This cross-sectional survey aimed to investigate nurses' opinions and practices regarding information and consent in the context of a large Italian teaching hospital and to explore potential influences of gender, age, university education, length of professional experience, and care setting. A questionnaire was administered to 282 nurses from six different care settings (Emergency Room, Emergency Medicine, Surgery, Hematology-Oncology, Geriatrics, and Internal Medicine). Overall, 84% (n = 237) of nurses returned the questionnaire (men: 24%; mean age: 36.2 ± 8 years; university degree: 35%; mean length of professional experience: 12 ± 8.2 years). Most respondents regularly informed patients about medications and nursing procedures and asked for consent prior to invasive procedures, but some provided information to relatives instead of patients. Lack of time or opportunity was the main difficulty in informing patients. The work setting was the foremost factor significantly associated with participants' opinions and practices. Further investigations are needed to confirm these findings in similar and other care settings.
Lateral p-n-p transistors and a complementary bipolar technology have been demonstrated for analog integrated circuits. Besides vertical n-p-n's, this technology provides lateral p-n-p's at the cost of one additional lithographic and dry etching step. Both devices share the same epitaxial layers and feature topside contacts to all terminals. The influence on p-n-p current gain of contact topology (circular versus rectangular), effective base width, base/emitter doping ratio, and temperature was studied in detail. In the range -40 degrees C to 300 degrees C, the current gain of the p-n-p transistor shows a maximum of similar to 37 around 0 degrees C and decreases to similar to 8 at 300 degrees C, whereas in the same range, the gain of n-p-n transistors exhibits a negative temperature coefficient.
Abstract-This paper presents a monolithic fully-differential amplifier implemented in a low-voltage 4H-SiC BJT technology. The circuit has been designed considering the variation of device parameters over a large temperature range. A base-current compensation technique has been applied to overcome the low input-resistance of the amplifier. The bare chip of the amplifier has been measured from 27 ºC to 500 ºC using a hot-chuck probe station. Its open-loop gain is 58 dB at 27 ºC, and monotonically decreases to 37 dB at 500 ºC. Its closed-loop gain reduction is around 5 dB over the investigated temperature range. The gain-bandwidth product drops from 2.8 MHz at 27 ºC to 1.3 MHz at 500 ºC with 470 pF off-chip compensation capacitors. A low total-harmonic-distortion of -58.4 dB at 27 ºC and -46.9 dB at 500 ºC is achieved due to the fully-differential implementation. A low input offset voltage of 0.5 mV at 27 ºC and 6.9 mV at 500 ºC is achieved without calibration. The relative high linearity and low offset demonstrate the potential of this technology to be further investigated for front-end sensor circuits in high-temperature applications.
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