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Background: Patients with disabilities often require healthcare accommodations in order to access high-quality, equitable healthcare services. While attention has been paid to accommodation needs in specific disability populations, limited research to date has explored healthcare accommodations that cross-cut diverse disability populations.Objective: To identify a deeper understanding regarding accommodations in healthcare settings that could apply across disability populations and promote equitable healthcare.Design: We conducted qualitative focus groups with patients with disabilities and caregivers to understand their experiences and preferences for healthcare accommodations.Participants: We recruited patients and caregivers across all major disability categories to participate in focus groups. Participants were recruited through advocacy organizations and healthcare settings in Southeastern Minnesota.Approach: A total of eight focus groups were conducted with 56 participants. Participants described their healthcare experiences and desires for healthcare accommodations. The multidisciplinary research team recorded, transcribed verbatim, and coded all focus groups. The team thematically coded transcripts using content analysis within and across focus groups to identify major themes.Key Results: Patients identified four challenges and corresponding steps healthcare team could take to promote equitable care: (1) consistent documentation of disabilities and needed accommodations in the medical record; (2) allowance for accommodations to the environment, including adapting physical space, physical structures, and scheduling and rooming processes; (3) provide accommodations for administrative tasks, such as completing paper or electronic forms; and (4) adapt communication during interactions, such as speaking slower or using terms that patients can easily understand.Conclusion: These identified themes represent specific opportunities for healthcare teams to effectively provide accessible care to patients with disabilities. Many of the accommodations require minimal financial investment, but did require behavioral changes by the healthcare team to ensure equitable healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aimed to determine if a novel digital therapeutic intervention could reduce agitation and unscheduled medication use in an adult delirious acute care population. Delirious participants were randomly allocated (1:1) to receive standard of care plus a single 4-hour exposure to the digital intervention "MindfulGarden", which uses a screen-based delivery to display a nature landscape with dynamic adjustment of screen content in response to movement and sound or standard of care only. Between March 2021 and January 2022, 73 participants were enrolled with 70 completing the trial protocol and included in the final analysis with a mean age of 61 years and 68% being male (35 intervention, 35 control). Mean RASS was significantly lower across the 4-hour study period in the intervention arm 0.3 (0.85) vs 0.9 (0.93), p = 0.01. Exposure to a nature-based dynamic digital intervention showed benefits in agitation reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in offering Internet-delivered cognitive behaviour therapy (ICBT) to individuals with chronic health conditions, with this process often being guided by a single clinician. Due to lack of full time personnel, it is sometimes necessary to have multiple clinicians offer guidance or for no guidance to be offered. In this randomized trial, we compared team-guided ICBT (n = 90) to self-guided ICBT (n = 88). Participants completed measures at pre-, post-, and 3-months post-ICBT. Both groups showed similar rates of treatment completion and large improvements on depression and anxiety at post-treatment and follow-up. Unexpectedly, more participants in the self-guided versus team-guided condition showed clinically significant improvement on depression at post-treatment (76.5% vs 49.2%) and follow-up (70% vs 45.6%). Thus, team-guided ICBT may not provide significant benefits compared to self-guided ICBT. However, it may be an alternative approach to consider among a population of high risk individuals that wants or requires closer monitoring of symptoms. Trail registration TRN: NCT03500237; Date: April 18, 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Aspirations refer to wishes, ways of defining quality of life (QOL), and life goals. Living with chronic illness likely impacts a person's life aspirations. