products examined by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy revealed the deposition might require the reduction of pyridine to facilitate the reduction of the lithium salt. Purity of the lithium film was determined by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Materials Science and Engineering 2019

Until recently, the model for training new orthopaedic surgeons was referred to as “see one, do one, teach one”. Resident surgeons acquired their surgical skills by observing attending surgeons in the operating room and then attempted to replicate what they had observed on new patients, under the supervision of more experienced surgeons. Learning in the operating is an unideal environment to learn because it adds more time to surgical procedures and puts patients at an increased risk of having surgical errors occur during the procedure. Programs are slowly beginning to switch to a model that involves simulation-based training outside of the operating room. Wire navigation is one key skill in orthopaedics that has traditionally been difficult for programs to train on in a simulated environment. Our group has developed a radiation free wire navigation simulator to help train residents on this key skill. For simulation training to be fully adopted by the orthopaedic community, strong evidence that it is beneficial to a surgeon’s performance must first be established. The aim of this work is to examine how simulation training with the wire navigation simulator can be used to improve a resident’s wire navigation performance. The work also examines the metrics used to evaluate a resident’s performance in a simulated environment and in the operating room to understand which metrics best capture wire navigation performance. In the first study presented, simulation training is used to improve first year resident wire navigation performance in a mock operating room. The results of this study show that depending on how the training was implemented, residents were able to significantly reduce their tip-apex distance in comparison with a group that had received a simple didactic training. The study also showed that performance on the simulator was correlated with performance in this operating room. This study helps establish the transfer validity of the simulator, a key component in validating a simulation model. The second study presents a model for using the simulator as a platform on which a variety of wire navigation procedures could be developed. In this study, the simulator platform, originally intended for hip wire navigation, was extended and modified to train residents in placing a wire across the iliosacral joint. A pilot study was performed with six residents from the University of Iowa to show that this platform could be used for training the other applications and that it was accepted by the residents. The third study examined wire navigation performance in the operating room. In this study, a new metric of performance was developed that measures decision making errors made during a wire navigation procedure. This new metric was combined with the other metrics of wire navigation performance (tip-apex distance) into a composite score. The composite score was found to have a strong correlation (R squared = 0.79) with surgical experience. In the final study, the wire navigation simulator was taken to a national fracture course to collect data on a large sample of resident performance. Three groups were created in this study, a baseline group, a group that received training on the simulator, and a third group that observed the simulator training. The results of this study showed that the training could improve the overall score of the residents compared to the baseline group. The overall distribution from resident performance between groups also shows that a large portion of residents that did not receive training came in below what might be considered as competent performance. Further studies will evaluate how this training impacts performance in the operating room.

Discharge instructions provided to patients discharged from the emergency department (ED) are often provided in a way that is neither clear nor concise. Patients are often discharged home without a clear understanding of their diagnosis, medications, reasons to return to the ED, follow-up instructions, or how to manage their care at home during their illness. Therefore, a guideline needed to be developed in order to help the ED staff provide clear and concise discharge instructions to patients discharged from the ED. The Ace Star Model of Knowledge Transformation was the foundation for the development of the evidence-based guideline. A formative group of 7 individuals was created to critique the initial draft of the guideline, and a final version of the guideline was then distributed to 10 medical professionals to aid in the approval and determination of the quality of the guideline. The data analysis from the formative group questionnaire, and the appraisal of guidelines for research and evaluation tool led to the recommendations for a guideline on the delivery of evidence-based discharge instructions. This project has implications for social change in practice by (a) increasing the awareness among medical professionals about the importance of their communication style on patient discharge and (b) allowing for more efficient communication to occur between them and their patients. The use of an evidence-based practice guideline for providing discharge instructions to patients discharged from the ED will allow improved quality of care to patients, efficient communication between the healthcare providers and patients, a positive impact for social change in practice, and a consistent and reliable method for patients to understand their discharge instructions in a way that is clear and concise.

The implementation of the mandatory alternative payment model (APM) guarantees savings for Medicare regardless of participant hospitals ability for reducing spending that shifts the cost minimization burden from insurers onto the hospital administrators. Surgical interventions account for more than 30% and 40% of hospitals total cost and total revenue, respectively, with a cost structure consisting of nearly 56% direct cost, thus, large cost reduction is possible through efficient operation management. However, optimizing operating rooms (ORs) schedules is extraordinarily challenging due to the complexities involved in the process. We present new algorithms and managerial guidelines to address the problem of OR planning and scheduling with disturbances in demand and case times, and inconsistencies among the performance measures. We also present an extension of these algorithms that addresses production scheduling for sustainability. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of these algorithms via simulation and statistical analyses.

The current nationwide shortage of registered nurses is a growing problem impacting patient care and hospital operations. The operating room is the area most affected by the nursing shortage. Reasons cited for this shortage include ineffective nursing orientation programs and a decline in job satisfaction. The purpose of this project was to develop a best practice succession planning educational program to provide novice operating room nurses with an introduction to the operating room. The Dreyfus model of skills acquisition and Benner's novice to expert theory guided this project. A 2-step process was used to assess and validate the content and quality of the educational program. In Phase 1, the educational program was distributed to 10 operating room nurse stakeholders for formative review. There was agreement from these reviewers that the educational program covered key concepts important for novice operating room nurses. Two recommendations were made for additional clarification. In Phase II, the educational program was revised and distributed to a group of 10 perioperative professionals for summative review using the AGREE II instrument. The summative review group found the educational program to be clear and concise. The overall summative approval of 100% and recommendations of both review groups guided the final development of the best practice educational module. This best practice educational module will provide a standardized program for educating novice operating room nurses. This project will contribute to positive social change by empowering these nurses while supporting safe care for all surgical patients. Dissemination will occur first within the organization and then to local and national organizations targeting operating room nurses.