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INTRODUCTION: This study aimed to determine the views and practices of healthcare providers and barriers they encountered when implementing the national health screening program for men in a public primary care setting in Malaysia. METHODS: An online survey was conducted among healthcare providers across public health clinics in Malaysia. All family medicine specialists, medical officers, nurses and assistant medical officers involved in the screening program for adult men were invited to answer a 51-item questionnaire via email or WhatsApp. The questionnaire comprised five sections: participants' socio-demographic information, current screening practices, barriers and facilitators to using the screening tool, and views on the content and format of the screening tool. RESULTS: A total of 231 healthcare providers from 129 health clinics participated in this survey. Among them, 37.44% perceived the implementation of the screening program as a "top-down decision." Although 37.44% found the screening tool for adult men "useful," some felt that it was "time consuming" to fill out (38.2%) and "lengthy" (28.3%). In addition, 'adult men refuse to answer' (24.1%) was cited as the most common patient-related barrier. CONCLUSIONS: This study provided useful insights into the challenges encountered by the public healthcare providers when implementing a national screening program for men. The screening tool for adult men should be revised to make it more user-friendly. Further studies should explore the reasons why men were reluctant to participate in health screenings, thus enhancing the implementation of screening programs in primary care.
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The boundary value techniques in vector-field diffraction theories are generalized to describe electromagnetic scattering of plane waves by a finite number of parallel, rectangular grooves corrugated on a metallic (infinitely conducting) ground plane. Each of the grooves has its own feature size and location for representing a general grating structure in multilevel binary optics. The multiple-scattering matrix is derived for determining the scattering coefficients that lead to a fast convergence in the Bessel-function series representation of the scattered-field angular spectrum. The solution remains stable from the long-wavelength (the Rayleigh limit) to the short-wavelength region (the geometrical optics limit). It is found that any N-groove scattered field can be treated as the sum of N single-groove radiation fields and the cross-groove coupling fields. A coupling index is introduced to measure the coupling effect. Numerical examples of two, six, and twelve grooves are examined in differentspectral regions. Plots of the coupling index are generated to show the feasibility of using pattern superposition for an approximate solution.
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A complete solution of plane-wave scattering from a groove-corrugated surface of infinite extent for arbitrary incidence is presented. The electromagnetic wave is decomposed into fast and slow modal representation, and the solution is accomplished through the use of the mode-matching method. We solved for the zero-order diffraction efficiency and the phase of each polarization component for arbitrary incident angles. Our results have verified special cases previously published by others and have illustrated the phase shift between polarizations associated with the diffraction process as a function of the incident angles.