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD) is an inherited disorder characterized by the inevitable and progressive loss of ambulation and independence. The present cross-sectional case–control study investigated how aspirations differed between people with DMD and a stratified comparison group of nationally representative children/adults. Methods: A web-based survey was administered October through December 2020. Recruitment was stratified by age group: 8–12, 13–17, and > = 18, reflecting the DMD disability trajectory. Aspirations were measured using qualitative (open-ended) and quantitative (closed-ended) questions. Qualitative prompts asked participants about wishes, how they would define "QOL"; and goals; answers to the prompts were then coded by six trained raters. Quantitative questions included 29 closed-ended goal-delineation items from the QOL Appraisal Profilev2. These data were analyzed using multivariate models adjusting for propensity scores (demographic differences), and testing for the effects of role (patient or comparison), age, and role-by-age interactions. Results: The study sample of DMD (n = 285) and comparison (n = 292) participants provided open-text data: 577 wishes statements, 283 QOL-definition statements, and 149 goals statements. Inter-rater reliability (kappa = 0.77) reflected good agreement between different raters' codes. Results suggested that people with DMD have aspirations that differ from their peers in several important ways. Both open-text and closed-ended data in both unadjusted and adjusted analyses generally showed that people with DMD were more focused on intrinsic aspirations such as health, healthcare, and independence than their peers. Compared to non-DMD persons, DMD individuals were much less focused on financial or housing concerns, community contributions, or spiritual growth. With age, patients' aspirations focused less on extrinsic aspirations such as careers and work and increasingly emphasized emotion-oriented goals. Patients were markedly less likely to give a direct answer to the open-ended goals question. Conclusion: There were important differences in aspirations between people with DMD and their peers. These findings may be helpful for developing psychosocial interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to explore the factor structure of the MOS-SSS in a sample of community-dwelling Spanish older adults. The sample comprised 406 community-dwelling older adults aged between 65 to 99 years old (Mage = 74.88, SD = 6.75). Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed, and four possible models were compared: the one-factor, the three-factor, the four-factor and the five-factor model, using an additional analysis with a second-order factor. The internal consistency reliability and convergent validity of the scale were also assessed. For the 19-item MOS-SSS scale, the five-factor model had the best fit to the data. All five subscales of the MOS-SSS showed adequate internal consistency, good convergent and discriminant validity. These findings contribute to the literature on the factor structure of the MOS-SSS in Spanish older adults. The MOS-SSS is a reliable and valid scale that can be used to assess Spanish older adults' social support perception for social services, health and in research contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims: A strong cardiorespiratory fitness is suggested to have beneficial effects on cardiovascular risk; the exact mechanisms underlying the cardioprotective effects of fitness remain uncertain. Our aim was to investigate associations between cardiorespiratory fitness and multiple plasma proteins, in order to obtain insights about physiological pathways associated with the effects of exercise on cardiovascular health. Methods: In the Prospective investigation of Obesity, Energy and Metabolism (POEM) study (n=444 adults aged 50 years, 50% women), cardiorespiratory fitness was measured by a maximal exercise test on bicycle ergometer with gas exchange (VO2peak) normalized for body lean mass (dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA)). We measured 82 cardiovascular proteins associated with cardiovascular pathology and inflammation in plasma samples with a proximity extension assay. Results: In sex-adjusted linear regression, VO2peak was associated with 18 proteins after Bonferroni correction for multiple testing (p<0.0006). Following additional adjustment for fat mass (DXA), fasting glucose (mmol/L), low-density lipoprotein (LDL, mmol/L), smoking status, waist/hip ratio, blood pressure (mmHg), education level, and lpnr (lab sequence number), higher VO2peak was significantly associated with lower levels of 6 proteins: fatty-acid binding protein-4 (FABP4), interleukin-6 (IL-6), leptin, cystatin-B (CSTB), interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1RA), and growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF-15), and higher levels of 3 proteins: galanin, kallikrein-6 (KLK6), and heparin-binding EGF-like growth factor (HB-EGF), at nominal p-values (p<0.05). Conclusions: We identified multiple novel associations between cardiorespiratory fitness and plasma proteins involved in several atherosclerotic processes and key cellular mechanisms such as inflammation, energy homeostasis, and protease activity, which shed new light on how exercise asserts its beneficial effects on cardiovascular health. Our findings encourage additional studies in order to understand the underlying causal mechanisms for these associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]