Identifying barriers to healthcare delivery and access in the Circumpolar North: important insights for health professionals.

Lack of access to healthcare services for people living in the Circumpolar North may have important consequences for their health and well-being, both in terms of the actual treatment and other possible health-related consequences intertwined with their life situation. The aim of the present study was to identify the specific challenges to healthcare service delivery and access for populations in the Circumpolar North that are addressed in contemporary literature. A scoping review of literature published between 2005 and 2016 was conducted and 43 articles were selected for inclusion into the review. The review findings address 4 main themes identified in the literature: (1) the influence of physical geography, (2) healthcare provider-related barriers, (3) the importance of culture and language and (4) the impact of systemic factors. The review of the literature enabled us to identify existing gaps in both health service access and issues discussed in the available literature, particularly for informing healthcare services in the Circumpolar North, as well as point towards opportunities for future research. The thematic findings drawn from interdisciplinary and international literature inform understandings of the impact of health system barriers on healthcare services and the opportunities for Northern residents to support their own health.

Effects of moderate doses of alcohol on immediate recall of numbers: some implications for information technology.

OBJECTIVE: Moderate doses of alcohol will have detrimental effects on memory functions used in various aspects of human interaction with information technology. The need to deal with multidigit numbers while under alcohol intoxication (e.g., making telephone calls) is a reality of life. To determine these relations, the effects of alcohol on immediate ordered recall were studied in a practical number-dialing task. METHOD: Immediate ordered recall of eight-digit numbers, presented visually or auditorily, was tested in read-and-dial or listen-and-dial forced ordered recall tasks with male subjects (N = 11) under two levels of blood alcohol concentration (BrAC = 0.05% and BrAC = 0.1%) and a no-alcohol placebo control condition (BrAC = 0.0%). RESULTS: With increasing alcohol level, immediate ordered recall of whole numbers (all eight digits correct and in the right order) fell by 9% (visual presentation) and 15% (auditory presentation). No significant interaction effect between alcohol level and digit position in the number was found for visually presented numbers, while a weak, but significant, effect was found for auditorily presented numbers (most prominent at digit positions 5, 6 and 7). This is probably due to the difference in rehearsal opportunities in the two presentation modes. No significant interaction effects between alcohol level and presentation modality were found. CONCLUSIONS: The results, tailored to a practical everyday task of dialing unfamiliar eight-digit telephone numbers, show that even moderate doses of alcohol will affect the performance of an already fragile short-term memory system engaged whenever reproduction of digit strings is required.

Item-specific effects in recognition failure: reasons for rejection of the Tulving-Wiseman function.

The present paper addresses the problems of whether recognition failure of recallable words is a function of both recognition and recall, and whether recognition failure is restricted to a small and specifiable subset of study items. A meta-analysis of the Nilsson-Gardiner database (Nilsson & Gardiner, 1993) showed that recognition given recall was positively correlated with recognition and negatively correlated with recall. Two new experiments are reported, the first one using 48 word pairs for which recognition failure was found in previous studies. An item analysis of the data demonstrated that recognition failure occurred primarily with noun-adjective pairs. The second experiment compared Norwegian-American and American-Norwegian name pairs. Wide deviation from the Tulving-Wiseman function (Tulving & Wiseman, 1975) was observed for the latter condition. In both conditions, recognition failure occurred with only the items for which the beginnings of names shared three or more letters. It is concluded that recognition failure occurs when there exists a relationship between the members of an A-B pairs that is independent of their pairing in the study context. The Tulving-Wiseman function is the result of collapsing across items in the analysis of previous studies.