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Background Burnout syndrome consists in physical as well as mental exhaustion observed in professionals whose work involves continuous contact with other people. Psychiatrists and psychiatry nursing staff are considered to be vulnerable to experiencing burnout. The purposes of this study aim to investigate the prevalence of burnout syndrome in practitioners, residents and nurses working in the psychiatric hospital of Tunisia. It also aims to investigate the relationship between burnout, depression, and a variety of personal variables, including age, gender, marital, parental and personal difficulties within this population. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted among the nursing staff ( n = 54), residents ( n = 41) and practitioners ( n = 11) in Razi hospital in Tunisia. The Maslach Burnout Inventory, the Beck depression inventory and a general questionnaire on demographic data were used. Results High levels of burnout were detected among nurses. This was true for the emotional tiredness sub-scale (mean score: 26.18); the depersonalization subscale (mean score: 10.20) and for the alteration of personal achievements (mean score: 32.94). High scores in emotional tiredness were correlated to depression ( P = 0.000; R = 0.56) and to personal difficulties ( P = 0.021; R = 0.31) in this group. Residents showed high scores in personal achievements (mean score: 32.56), and practitioners did not reach the cutoff scores on the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Conclusion Our results are somewhat comparable to those of studies in other countries. Burnout syndrome was highly prevalent among nurses and residents. This study corroborates former results of a relation between depression and burnout. A strong relationship was found between personal difficulties and burnout, but seemed to be more specific to the nursing sample.

Resume Objectif Les facteurs de vulnerabilite a la depression, en particulier le support social et l’attachement, ont fait l’objet de nombreuses recherches. Certains styles d’attachement ou un faible support social se verraient plus frequemment dans la depression. Notre etude a pour objectif d’evaluer et de comparer les styles d’attachement et le soutien social de deux echantillons de sujets depressifs et non depressifs et ainsi de mettre en evidence une eventuelle relation entre le style d’attachement, le soutien social et la vulnerabilite depressive. Methodes Nous avons procede a une enquete comparative portant sur 80 patients presentant un episode depressif majeur, diagnostique selon les criteres de la quatrieme version revisee du Manuel de Diagnostic et de Statistique (DSM-IV-TR), que nous avons compare a 80 temoins indemnes de toute pathologie psychiatrique. La severite de l’etat depressif a ete evaluee par l’echelle de depression de Hamilton. L’evaluation du reseau relationnel s’est faite a l’aide de deux autoquestionnaires : le questionnaire de perception sociales de Bartholomew et Horowitz, qui renseigne sur les relations actuelles, generales et sociales du sujet, et le questionnaire de soutien social de Sarason (SSQ6), qui evalue l’importance quantitative du reseau social percu et la satisfaction de ce soutien. Resultats Notre population comprenait 64 % de femmes et 36 % d’hommes. L’âge moyen etait de 44 ans pour les patients et 34 ans pour les temoins. Les sujets temoins avaient un style d’attachement « secure » dans 56 % des cas, contre 29 % pour les patients, difference significative (p = 0,002). Nous avons retrouve une difference entre les deux groupes concernant le style « desorganise » qui etait nettement plus frequent chez les sujets deprimes : 25 % contre 1 % chez les temoins (p Conclusion La population de sujets deprimes presentait des caracteristiques particulieres de leur reseau relationnel quant au style d’attachement, essentiellement « insecure », et au soutien social, particulierement pauvre.

Resume Des etudes transculturelles suggerent que le pronostic des schizophrenies est meilleur dans les pays en voie de developpement. L’objectif de ce travail etait d’etudier le degre de l’handicap social et les facteurs pronostiques des schizophrenies dans une population tunisienne et de comparer cette evolution a celle constatee dans les pays industrialises. Notre etude a inclus 60 patients repondant aux criteres diagnostiques des schizophrenies selon le DSM IV et traites depuis au moins cinq ans. L’adaptation sociale a ete evaluee a partir d’un entretien semi-structure, de la cotation de l’echelle globale du fonctionnement (EGF) et des donnees recueillies a partir des dossiers medicaux. Il ressort, de cette etude, cinq ans apres le debut du traitement, 67,9 % avaient un pronostic social defavorable. Tous les indicateurs sociaux, sauf la sexualite et le statut matrimonial, suivaient globalement le meme cours : une aggravation statistiquement significative entre la phase premorbide et l’etat evolutif a deux ans. Il y a peu de variabilite entre deux et cinq ans puis une stabilisation statistiquement significative au-dela de cinq ans d’evolution. En conclusion, l’echantillon etudie ne semble pas confirmer la frequence elevee des evolutions favorables des schizophrenies, sur le plan social, dans les pays en developpement.

