Background:Promoting patients’ rights is essential for defining the standards of clinical services within a country. Given their responsibilities, nurses can be the primary target for research to investigate the issue of patients’ rights within a healthcare system. As such, assessing the knowledge of nurses about patients’ rights is an essential step toward improving the quality of healthcare in limited resource settings like Sudan.Objectives:We aimed to assess the level of knowledge about patients’ rights among the nursing staff at Friendship Teaching (...) Hospital in Sudan.Methods:This hospital-based cross-sectional study was carried out at the Friendship Teaching Hospital in Sudan. We surveyed the totality of nurses (95) at the hospital using an amended survey. The data were analyzed in SPSS software using descriptive and inferential statistics.Ethical consideration:The study was approved by the Research Unit of Khartoum Ministry of Health and the Hospital administration. All respondents gave verbal consent prior to participating in the study.Results:Only 48.4% of the participants knew about the existence of the Sudanese Charter of patients’ rights. Nonetheless, our analysis found that 65.8% of nurses had acceptable level of knowledge (scored more than 75% of the total knowledge score) of patients’ rights, and none of the participant scored less than 50% of the total knowledge score. Finally, we found no statistical association between the knowledge score and demographic data, educational level, whether the participant knows about the existence of the Charter or not and a number of other factors.Conclusion:Nurses’ lack of knowledge about the existence of the Sudanese Charter of patients’ rights adopted in 2009 rights confirms the need for further efforts by Ministry of Health to promote the document. Furthermore, further research is needed to investigate the disconnect between nurses’ lack of knowledge about the existence of the charter and their awareness of the rights within the charter as well as the actual implementation of rights. (shrink)

ABSTRACT At the beginning of the twentieth century, health research in the Sudan developed primarily as a function of the colonial British administration. Ethical issues in the medical profession in the Sudan are governed by the Sudan Medical Council. To address these issues, the Sudan Medical Council issued Medico‐legal and Ethical Guidelines in 1967. This important document has focused principally on ethical issues arising in clinical medicine. Throughout the history of health research in Sudan it (...) is very difficult to find any reference to research ethics. Nevertheless, there have been a few attempts to articulate ethics in health research. In 1979, Sudan witnessed the establishment of the first ethical review committee, which was established by the initiative of a group of doctors and scientists from the national health research laboratory. This committee got neither political nor institutional recognition. Therefore, it was not developed and came to an end shortly after its inception. Yet, in 2000 the FMOH established an ethical review committee (ERC). The functions of this committee were to review proposals of health research to be carried out in the country for ethical issues irrespective to the funding agents. Unfortunately, the committee devoted all the jobs in reviewing only externally‐sponsored health research and research carried out by expatriate researchers or international organisations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The ethical review process is an important component of contemporary health research worldwide. Sudan started an ethical review process rather late in comparison with other countries. In this study, we evaluate the structure and functions of existing ethics review committees. We also explore the knowledge and attitudes of Sudanese researchers toward the ethical review process and their experience with existing ethics review committees. There are four ethics review committees in the country; these committees have no institutional regulations to (...) govern their functions. Furthermore, Sudan also lacks national guidelines. Ethical reviews are carried out primarily for studies seeking international funding and are almost always governed by the funding agencies’ requirements. Nearly half of respondents (46.3%) knew about the existence of research ethics committees in Sudan. Researchers reported a variety of experiences with the ethical review process; most of them were unable to define ‘ethics committee’. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, health research in the Sudan developed primarily as a function of the colonial British adm.

ABSTRACT The ethical review process is an important component of contemporary health research worldwide. Sudan started an ethical review process rather late in comparison with other countries. In this study, we evaluate the structure and functions of existing ethics review committees. We also explore the knowledge and attitudes of Sudanese researchers toward the ethical review process and their experience with existing ethics review committees. There are four ethics review committees in the country; these committees have no institutional regulations to (...) govern their functions. Furthermore, Sudan also lacks national guidelines. Ethical reviews are carried out primarily for studies seeking international funding and are almost always governed by the funding agencies’ requirements. Nearly half of respondents (46.3%) knew about the existence of research ethics committees in Sudan. Researchers reported a variety of experiences with the ethical review process; most of them were unable to define ‘ethics committee’. (shrink)

