The thoughts and opinions of advanced life support providers in the South African private emergency medical services sector concerning pre-hospital palliative care by Gage, Caleb Hanson

“…EMS providers are uniquely positioned to deliver this care in the pre-hospital setting as they are often the first point of medical contact. 10 This has great potential benefit for patient comfort, early identification and relief of suffering and earlier referral to hospice care. 10, 11 Despite this unique position there is an overall lack of guidance within EMS systems to manage palliative patients. 5, 6, 10 In the United States of America (USA), for example, only 5-6% of EMS systems have protocols for palliative care. 6, 10 In addition, there is no specific pre-hospital emergency care curricula on the subject, resulting in a lack of education and training for EMS providers. 3-5, 12, 13 This may stem from the historical focus of EMS training which primarily involves immediate measures to preserve life or limb until definitive care is reached. 11 This focus has resulted in an EMS ethos of 'saving lives.' 5, 12 Palliative care, on the other hand, is not focussed on 'saving lives', but rather the prevention and relief of suffering. 1 Therefore, palliative care may seem to conflict with emergency care, placing EMS providers in difficult situations when confronted with palliative care patients. 8, 12, 14 South Africa itself faces what has been termed a “quadruple burden of disease” due to communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS, high maternal and paediatric mortality rates, non-communicable disease as well as injury. 15 The large number of patients suffering from these diseases and the life-limiting complications thereof, results in increased need for palliative care in the country as noted by the South African Minister of Health. 16 Access to health care for patients suffering from these diseases is a further challenge in the Sub-Saharan African setting. 17, 18, 19 In South Africa, EMS are often contacted 3 by those without access to transport to provide this service. 20 Thus, South African EMS providers may frequently encounter not only high acuity emergency patients, but many ill HIV/AIDS, cancer and other chronically ill patients requiring palliative care who are unable to access healthcare via alternative means. 21 European studies have found that approximately 3-5% of all pre-hospital calls involve palliative care situations. 2, 22, 23 With the quadruple burden of disease and limited access in the South African setting, this percentage is likely higher as these factors result in increased frequency of contact between EMS providers and patients requiring palliative care. …”
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Martial Arts as a coping strategy for aggressive behaviour in young adolescents

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A deep learning approach towards diagnostics of bearings operating under non-stationary conditions

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Institutionalization of E-commerce in Women-led SMEs - A Least-developed Country Context by Matsinhe, Fernanda Ernestina

“…A number of important recommendations were made, for example, the government should not only provide the regulatory framework but also work actively in its promotion and implementation. …”
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Automated detection and classification of red roman in unconstrained underwater environments using Mask R-CNN by Conrady, Christopher

“…To address this gap in the literature, this thesis contributes (i) a novel image dataset of red roman (Chrysoblephus laticeps), a fish species endemic to Southern Africa, and (ii) a Mask R-CNN framework for the automated localisation, classification, counting, and tracking of red roman in unconstrained underwater environments. The model, trained on an 80:10:10 split, accurately detected and classified red roman on the training dataset (mAP50 = 80.29%), validation dataset (mAP50 = 80.35%), as well as on previously unseen footage (test dataset) (mAP50 = 81.45%). …”
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Natural Language Processing on Data Warehouses by Maree, Stiaan

“…Utterances are queries that people make with natural language, for example, What is the sales value for mountain bikes in Georgia for 1 July 2005?" …”
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Enforcement of international human rights law in domestic courts in Mozambique and Ghana

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Opportunities to learn environmental education : a case study of Mpumalanga province

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The needs of male adolescents who have lost both parents

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Sign language challenges encountered by deaf learners born to hearing parents

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An Evaluation of student support services in open and distance learning at the University of Namibia by Mowes, Delvaline Lucia

“…CES should provide adequate training to tutors to prepare them for the special challenges presented by open and distance learning. …”
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Exploring the resilience of youth living in a high-risk community by Normand, Catherine

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On noise regularised neural networks: initialisation, learning and inference by Pretorius, Arnu

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Audiologists' perceptions of ethical climate and level of moral distress in the provision of amplification services in South Africa by Budden, Anne

“…Quantitative data showed HHPs experienced no to mild levels of MD and perceived their ethical work environment as neutral to positive; however, qualitative data raised additional concerns. For example, and of relevance for both training curricula and continuing professional education purposes, personal semi-structured interviews raised the need for more advanced ethics training to address dilemmas that are unique to the public and private healthcare sectors. …”
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Multilingual acoustic word embeddings for zero-resource languages by Jacobs, Chrsitiaan

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Secondary victimisation in the court procedures of rape cases : an analysis of four court cases by Viljoen, Charmell S.

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3D approximation of scapula bone shape from 2D X-ray images using landmark-constrained statistical shape model fitting by Wasswa, William

“…However, 3D images are desirable in a range of clinical applications, for example surgical planning. The aim of this research was to develop a tool for 3D approximation of scapula bone from 2D X-ray images using landmark-constrained statistical shape model fitting. …”
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An analysis of the relationship between psychosocial safety climate and the work-school-interface for non-traditional students in South Africa by April, Kelly

“…It is also a global phenomenon that an increasing number of fulltime employees are also engaging in formal further studies due to the rapid changes in the labour market. For example, advancements in technology have had a major impact on traditional business models and the roles, and skills needed. …”
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A comparison of Gaussian mixture variants with application to automatic phoneme recognition by Brand, Rinus

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Social change and community works in rural eMaxesibeni, Alfred Nzo district in the South Africa’s Eastern Cape

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