Burnout syndrome consists in physical as well as mental exhaustion observed in professionals whose work involves continuous contact with other people. Psychiatrists and psychiatry nursing staff are considered to be vulnerable to experiencing burnout. The purposes of this study aim to investigate the prevalence of burnout syndrome in practitioners, residents and nurses working in the psychiatric hospital of Tunisia. It also aims to investigate the relationship between burnout, depression, and a variety of personal variables, including age, gender, marital, parental and personal difficulties within this population.A cross-sectional study was conducted among the nursing staff (n=54), residents (n=41) and practitioners (n=11) in Razi hospital in Tunisia. The Maslach Burnout Inventory, the Beck depression inventory and a general questionnaire on demographic data were used.High levels of burnout were detected among nurses. This was true for the emotional tiredness sub-scale (mean score: 26.18); the depersonalization subscale (mean score: 10.20) and for the alteration of personal achievements (mean score: 32.94). High scores in emotional tiredness were correlated to depression (P=0.000; R=0.56) and to personal difficulties (P=0.021; R=0.31) in this group. Residents showed high scores in personal achievements (mean score: 32.56), and practitioners did not reach the cutoff scores on the Maslach Burnout Inventory.Our results are somewhat comparable to those of studies in other countries. Burnout syndrome was highly prevalent among nurses and residents. This study corroborates former results of a relation between depression and burnout. A strong relationship was found between personal difficulties and burnout, but seemed to be more specific to the nursing sample.

Transcultural studies suggest that the social outcome of schizophrenia might be better in developing countries than in industrialized ones. This study aims to check this hypothesis and attempted to identify prognostic indicators of schizophrenia among Tunisian patients.This study included all the outpatients responding to DSM IV criteria of schizophrenia for at least five years, during the study period. The assessment tools were: an interview with the patients and their families, data from medical records and the Global Assessment of Functioning scale (GAF) applied for the premorbid period, at two years after onset, at five years, and during the interview (current assessment). The social outcome was assessed by marital and labour market status, social network, sexuality and the GAF score. The outcome was considered to be good, if the current GAF60, intermediate if GAF was between 31 and 60 and severe if GAFor=30. The three prognostic subgroups were compared in order to look for prognostic indicators.Informed consent was obtained from 60 patients (85.7% of outpatients) and from 56 families. The sex-ratio was 4 (48 men/12 women), the mean age of patients was 39.3 years; the mean follow-up was 14.7 years ([5-45]). School level was six years primary school in the majority of cases, and the living conditions were poor in 48.3% of cases (n=29). During the interview, only 21.6% (n=13) of patients were married. The majority of patients, who were working before the first episode, had lost their job. 76.6% (n=46) did not have any social contacts and only 23.3% (n=14) had any sexual activity. Thus, the social outcome was good in 21% of patients, intermediate in 11.1% and severe in 67.9%. Most social indicators (GAF score, labour market status, social network) revealed a fairly similar progress: a significant decline between the premorbid period and two years after the onset. The course reached a plateau after two years. According to current GAF scores, outcome was good in 25% (n=15) of cases, intermediate in 55% (n=33) of them and severe in 20% (n=12). Some indicators were found to be correlated with this outcome: patient related factors; late language development (correlated with intermediate prognosis [p=0.03]); a comorbid axis II diagnosis (correlated with poorer outcome p=0.04); a poor premorbid global functioning (higher premorbid GAF scores were correlated with a better outcome [p0.03]); family history related factors; consanguinity in parents (correlated with intermediate-severe prognosis [p=0.04]); elderly father at birth (correlated with severe prognosis [p=0.04]).Even if these results are limited in their generalisation, this Tunisian sample argues that schizophrenia's prognosis is not better in such a developing country.

This paper describes a hardware platform that has been designed to validate joint detection receivers for UMTS/TDD. This testbed includes transmitters, a multipath baseband channel emulation and a receiver. The receiver includes channel estimation, multiuser detection (MUD) and channel turbo decoding. It consists of a set of DSP and FPGA boards host in a PC machine that achieves real-time computation of multiuser processing at 368 kbit/s (user rate). The flexibility of the platform enables various configurations: downlink (DL), uplink (UL) and various channel conditions. Joint detection (JD) based receivers have been tested on this platform. The first one performs the JD in the temporal domain, the second one in the frequency domain. Real-time performance, hardware complexity and performance improvement compared to the RAKE receiver are discussed in this paper.

Revolving Door Syndrome usually corresponds to what might be called “hospital multiple readmissions phenomenon”. Beyond consequences to the patients and their families, frequent re-readmissions also heavily increase healthcare cost and cause burn out among medical and paramedical staff. The objective of this study was to find the characteristics of Tunisian patients with “revolving door” syndrome. The purpose of this study was to identify factors associated to short-term readmissions in a sample of Tunisian patients with schizophrenia. The authors conducted a retrospective study on 50 patients with schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorders from November to february 2009 in Razi Hospital's “Psychiatry C” service. Patients included in the study had been hospitalized at least 4 times. The patients were analyzed for socio-demographic characteristics, total readmissions and the number of admissions in the last year. Their medication adherence was evaluated by MARS (Medication Adherence Rating Scale) and their insight was evaluated by the Q8 scale. The sample was composed of 50 patients with schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorders according to DSM-IV, more than 18 years of age, which have been hospitalized more than 4 times. The sample was composed of 80% men. 74% of the sample was single and 66% were living with their parents. 88% were unemployed. 54% of patients were bad observers and 88% had lack of insight. The authors found that the typical Tunisian revolving door patient is a single man, living at his parent's, unemployed and with a lack of observation skills and insight.