BackgroundObstetrics and gynaecology always has reputation for being a highly litigious. The field of obstetrics and gynaecology is surrounded by different circumstances that stimulate the doctors to practice defensive medicine.MethodsThis study was directed to assess the extent and the possible effect of defensive medicine phenomenon on medical decision making among different grades of obstetric and gynaecologic Sudanese doctors, and to determine any experience of medical litigations with respect to sources and factors associated with it.ResultsA total of 117 doctors were approached, (...) their distribution according to job description was as follow: consultants registrars and specialists. The majority 89.7 % had the impression that litigation against doctors are increasing and 27.6 % had a direct experience of litigation. In this study less than one half of the surveyed doctors knew the concept of defensive medicine and 71.8 % reported practicing one or another form of defensive medicine. The different sources of the litigations reported by the doctors included: maternal death, perinatal death, other {misdiagnosis, intra-uterine fetal death, uterine perforation, rupture uterus}, fetal distress, injury to viscera and shoulder dystocia. In this study the experience of medical litigation was significantly observed among those who worked in area of blame culture. In logistic regression model, there was no significant difference between those who knew the concept of defence medicine and those who didn’t.ConclusionThere should be strategic plan to reduce the practice of defensive medicine and medical litigation against doctors. (shrink)

This study aims to create an integrated geographical information system database of natural resources represented by mining activities in the Red Sea area in Sudan. GIS is a vital tool to help the decision-makers in managing and classifying these resources in terms of quantity and quality within the concept of sustainable development. The paper extracts some models of investment map indicators. In addition to that, it conducts a study and research aimed at developing a mineral resources management and discovering (...) and identifying the new areas of mineral wealth in GIS database. The motivation of this study stems from the fact that countries with these types of wealth can greatly grow their gross domestic product through the optimum management and governance. Most of the least development countries can focus on the search for alternative natural resources to support their economy. Red Sea region is one of the great regions full of natural and mineral resources, beside its strategic location on the way of most of the global trade transaction path. This paper designs and implements GIS multiple database layers. The multiple layers were modelled to overcome the technical difficulties that result from processing of large quantities of tempospatial information. The database was built by using an Oracle database system due to its capability of multilayer design. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

Arguably no concept is more fundamental to science than that of causality, for investigations into cases of existence, persistence, and change in the natural world are largely investigations into the causes of these phenomena. Yet the metaphysics and epistemology of causality remain unclear. For example, the ontological categories of the causal relata have been taken to be objects (Hume 1739), events (Davidson 1967), properties (Armstrong 1978), processes (Salmon 1984), variables (Hitchcock 1993), and facts (Mellor 1995). (For convenience, causes and effects (...) will usually be understood as events in what follows.) Complicating matters, causal relations may be singular (Socrates’s drinking hemlock caused Socrates’s death) or general (Drinking hemlock causes death); hence the relata might be tokens (e.g., instances of properties) or types (e.g., types of events) of the category in question. Other questions up for grabs are: Are singular causes metaphysically and/or epistemologically prior to general causes or vice versa (or neither)? What grounds the intuitive asymmetry of the causal relation? Are macro-causal relations reducible to micro-causal relations? And perhaps most importantly: Are causal facts (e.g., the holding of causal relations) reducible to non-causal facts (e.g., the holding of certain spatiotemporal relations)? (shrink)

In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of the good’ to a claim about intention and moral action, and in so (...) doing have become divorced from the theory's roots in classical and medieval philosophy. Aristotle and Aquinas’ ‘guise of the good’ is primarily a metaphysical claim resting on the equivalence between actuality and goodness, from which conclusions about moral action are derived. I show the reasoning behind their theory and how it forms the basis for the claims about intention and action at the centre of the modern debate. Finally, I argue that the absence of its original foundation is apparent in recent attacks on the ‘guise of the good’. It is unsurprising that modern action theory and ethics have not always been able to comfortably accommodate the ‘guise of the good’; they are only telling half of the story. (shrink)

This volume provides a philosophical introduction to and analysis of the study of metaphor. By proceeding from the concrete analysis of complex metaphors, White is able to identify a range of features which are incompatible with standard accounts of the way words function in metaphor.

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Much discussion about experimental philosophy and philosophical methodology has been framed in terms of the reliability of intuitions, and even when it has not been about reliability per se, it has been focused on whether intuitions meet whatever conditions they need to meet to be trustworthy as evidence. But really that question cannot be answered independently from the questions, evidence for what theories arrived at by what sorts of inferences? I will contend here that not just philosophy's sources of evidence, (...) but also its inferential resources, are in great need of closer examination. (shrink)

Linguistic anthropologists have studied emotion in societies around the world for several decades. This article defines the discipline, introduces its general relevance to emotion theory, then presents five of the most important contributions linguistic anthropology has made to the study of emotion.

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)