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This study investigated whether Fitbit devices can reduce sedentary behavior among employees in the workplace. Participants were asked to wear Fitbits during 8-hour work shifts, 5 days per week, for 8 weeks. They were instructed to stand at least once every 30 minutes throughout the workday. The goal of the study was to determine whether standing once every 30 minutes was a feasible strategy for reducing sedentary workplace behavior. On average, participants completed 36 of 40 workdays using Fitbits. The number of times participants stood during an 8-hour workday averaged 12 stands per day (maximum 16 stands per day). These results indicate that Fitbit technology is effective for recording and tracking interruptions in sitting time; however, to reduce sitting behavior, alternate approaches are required to motivate larger numbers of workers to participate.

Aims: This study aimed to understand how the personal and professional resilience of Registered Practical Nurses working in long-term care (LTC) homes in Ontario were impacted during the Coronavirus 2019 pandemic. Background: Registered Practical Nurses are primary regulated healthcare providers that have worked in Ontario LTC homes during the COVID-19 pandemic. As frontline workers, they have experienced increased stress secondary to lockdowns, changing Ministry of Health recommendations, social isolation and limited resources. LTC homes experienced almost a third of all COVID-19-related deaths in Ontario. Understanding registered practical nurses' (RPNs) resilience in this context is vital in developing the programs and supports necessary to help nurses become and stay resilient in LTC and across a range of settings. Methods: Purposive sampling was used to recruit 40 Registered Practical Nurses working in LTC homes across Ontario for interviews. Charmaz's Grounded theory guided in-depth one-on-one interviews and analyses completed between April to September 2021.Results: Registered Practical Nurse participants represented 15 (37.5%) private, and 25 (62.5%) public LTC homes across Ontario Local Health Integration Networks. Findings informed two distinct perspectives on resilience, one where nurses were able to maintain resilience and another where they were not. Sustaining and fraying resilience, presented as bimodal processes, was observed in four themes: 'Dynamic Role of the Nurse', 'Preserving Self', 'Banding Together' and 'Sense of Leadership Support'. Conclusion:Resilience was largely drawn from themselves as individuals. Resources to support self-care and work-life balance are needed. Additionally, workplace supports to build capacity for team-based care practices, collegial support in problem-solving and opportunities for 'connecting' with LTC nursing colleagues would be beneficial. Our findings suggest a role for professional development resources in the workplace that could help rebuild this workforce and support RPNs in providing quality care for older adults living in LTC.

Three-quarters of Canadians are exposed to a traumatic event sufficient to cause psychological trauma in their lifetime. In fact, post-traumatic stress disorder is a global health issue with a prevalence as high as 37%. Health care professionals trained to provide mental health treatment for these individuals are at risk of developing vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress, both of which result in adverse symptoms for the health care provider that often mimic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Vicarious trauma develops over time as the clinician is continually exposed to their clients’ traumatic experiences, while clinicians experiencing secondary traumatic stress begin to experience the symptoms of PTSD due to secondary exposure of the traumatic event. Both vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress cause mental, physical, and emotional issues for health care professionals that include burnout and decreased self-worth. Health care systems and administration should aim to develop training and professional education for health care providers. This review will emphasize what factors lead to the development of vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress, and what aids or supports can be implemented to treat the symptoms. The implications for policy development and training will be discussed.

The interaction of working and reference memory was studied in rats on an eight-arm radial maze. In two experiments, rats were trained to perform working memory and reference memory tasks. On working memory trials, they were allowed to enter four randomly chosen arms for reward in a study phase and then had to choose the unentered arms for reward in a test phase. On reference memory trials, they had to learn to visit the same four arms on the maze on every trial for reward. Retention was tested on working memory trials in which the interval between the study and test phase was 15 s, 15 min, or 30 min. At each retention interval, tests were performed in which the correct WM arms were either congruent or incongruent with the correct RM arms. Both experiments showed that congruency interacted with retention interval, yielding more forgetting at 30 min on incongruent trials than on congruent trials. The effect of reference memory strength on the congruency effect was examined in Experiment 1, and the effect of associating different contexts with working and reference memory on the congruency effect was studied in Experiment 2.

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Adult hippocampal neurogenesis has been proposed to both aid memory formation and disrupt memory. We examined the role of adult hippocampal neurogenesis in spatial working and reference memory in black‐capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), a passerine bird that relies on spatial memory for cache retrieval and foraging. We tested spatial working and spatial reference memory in birds that had received methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM), a neurotoxin that decreases hippocampal neurogenesis. MAM treatment significantly reduced neurogenesis in the hippocampus quantified by doublecortin (DCX) labeling of newly divided and migrating neurons. MAM treatment had little effect on the working or reference memory but caused an increase in errors on the reference memory task following reversal. Working memory for recently visited spatial locations and reference memory for familiar spatial locations were thus unaffected by a reduction in neurogenesis. An increase in errors following reference memory reversal may indicate that adult hippocampal neurogenesis aids in pattern separation, the differentiation of similar memories at the time of encoding.

Purpose: This study examined what physiotherapists and physiotherapy students understand and know about executive functioning (EF), what EF outcome measures they use clinically, and whether their primary area of practice influences their assessment practices. Method: An open online survey was distributed to registered members of the Canadian Physiotherapy Association, its various divisions, and colleges of physiotherapy within Canada that took approximately 15 minutes to complete and was available for 13 months. Pearson correlation was used to assess the relationship between subjective and objective understanding and knowledge of EF (UKEF) and a one-way multivariate analysis of variance was used to analyze differences in survey responses based on respondents’ primary area of practice. Results: A total of 335 respondents consented to participate (completion rate = 78.4%). There was a significant moderate positive correlation between subjective and objective UKEF ( r = 0.43; 95% CI: 0.32, 0.54; n = 260; p < 0.001). Significant differences in survey responses were related to physiotherapists’ primary areas of practice (i.e., musculoskeletal, neurological, cardiorespiratory, or multi-systems; F12,555.89 = 2.29, p = 0.008; Wilks Λ = 0.880; partial η2 = 0.042). Conclusions: Respondents reported that they had good subjective UKEF, but this was only moderately correlated with objective UKEF.