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Clinical governance is the framework around which health care organizations can maintain a higher standard of safety and care. One of the central aspects of clinical governance is continuous professional education, including case-based review and case-based learning. In this article, we present the case-based education process in use at London's Air Ambulance, a mature advanced prehospital system in London, UK. The case review process begins with an on-scene hot debrief, an informal process often involving other emergency services. This is usually followed by internal team feedback and debrief and patient follow-up. All cases are then reviewed over the next 24 to 48 hours by the duty prehospital consultant (attending) in the rapid review process. After this, certain cases are volunteered or selected for discussion in the twice weekly death and disability (DD) meeting or the monthly dispatch meeting. A small subset of cases is highlighted through this process for full formal audit and presentation at the monthly clinical governance meetings based on their educational value. Another subset of cases involving a fatality is also discussed at the monthly clinical pathology correlation meeting with the input of local forensic pathologists. Organization of the process, structure of the meetings, and educational value are described in detail.

The steam generator (SG) channel head forms part of the reactor coolant pressure boundary and is of high nuclear safety duty. The channel head failure is considered intolerable and there are no reasonably practicable physical provisions available to prevent its failure. Therefore the channel head is classified as either an Incredibility of Failure (IoF) or High Integrity (HI) component and it requires additional analyses and assessments beyond the design code requirements to achieve and demonstrate its structural integrity. The hydrodynamic effects of the primary coolant in the annulus around the drain plug of the SG channel head are not very well understood, but are exacerbated by high flow rates in its immediate vicinity due to typical design details. Vibration of the drain plug due to coolant flow may result in fatigue induced failure of the channel head drain penetration weld. In the study presented here, random vibration analyses and a fatigue assessment have been carried out for a submerged drain plug in a pressurized water reactor (PWR) SG channel head. A finite element (FE) model of the drain plug submerged in water coolant has been developed. Modal analyses confirmed that the natural frequency of the submerged drain plug is significantly reduced by the large hydrodynamic added mass from the surrounding fluid. The fatigue evaluation undertaken using ASME III fatigue curve concluded that the fatigue life usage due to the vibration of the drain plug is negligible even after an extended plant life. Therefore the coolant flow-induced drain plug vibration is not a threat to the channel head integrity.

Lateralized behaviour refers to a preference for using a specific limb or direction of movement that is consistent across events. We investigated apparent lateralized behaviour in North Atlantic humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, in the southern Gulf of Maine using digital acoustic tag (‘DTAG’) technology to analyse feeding behaviours during 2004–2009. An ideal tool to examine lateralized behaviours, DTAGs allowed continuous measurements of whale depth, heading, pitch and roll throughout the attachment period (less than 24 h). Side preference (right or left) in rolling behaviours (e.g. bottom rolling and side lunging) and directional preference (clockwise or anticlockwise) in feeding behaviours such as looping and spiraling were determined from visual examination of DTAG data. A ‘handedness index’ (HI) was used to quantify side bias and strength of preference. We found a population-level right-side bias similar to the 90/10 right-hand bias in humans. Furthermore, photos of jaw scuffing and direct tag data on rolling behaviour were used to assign a bottom-rolling side preference for 11 individuals for whom both of these data were available, 10 (90.9%) of which demonstrated a right-side bias. Consistent laterality was observed between individuals that performed bottom rolling and directional feeding behaviours, which was biased in the right/clockwise direction. Younger individuals tended to show weaker lateralization scores than older individuals, even among adults (P = 0.048), suggesting that lateralization develops, and continues to do so, beyond sexual maturity.

Soft-bodied marine invertebrates comprise a keystone component of ocean ecosystems; however, we know little of their behaviors and physiological responses within their natural habitat. Quantifying ocean conditions and measuring organismal responses to the physical environment is vital to understanding the species or ecosystem-level influences of a changing ocean. Here we describe a novel, soft-bodied invertebrate eco-sensor tag (the ITAG), its trial attachments to squid and jellyfish, and the fine-scale behavioral measurements recorded on captive animals. Tags were deployed on five jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) and eight squid (Loligo forbesi) in laboratory conditions for up to 24 h. Using concurrent video and tag data, movement signatures for specific behaviors were identified. These behaviors included straight swimming (for jellyfish), and finning, jetting, direction reversal and turning (for squid). Overall activity levels were quantified using the root-mean-squared magnitude of acceleration, and finning was found to be the dominant squid swimming gait during captive squid experiments. External light sensors on the ITAG were used to compare squid swimming activity relative to ambient light across a ca. 20-h trial. The deployments revealed that while swimming was continuous for captive squid, energetically costly swimming behaviors (i.e., jetting and rapid direction reversals) occurred infrequently. These data reflect the usefulness of the ITAG to study trade-offs between behavior and energy expenditure in captive and wild animals. These data demonstrate that eco-sensors with sufficiently high sampling rates can be applied to quantify behavior of soft-bodied taxa and changes in behavior due to interactions with the surrounding environment. The methods and tool described here open the door for substantial lab and field-based measurements of fine-scale behavior, physiology, and concurrent environmental parameters that will inform fisheries management, and elucidate the ecology of these important keystone taxa.

