This study addresses the challenge of low blood donation rates in developing countries by examining the effectiveness of a barrier-removal incentive-a one-day transportation voucher-to promote blood donation. Utilizing a longitudinal dataset of 23,750 donors from a Brazilian blood collection agency (BCA) collected between March 2018 and May 2020, we examine the short and long-term effects of this campaign on donation rates. Our results show that the incentive had a large positive influence on both donation attempts and successful donations on the day of the campaign. However, the short-term success of the intervention had an unintended consequence: the significant increase in prospective donors\' waiting time at the BCA during the intervention day, which may help explain the negative impact on return rates in the 24-month follow-up. Despite these opposing outcomes, the net effect of the one-day blood donation incentive was still positive, offering valuable insights for BCAs aiming to enhance donor recruitment and retention strategies and emphasizing the need to balance immediate benefits with potential long-term impacts.

Approximately 100,000 people in the United States are affected by Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). Acute pain and chronic pain are common and are experienced by everyone with SCD. Children and adolescents who had pain from SCD reported daily pain, decreased function, missed school/workdays, and limited participation in recreational and social activities. This case report aims to highlight the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion of pain control through the lens of a patient with SCD to improve clinical practice.

To examine family members/friends\' perception of change following standard and intensive group interactive structured treatment (GIST) for persons with social communication difficulties (SCDs).
A parallel mixed methods design combining data from questionnaires, the Goal Attainment Scale, and interviews.
Forty-nine adult (>18 years) family members/friends (69.4% female) of persons with SCDs and acquired brain injury (ABI) (cohabitating partner, 53.1%; other relatives, 30.6%; friends, 16.3%).
Standard GIST consisted of 12 weekly outpatient sessions (2.5 h). Intensive GIST consisted of 4 weeks of inpatient rehabilitation (2 × 3 days/week, 2 × 4 days/week). Both treatments included 3- and 6-month follow-ups.
Quantitative measures (n = 49) included the following informant reports: Latrobe Communication Questionnaire (LCQ), Social Communication Skills Questionnaire-Adapted (SCSQ-A), Behavior Rating Inventory for Executive Functions-Adult version (BRIEF-A), and Goal Attainment Scale. The qualitative measure (n=9) was an interview performed at 6-month follow-up.
Converging results were found, suggesting a perceived positive change over time for both standard and intensive GIST, with no substantial differences reported between the treatments.
Family members/friends reported improved social communication skills of the persons with SCDs following standard and intensive GIST. However, the integration of data showed the complexity of assessing SCDs and the need for further investigation.

Social prescribing (SP) typically involves linking patients in primary care with a range of local, community-based, non-clinical services. While there is a growing body of literature investigating the effectiveness of SP in improving healthcare outcomes, questions remain about how such outcomes are achieved within the everyday complexity of community health systems. This qualitative case study, informed by practice theory, aimed to investigate how SP practices relevant to people at high risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D) were enacted in a primary care and community setting serving a multi-ethnic, socioeconomically deprived population. We collected different types of qualitative data, including 35 semi-structured interviews with primary care clinicians, link workers and SP organisations; 30 hours of ethnographic observations of community-based SP activities and meetings; and relevant documents. Data analysis drew on theories of social practice, including Feldman\'s (2000) notion of the organisational routine, which emphasises the creative and emergent nature of routines in practice. We identified different, overlapping ways of practising SP: from highly creative, reflective and adaptive (\'I do what it takes\'), to more constrained (\'I do what I can\') or compliant (\'I do as I\'m told\') approaches. Different types of practices were in tension and showed varying degrees of potential to support patients at high risk of T2D. Opportunities to adapt, try, negotiate, and ultimately reinvent SP to suit patients\' own needs facilitated successful SP adoption and implementation, but required specific individual, relational, organisational, and institutional resources and conditions. Feldman, M.S., 2000. Organizational Routines as a Source of Continuous Change. Organ. Sci. 11, 611-629.

In late 2019, the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, led to the implementation of stringent measures forming the zero-COVID policy aimed at eliminating transmission. Zero-COVID policy basically aimed at completely eliminating the transmission of COVID-19. However, the relaxation of this policy in late 2022 reportedly resulted in a rapid surge of COVID-19 cases. The aim of this work is to investigate the factors contributing to this outbreak using a new SEIR-type epidemic model with time-dependent level of immunity. Our model incorporates a time-dependent level of immunity considering vaccine doses administered and time-post-vaccination dependent vaccine efficacy. We find that vaccine efficacy plays a significant role in determining the outbreak size and maximum number of daily infected. Additionally, our model considers under-reporting in daily cases and deaths, revealing their combined effects on the outbreak magnitude. We also introduce a novel Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) approach which is extremely useful in estimating critical parameters and helps in evaluating the predictive capability of our model.

Policy-makers and hospital boards throughout the world have implemented different measures to create and sustain effective hospital-physician relationships. The \'integrated funding\' policy reform in the Netherlands was aimed at increasing hospital-physician alignment and led to the unforeseen formation of medical specialist enterprises (MSEs): a fiscal entity representing all self-employed physicians in a hospital. It is unknown how hospitals and MSEs perceive their alignment and how they govern the relationship. This study explores the hospital-MSE relationship, and how governance styles influence perceived alignment in this relationship.
A multiple case study of five non-academic hospitals in the Netherlands was performed. Data was derived from two sources: (1) analysis of hospital-MSE contracts and (2) semi-structured interviews with hospital and MSE board members. Contracts were analysed using a predefined contract analysis template. Interview recordings were transcribed and subsequently coded using the sensitizing concepts approach.
Contracts, relational characteristics, governance styles and perceived alignment differed substantially between cases. Two out of five contracts were prevention contracts, one was a mixed type, and two were promotion contracts. However, in all cases the contract played no role in the relationship. The use of incentives varied widely between the hospitals; most incentives were financial penalties. The governance style varied between contractual for two hospitals, mixed for one hospital and predominantly relational for two hospitals. Development of a shared business strategy was identified as an important driver of relational governance, which was perceived to boost alignment.
Large variation was observed regarding relational characteristics, governance and perceived alignment. MSE formation was perceived to have contributed to hospital-physician alignment by uniting physicians, boosting physicians\' managerial responsibilities, increasing financial alignment and developing shared business strategies. Relational governance was found to promote intensive collaboration between hospital and MSE, and thus may improve alignment in the hospital-physician relationship.

