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Background: A clinical associate (ClinA) is a mid-level health professional who may only practise under the supervision of a medical doctor. By extension, medical students need to be prepared for this responsibility. This study explored whether final-year medical students at one university were aware of this supervisory role, felt prepared and were knowledgeable about the ClinAs’ scope of practice. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional study was conducted. The population included all final-year medical students who had completed their District Health and Community Obstetrics rotations (March to November 2017). After an end-of-rotation session, 151 students were given questionnaires to complete. A list of 20 treatments or procedures was extracted from the ClinAs’ gazetted scope of practice for a ‘knowledge test’. Data were analysed with Stata and Microsoft Excel. Ethical permission was granted. Results: The response rate was 77.4% (n/N = 117/151). The majority of participants (76.1%, n = 86) had worked with a qualified or student ClinA before and had a generally positive impression (81.4%; n = 70). Almost half (47.8%; n = 56) thought that the ClinAs’ scope of work was similar to registered nurses rather than a doctor’s (38.2%; n = 44). Most were unaware that they would be required to supervise ClinAs once qualified (65.8%; n = 77). On average, participants identified 12 out of 20 treatments or procedures that a ClinA could perform. Conclusion: Despite having worked with ClinAs, participants appeared largely unaware of their future legal obligation of supervision. Adequate clinical supervision is based on the knowledge of the scope of practice, which was variable. Formal training on the scope of the work of ClinAs is needed to prepare future doctors for their supervisory role. Medical schools have an obligation to adequately prepare their students in this regard as part of their transformative education with elements of interprofessional education.

The Remote Experiment Monitoring and Control (REMOT) project objective is to develop a system architecture to allow remote control of scientific experiments and facilities that require real time operation and multimedia information feedback, using available or deploying communications infrastructure. Representatives from two user communities participate in the project: the Astronomical community, which usually has telescopes located at far places -such as islands and/or mountains- and the Plasma Physics community, that is concentrating the experimental facilities in a few places in order to save costs. In this paper we review the underlying networking technologies considered, and summarize the results on the ATM based pilot studies we have carried out in the last two years. Particularly we will present results from experiments on Switched Virtual Circuits (SVC) tunneling and video on ATM.

The capacity of data acquisition systems will improve by an order of magnitude with the advent of the new high-bandwidth network technology. Data acquisition systems will really be scalable. To be in the front line of the application of this new technology, we participate in the Dutch national asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) pilot project SURFnet4. In this framework we have initiated a project: 'Remote data acquisition and analysis'. The aim is to have an ATM network between remote VME front-ends and controlling and monitoring workstations.

In the context of Research and Development (R & D) activities for future hadron colliders, competitive implementations of real-time algorithms for feature extraction have been made on various forms of commercial pipelined and parallel architectures. The algorithms used for benchmarking serve for decision making and are of relative complexity; they are required to run with a repetition rate of 100 kHz on data sets of kilobyte size. Results are reported and discussed in detail. Among the commercially available architectures, pipelined image processing systems can compete with custom-designed architectures. General-purpose processors with systolic mesh connectivity can also be used. Massively parallel systems of the SIMD type (many processors executing the same program on different data) are less suitable in the presently marketed form.

Dynacore's project objective is to provide tools for the remote operation of large physics experiments [1], [2], [3]. Our group concentrates on the design of a remote control room for the Textor-94 plasma-physics experiment [4], which will incorporate a distributed database, accessible with Corba over Internet [5]. During normal operation, Textor-94 generates hundreds of megabytes of measurement data within the few seconds of a plasma shot. These shots are generated approximately every ten minutes, in total around 30 shots per day. A database will make the measurement data available to scientists, both at the experiment and in remote control rooms, which can be located in different countries, within minutes after the acquisition. Fast access to the database and a high data-storage speed are, therefore, of utmost importance. We have defined a set of data objects, which allow storage of virtually any kind of Textor measurement data. An Objectivity [6] object-oriented database is used to store these objects. We have also designed an architecture in which database clients access the measurement database solely via data managers with Corba-interfaces. The data managers introduce security into the database, and also hide details of the database implementation for the users. An object manager provides clients with a central starting point, and distributes the total database load in an intelligent way over all available data-managers. We have tested the performance of our architecture on a computer cluster consisting of eight Sun-Ultra-10 workstations [7]. These computers are interconnected with 1-gigabit/s Ethernet fiber-optic links over two Cabletron SSR-8000 IP routers, and also via 100 Mbit/s Ethernet UTP cables over one Cabletron SS-6000 [8]. This article will discuss the database model, the distributed architecture and the performance measurements results. The measurements showed that our high performance goals can be achieved with the presented architecture.