\n\nMethod: A questionnaire was designed and implemented between January 2010 and March 2011 at the Hospital Clinic San Cecilio (Granada, Spain). The final ABT-263 nmr questionnaire consisted of 44 items that

assessed provider behavior before and after contact with the patient, declarative knowledge, and attitudes to hand hygiene. The questionnaire was administered to 113 health professionals.\n\nResults: A factor analysis was performed. Data were obtained that supported the unidimensionality of the instrument with a general convergence Value that explained 39.289% of the total variance and a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.784 for the established elements. Significant differences were found in hand hygiene behavior before and after contact with the patient (t = -8,991, p <0.001). Declarative knowledge and attitudes significantly predicted behavior.\n\nConclusions: The questionnaire shows high internal consistency, reliability, and validity and is thus a valid tool to assess behavior, knowledge and attitudes related to hand hygiene in health professionals. This instrument

also detects deficiencies in basic knowledge. (C) 2011 SESPAS. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L All rights reserved.”
“Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is commonly considered as the most accurate method for radiation dose calculations. Commissioning selleck inhibitor of a beam model in the MC code against a clinical linear accelerator beam is of crucial importance for its clinical implementation. In this paper, we propose an automatic commissioning method for our GPU-based MC dose engine, gDPM. gDPM utilizes a beam model based on a concept of phase-space-let (PSL). A PSL contains

a group of particles that are of the same type and close in space and energy. A set of generic PSLs was generated by splitting a reference phase-space file. Each PSL was associated CAL-101 supplier with a weighting factor, and in dose calculations the particle carried a weight corresponding to the PSL where it was from. Dose for each PSL in water was pre-computed, and hence the dose in water for a whole beam under a given set of PSL weighting factors was the weighted sum of the PSL doses. At the commissioning stage, an optimization problem was solved to adjust the PSL weights in order to minimize the difference between the calculated dose and measured one. Symmetry and smoothness regularizations were utilized to uniquely determine the solution. An augmented Lagrangian method was employed to solve the optimization problem. To validate our method, a phase-space file of a Varian TrueBeam 6 MV beam was used to generate the PSLs for 6 MV beams. In a simulation study, we commissioned a Siemens 6 MV beam on which a set of field-dependent phase-space files was available. The dose data of this desired beam for different open fields and a small off-axis open field were obtained by calculating doses using these phase-space files.