Field studies of natural mammal populations present powerful opportunities to investigate the determinants of health and aging using fine-grained observations of known individuals across the life course. Here, we synthesize five decades of findings from one such study: the wild baboons of the Amboseli ecosystem in Kenya. First, we discuss the profound associations between early life adversity, adult social conditions, and key aging outcomes in this population, especially survival. Second, we review potential mediators of the relationship between early life adversity and survival in our population. Notably, our tests of two leading candidate mediators-social isolation and glucocorticoid levels-fail to identify a single, strong mediator of early life effects on adult survival. Instead, early adversity, social isolation, and glucocorticoids are independently linked to adult lifespans, suggesting considerable scope for mitigating the negative consequences of early life adversity. Third, we review our work on the evolutionary rationale for early life effects on mortality, which currently argues against clear predictive adaptive responses. Finally, we end by highlighting major themes emerging from the study of sociality, development, and aging in the Amboseli baboons, as well as important open questions for future work.

The morning report is one of the longest surviving hospital practices. Most studies of the morning report focus on the effectiveness of formal medical training, while focus on social and communicative aspects is rarer. This study explores the social interactions and communication in morning reports, examining the ways in which they contribute to the construction of professional identity and socialization into the community of the clinical department.
We used a qualitative explorative design with video observations of morning reports. Our data consisted of 43 video-recorded observations (in all, 15.5 hours) from four different hospital departments in Denmark. These were analyzed using the theoretical framework of positioning theory.
A key finding was that each department followed its own individual structure. This order was not articulated as such but played out implictly. Two alternative storylines unfolded in the elements of the morning report: 1) being equal members of the specialty and department, and 2) preserving the hierarchical community and its inherent positions.
The morning report can be seen as playing an important role in community making. It unfolds as a \"dance\" of repeated elements in a complex collegial space. Within this complexity, the morning report is a space for positioning oneself and others as a collegial \"we\", i.e., equal members of a department and specialty, at the same time as \"having a place\" in a hierarchal community. Thus, morning reports contribute to developing professional identity and socialization into the medical community.

Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) techniques include sensors and tools to install on livestock farms and/or animals to monitor them and support the decision making process of farmers, finally early detecting alerting conditions and improving the livestock efficiency. Direct consequences of this monitoring include enhanced animal welfare, health and productivity, improved farmer lifestyle, knowledge, and traceability of livestock products. The indirect consequences, instead, include improved Carbon Footprint and socio-economic indicators of livestock products. In this context, the aim of this paper is to develop an indicator applicable to dairy cattle farming that takes into account concurrently these indirect consequences. The indicator was developed combining the three sustainability pillars (with specific criteria): environmental (carbon footprint), social (5 freedoms of animal welfare and antimicrobial use) and economic (cost of technology and manpower use). The indicator was then tested on 3 dairy cattle farms located in Italy, where a baseline traditional scenario (BS) was compared with an alternative scenario (AS) where PLF techniques and improved management solutions were adopted. The results highlighted that the carbon footprint reduced in all AS by 6-9 %, and the socio-economic indicators entailed improvements in animals and workers welfare with some differences based on the tested technique. Investing in PLF techniques determines positive effects on all/almost all the criteria adopted for the sustainability indicator, with case-specific aspects to consider. Being a user-friendly tool that supports the testing of different scenarios, this indicator could be used by stakeholders (policy makers and farmers in particular) to identify the best direction towards investments and incentive policies.

The environmentally responsible behaviors of residents and tourists are great significance to the protection of natural resources and sustainable development of ecotourism. This paper takes China\'s Qilian Mountains National Park as the case place. By constructing a theoretical model of perceived value on environmentally responsible behavior and studying the relationship between residents\' and tourists\' perceived value, satisfaction and environmentally responsible behavior from both subject and object perspectives, the study shows that. Educational level and occupational distribution have significant effects on residents\' and tourists\' perceptions of ecotourism environmentally responsible behaviors, but age only has a significant effect on residents\' perceptions of ecotourism environmentally responsible behaviors. Gender differences do not affect residents\' and tourists\' perceptions of ecotourism environmentally responsible behaviors. The theoretical model between residents\' perceptions of environmentally responsible behaviors, environmentally responsible behaviors, and satisfaction was basically confirmed. Perceived environmentally responsible behaviors of tourists does not affect satisfaction. Satisfaction has a positive effect on tourists\' environmentally responsible behaviors. Perceived environmental responsibility of tourists has a significant positive effect on tourists\' environmentally responsible behaviors. The overall level of residents\' perception of environmentally responsible behaviors in ecotourism is higher than tourists\' perception. Residents and tourists have a poor perception of ecological and environmental protection policies. This paper expects to strengthen residents\' and tourists\' perceptions of ecologically responsible behaviors. Establishing the sentiment of satisfaction and commitment to environmental protection motivates residents and tourists to implement environmentally responsible behaviors and contribute to the sustainable development of ecotourism.