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Objective This study explored factors that underpin decisions to seek emergency department (ED) care for chronic noncancer pain in patients identifying as culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) or Australian born. Design and Methods This mixed-methods study was underpinned by the Behavioral Model of Health Services Use conceptual framework. Consenting consecutive patients attending the ED for a chronic pain condition were recruited to a CALD (n = 45) or Australian-born (n = 45) cohort. Statistical comparisons compared the demographic, pain, health literacy, and episode of care profiles of both cohorts. Twenty-three CALD and 16 Australian-born participants consented to an audio-recorded semi-structured interview (n = 24) or focus group (n = 5 focus groups) conducted in their preferred language. Interviews were translated and transcribed into English for analysis using applied thematic analysis, guided by the conceptual framework. Data were triangulated to investigate the patterns of ED utilization and contributing factors for both cohorts. Results ED attendance was a product of escalating distress, influenced by the degree to which participants’ perceived needs outweighed their capacity to manage their pain. This interaction was amplified by the presence of predisposing factors, including constrained social positions, trauma exposure, and biomedical health beliefs. Importantly, experiences varied between the two cohorts with higher degrees of pain catastrophizing, lower health literacy, and greater social challenges present for the CALD cohort. Conclusion This study highlights the role contextual factors play in amplifying pain-related distress for CALD and Australian-born patients with chronic pain. The findings support a need for health care providers to recognize features of higher vulnerability and consider streamlining access to available support services.

Recent research in value prediction shows a surprising amount of predictability for the values produced by register-writing instructions. Several hardware based value predictor designs have been proposed to exploit this predictability by eliminating flow dependencies for highly predictable values. This paper proposed a hardware and software based scheme for value speculation scheduling (VSS). Static VLIW scheduling techniques are used to speculate value dependent instructions by scheduling them above the instructions whose results they are dependent on. Prediction hardware is used to provide value predictions for allowing the execution of speculated instructions to continue. In the case of miss-predicted values, control flow is redirected to patch-up code so that execution can proceed with the correct results. In this paper, experiments in VSS for load operations in the SPECint95 benchmarks are performed. Speedup of up to 17% has been shown for using VSS. Empirical results on the value predictability of loads, based on value profiling data, are also provided.