No abstract

The authors report a short-term reading intervention study involving 15 children with Down syndrome (DS) who attended mainstream schools. The intervention programme taught children phoneme segmentation and blending skills in the context of learning letter-sounds and working with words in books. The children were taught by their learning support assistants, who received special training for this purpose. Compared to a waiting group, a group of eight children with DS improved significantly on measures of early literacy skills (letter-sound knowledge, Early Word Recognition) following eight weeks of intervention. The waiting group started to make progress once they received the intervention. Both groups maintained progress on the literacy measures five months after the intervention had finished. The results suggest that children with DS can benefit from structured, phonics-based reading intervention.

There appears to be a close and probably causal relationship between early variations in phoneme skills and later reading skills in typically developing children, though the pattern in children with Down Syndrome is less clear. We present the results of a 2-year longitudinal study of 49 children with Down Syndrome (DS) and 61 typically developing (TD) control children with similar initial levels of reading skill. Phoneme awareness and vocabulary were strong concurrent predictors of initial levels of reading skill in both groups. However, longitudinally phoneme awareness was a predictor of the growth of reading skills in TD children but not in children with DS. There was a very high degree of longitudinal stability in reading skills in children with DS, and initial levels of reading skills seemed to be highly constrained by general language skills, as indexed by vocabulary knowledge, in this population. We conclude that reading development in children with DS shows similarities and differences to the pattern observed in TD children and that phoneme awareness appears to be a less powerful influence on the development of reading skills in children with DS.

The ELS programme provides a cost effective method of boosting 6-year-old children's reading to an average level.

Medical errors are common, costly, and can potentially be life threatening to patients. Recent studies have established that Computer Provider Order Entry (CPOE) systems reduce medical errors as well as improve safety, quality, and value of patient care. However, research regarding adoption factors associated with CPOE systems is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this review was to determine adoption factors by identifying the frequency of barriers through the analysis of literature and research. A systematic literature review was conducted from EBSCO Host and Google Scholar. The search criteria focused on publication date, keywords, and peer reviewed articles. The final set established for evaluation was ten articles. The authors summarized each article and then identified common barriers. Throughout the ten articles, 31 barriers were identified; 15 of which were unique. The three most frequent barriers identified were: process changes (23 %), training (13 %), and efficacy (10 %). The results of this review identify to policy makers levers to incentivize to encourage adoption. The results also illustrate to vendors the importance of factors to include in both marketing and development. The leadership of healthcare organizations should be encouraged to see such results and know that their concerns are heard. If policy makers and vendors help healthcare organizations overcome barriers to adoption, the organization has a better chance of successful CPOE implementation. If successfully implemented, a CPOE system can improve the process of care, quality of care, and patient outcomes; all of which address issues of Meaningful Use.