Attaching bio-telemetry or -logging devices ('tags') to marine animals for research and monitoring adds drag to streamlined bodies, affecting posture, swimming gaits and energy balance. These costs have never been measured in free-swimming cetaceans. To examine the effect of drag from a tag on metabolic rate, cost of transport, and swimming behavior, four captive male dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) were trained to swim a set course, either non-instrumented (n = 7) or instrumented with a tag (DTAG2; n = 12), and surface exclusively in a flow-through respirometer where oxygen consumption (V̇O2) and carbon dioxide production (V̇CO2; mL kg-1 min-1) rates were measured and respiratory exchange ratio (V̇O2/V̇CO2) was calculated. Tags did not significantly affect individual mass-specific oxygen consumption, Physical Activity Ratios (exercise V̇O2/resting V̇O2), total or net cost of transport (COT, J m-1 kg-1) or locomotor costs during swimming or two-minute recovery phases. However, individuals swam significantly slower when tagged (by ~11%; mean±s.d. 3.31±0.35 m s-1) compared to when non-instrumented (3.73±0.41 m s-1). A combined theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model estimating drag forces and power exertion during swimming suggests drag loading and energy consumption are reduced at lower swimming speeds. Bottlenose dolphins in the specific swimming task in this experiment slowed to the point where the tag yielded no increases in drag or power, while showing no difference in metabolic parameters when instrumented with a DTAG2. These results, and our observations, suggest that animals modify their behavior to maintain metabolic output and energy expenditure when faced with tag-induced drag.

Here we propose to make design changes to improve reliability and manufacturability of the DTAG, a sound recording multi-sensor tag. OBJECTIVES DTAGs have proven to be a valuable tool for the study of marine mammal acoustics and fine scale motion. The success of the DTAG has resulted in an increased demand for the instrument from researchers both within the Navy and the marine mammal community as a whole. However, the current DTAG design has cost, robustness, and reliability issues that make it unsuitable for the scaledup manufacturing necessary to meet demand. To address this, we will improve reliability and manufacturability of the tag, and evaluate the new design by fabricating a small number of tags for testing. Additionally, this project will implement these design changes to create a pool of field-ready and cost-effective DTAGs available to marine mammal researchers.

In the past decade, much progress has been made in real-time passive acoustic monitoring of marine mammal occurrence and distribution from autonomous platforms (e.g., gliders, floats, buoys), but current systems focus primarily on a single call type produced by a single species, often from a single location. A hardware and software system was developed to detect, classify, and report 14 call types produced by 4 species of baleen whales in real time from ocean gliders. During a 3-week deployment in the central Gulf of Maine in late November and early December 2012, two gliders reported over 25,000 acoustic detections attributed to fin, humpback, sei, and right whales. The overall false detection rate for individual calls was 14%, and for right, humpback, and fin whales, false predictions of occurrence during 15-min reporting periods were 5% or less. Transmitted pitch tracks--compact representations of sounds--allowed unambiguous identification of both humpback and fin whale song. Of the ten cases when whales were sighted during aerial or shipboard surveys and a glider was within 20 km of the sighting location, nine were accompanied by real-time acoustic detections of the same species by the glider within ±12 h of the sighting time.

Autonomous listening devices are increasingly used to study vocal aquatic animals, and there is a constant need to record longer or with greater bandwidth, requiring efficient use of memory and battery power. Real-time compression of sound has the potential to extend recording durations and bandwidths at the expense of increased processing operations and therefore power consumption. Whereas lossy methods such as MP3 introduce undesirable artifacts, lossless compression algorithms (e.g., flac) guarantee exact data recovery. But these algorithms are relatively complex due to the wide variety of signals they are designed to compress. A simpler lossless algorithm is shown here to provide compression factors of three or more for underwater sound recordings over a range of noise environments. The compressor was evaluated using samples from drifting and animal-borne sound recorders with sampling rates of 16-240 kHz. It achieves >87% of the compression of more-complex methods but requires about 1/10 of the processing operations resulting in less than 1 mW power consumption at a sampling rate of 192 kHz on a low-power microprocessor. The potential to triple recording duration with a minor increase in power consumption and no loss in sound quality may be especially valuable for battery-limited tags and robotic vehicles.

Long-endurance oceanographic sampling platforms such as gliders and profiling floats provide a new opportunity for acquiring acoustic signals from marine animals with immediate applications in conservation and mitigation. Our objective is to produce a reliable system for persistent passive acoustic monitoring of marine animals. The system, comprising both low-power hardware and acoustic processing software, will be extensible and can be incorporated in a variety of autonomous platforms. The design will be open and available for other researchers to adapt and extend.

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is a promising tool for improving the effectiveness of visual surveys for marine animals and for stand‐alone persistent monitoring. Nonetheless, significant data gaps make it difficult to predict PAM performance for many species. Detection functions are only beginning to be formed for some vocalizations and detectors. Statistical models for calling rates, as a function of behavior, are needed to translate acoustic detections into abundance estimates, or lack of detections into decisions about absence of animals. Finally, ambient noise levels and spectra are unavailable in most of the world’s oceans, complicating the application of results from one area to another. Although some of these gaps are being addressed by a growing group of researchers, there is an urgent need to develop standards for measuring and reporting results, and to foster the interchange of data. To exemplify the form such standards might take, and the potential pitfalls, we present results from a series...