In Iraq, because of the dramatic turnovers facing the country for three decades, pharmacists continue to experience significant professional challenges in both the public and private sectors. The present study aimed to explore the professional challenges and obstacles facing Iraqi pharmacists working in public hospitals. This qualitative study included face-to-face semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions with hospital pharmacists. The participants were selected purposefully (with ≥ 3 years of experience) to work at governmental hospitals in Karbala province between December 2022 and April 2023. The audio-recording interviews were scripted. Thematic analyses were used to generate themes and subthemes from the interviews. Thirty-two pharmacists participated in this study. The study found that there are many challenges facing Iraqi pharmacists in hospitals. Some of which are related to the pharmacists themselves, such as suboptimal competency with an overwhelming number of pharmacists in each hospital, while the others are related to suboptimal organizational conditions, such as inadequate interdisciplinary collaboration, an unfriendly hospital environment as patients' confrontation, unequal task distributions, and inadequate technology and tools. According to the study findings, greater emphasis should be placed on improving multidisciplinary teamwork, pharmacist competency, the pharmacists' role in hospitals and securing the supply of essential medicines. Most participants recommend enhancing quality over quantity of pharmacists in addition to finding areas and horizons to benefit from these large numbers of pharmacists. Keywords: Iraqi pharmacists, hospital pharmacists, challenges, obstacles, Qualitative study.
This study employs evolutionary optimization and Artificial Intelligence algorithms to determine an individual’s age using a single-faced image as the basis for the identification process. Additionally, we used the WIKI dataset, widely considered the most comprehensive collection of facial images to date, including descriptions of age and gender attributes. However, estimating age from facial images is a recent topic of study, even though much research has been undertaken on establishing chronological age from facial photographs. Retrained artificial neural networks are used for classification after applying reprocessing and optimization techniques to achieve this goal. It is possible that the difficulty of determining age could be reduce
... Show MoreThis study concerns the removal of a trihydrate antibiotic (Amoxicillin) from synthetically contaminated water by adsorption on modified bentonite. The bentonite was modified using hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (HTAB), which turned it from a hydrophilic to a hydrophobic material. The effects of different parameters were studied in batch experiments. These parameters were contact time, solution pH, agitation speed, initial concentration (C0) of the contaminant, and adsorbent dosage. Maximum removal of amoxicillin (93 %) was achieved at contact time = 240 min, pH = 10, agitation speed = 200 rpm, initial concentration = 30 ppm, and adsorbent dosage = 3 g bentonite per 1L of pollutant solution. The characterization of the adsorbent, modi
... Show MoreUnderstanding, promoting, and teaching media literacy is an important societal challenge. STEM educators are increasingly looking to incorporate 21st century skills such as media literacy into core subject education. In this paper we investigate how undergraduate Computer Science (CS) students can learn media literacy as a by-product of collaborative video tutorial production. The paper presents a study of 34 third-year CS undergraduates who, as part of their learning, were each asked to produce three video tutorials on Raspberry Pi programming, using a collaborative video production tool for mobile phones (Bootlegger). We provide results of both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the production process and resulting video tutorials,
... Show Moreplanning is among the most significant in the field of robotics research. As it is linked to finding a safe and efficient route in a cluttered environment for wheeled mobile robots and is considered a significant prerequisite for any such mobile robot project to be a success. This paper proposes the optimal path planning of the wheeled mobile robot with collision avoidance by using an algorithm called grey wolf optimization (GWO) as a method for finding the shortest and safe. The research goals in this study for identify the best path while taking into account the effect of the number of obstacles and design parameters on performance for the algorithm to find the best path. The simulations are run in the MATLAB environment to test the
... Show MoreImage classification is the process of finding common features in images from various classes and applying them to categorize and label them. The main problem of the image classification process is the abundance of images, the high complexity of the data, and the shortage of labeled data, presenting the key obstacles in image classification. The cornerstone of image classification is evaluating the convolutional features retrieved from deep learning models and training them with machine learning classifiers. This study proposes a new approach of “hybrid learning” by combining deep learning with machine learning for image classification based on convolutional feature extraction using the VGG-16 deep learning model and seven class
... Show MoreABSTRACT Pulmonary alveolar microlithiasis is rare infiltrative pulmonary disease characterized by intra-alveoli deposition of microliths. We present a familial case of an adult female with complaint of progressive shortness of breath on exertion. Chest radiograph showed innumerable tiny dense nodules, diffusely involving both lungs mainly the lower zones. High-resolution CT scan illustrated widespread intra-alveolar microliths, diffuse ground-glass attenuation areas and septal thickening predominantly in the basal regions. Chest radiograph is all that is needed for the diagnosis of this case but CT scan was done to demonstrate the extent and severity of this disease
Exponential distribution is one of most common distributions in studies and scientific researches with wide application in the fields of reliability, engineering and in analyzing survival function therefore the researcher has carried on extended studies in the characteristics of this distribution.
In this research, estimation of survival function for truncated exponential distribution in the maximum likelihood methods and Bayes first and second method, least square method and Jackknife dependent in the first place on the maximum likelihood method, then on Bayes first method then comparing then using simulation, thus to accomplish this task, different size samples have been adopted by the searcher us
... Show MoreStatic Synchronous Series Compensator (SSSC) is a well known device for effectively regulating the active power flow in a power system. In this paper, the SSSC linearized power flow equations are incorporated into Newton-Raphson algorithm in a MATLAB written program to investigate the control of active poweer flow and the transient stability of a five bus and a thirty bus IEEE test systems, during abnormal conduction (three phase fault near buses). A comparison of the results obtained for the base case without SSSC and with it to investigate the effectiveness of the device on both of the active power flow and the transient stability.
This paper describes a newly modified wind turbine ventilator that can achieve highly efficient ventilation. The new modification on the conventional wind turbine ventilator system may be achieved by adding a Savonius wind turbine above the conventional turbine to make it work more efficiently and help spinning faster. Three models of the Savonius wind turbine with 2, 3, and 4 blades' semicircular arcs are proposed to be placed above the conventional turbine of wind ventilator to build a hybrid ventilation turbine. A prototype of room model has been constructed and the hybrid turbine is placed on the head of the room roof. Performance's tests for the hybrid turbine with a different number of blades and different values o
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