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Articles by Simon Howell
Barriers to Changing Sedation Practice for Patients Undergoing Mechanical Ventilation on the Intensive Care Unit: A Qualitative Interview Study of Clinical Staff - Richards - 2026 - Nursing in Critical Care - Wiley Online Library
1 Introduction Providing and optimising sedation for critically ill patients on the intensive care unit (ICU) is a fundamental aspect of critical care and plays an essential role in allowing patients to tolerate invasive therapies such as mechanical ventilation. Sedation reduces discomfort, pain and distress but can cause adverse effects such as hypotension, bradycardia and prolonged ventilation [1-4].
Cannabis boom in South Africa and Zimbabwe is good for wealthy investors, bad for small farmers
Cannabis is booming as an ingredient in everything from supplementary oils, inflammation-reducing skin creams, lip balms to health drinks and gummy sweets that promise to reduce anxiety and pain and promote relaxation. The global legal cannabis market is today worth about US$69.78 billion, and this will skyrocket to US$216.76 billion by 2033. Read more: More people are trying medicinal cannabis for chronic pain. But does it work?
Cannabis boom in South Africa and Zimbabwe is good for wealthy investors, bad for small farmers
Cannabis is booming as an ingredient in everything from supplementary oils, inflammation-reducing skin creams, lip balms to health drinks and gummy sweets that promise to reduce anxiety and pain and promote relaxation. The global legal cannabis market is today worth about US$69.78 billion, and this will skyrocket to US$216.76 billion by 2033. But is this boom benefiting indigenous cannabis farmers in southern Africa?
Cannabis boom in South Africa and Zimbabwe is good for wealthy investors, bad for small farmers
Cannabis is booming as an ingredient in everything from supplementary oils, inflammation-reducing skin creams, lip balms to health drinks and gummy sweets that promise to reduce anxiety and pain and promote relaxation. The global legal cannabis market is today worth about US$69.78 billion, and this will skyrocket to US$216.76 billion by 2033. Read more: More people are trying medicinal cannabis for chronic pain. But does it work?
Development, external validation and integration into clinical workflow of machine learning models to support pre‐operative assessment in the UK
Introduction Demand for surgical treatment is growing, having outstripped capacity since before the COVID-19 pandemic. As of November 2024, over 6 million patients in England were waiting for over 7 million procedures, with over 3 million patients missing the target set by NHS England for time to receiving first treatment [1].
British Journal of Anaesthesia: a leading publication and a registered charity
Summary The British Journal of Anaesthesia organisation is a registered charity comprised of two interlinked missions: provision of impactful publications and funding the generation and dissemination of research to the wider anaesthetic community. This centenary editorial highlights our charitable activity that covers funding of research infrastructure, meeting support and funding of a diverse portfolio of international research grants.
Cannabis policy changes in Africa are welcome. But small producers are the losers
Cannabis is a drug crop with a long history in Africa. Alongside coca and opium poppy, it has been subjected to international control for nearly a century. The International Opium Convention of 1925 institutionalised the international control system and extended the scope of control to cannabis. In 1961 a new international convention was adopted to replace the existing multilateral treaties for control of narcotic drugs.
Part 8: See and don't see (ft. Alisa Lebow)
Share Page Embed Code Subscribe & Share RSS Feed Download (86.6 MB) Link with Timestamp Tags RSS Share With the help of scholar and filmmaker Alisa Lebow, who arrives armed with memories of meeting and speaking with Akerman, we tackle some of the Akerman work most inherently tied up with questions and challenges of Jewish identity, history and politics.
Part 7: Song and dance (ft. Girish Shambhu)
Share Page Embed Code Subscribe & Share RSS Feed Download (76.5 MB) Link with Timestamp Tags RSS Share After a mid-season siesta, we're back with one of the most obviously pleasurable and accessible groupings of any episode of The Akerman Year: that's right, it's time for musicals. Girish Shambhu is on with us to talk about the beguiling whatsit Les Années 80, the one-hour TV documentary One Day Pina Asked, and finally Akerman's long-in-the-making Golden Eighties.
Small cannabis producers the losers in policy changes across Africa
Cannabis is a drug crop with a long history in Africa. Alongside coca and opium poppy, it has been subjected to international control for nearly a century. The International Opium Convention of 1925 institutionalised the international control system and extended the scope of control to cannabis. In 1961 a new international convention was adopted to replace the existing multilateral treaties for control of narcotic drugs.
Cannabis policy changes in Africa are welcome. But small producers are the losers
Cannabis is a drug crop with a long history in Africa. Alongside coca and opium poppy, it has been subjected to international control for nearly a century. The International Opium Convention of 1925 institutionalised the international control system and extended the scope of control to cannabis. In 1961 a new international convention was adopted to replace the existing multilateral treaties for control of narcotic drugs.
Part 6: Have you considered analysis? (ft. Miriam Bale)
Share Page Embed Code Subscribe & Share RSS Feed Download (96.9 MB) Link with Timestamp Tags RSS Share This month, we're taking a look at Akerman's sole foray into the English mainstream via the 1996 rom-com A Couch in New York, while also taking a look at the 7-minute short that followed in its wake (the introspective Le jour ou) and looking backwards to a previous comic gem, 1984's 60-minute L'homme a la valise.
Part 05: Hot summer nights (ft. Caden Mark Gardner)
Simple Sharing Page A clean, simple landing page with an embedded HTML5 audio player (and audio cards for Twitter and Facebook). Embeddable Audio Player Paste this code to embed an HTML5 audio player with controls. Download URL Useful if you want to create a direct download link, embed in your own player, post from another publishing engine, link to from Patreon, etc.' Social Network Quick Links
The relationship between diabetes mellitus and the development of postoperative renal complications following major resection of a colorectal cancer.
Carlota D'souza-Ferrer Rebecca Birch Simon Howell Ramzi Ajjan Amy Downing Background: Diabetes Mellitus (DM) increases the risk of postoperative complications following colorectal cancer (CRC) surgery. However, few studies investigate whether DM increases the risk of developing postoperative renal complications. The primary aim was to compare the incidence of postoperative renal complications following CRC surgery in patients with and without DM.
Part 3: in correspondence (ft. Lakshmi Padmanabhan)
Share Page Embed Code Subscribe & Share RSS Feed Download (85.8 MB) Link with Timestamp Your Hosts Tags RSS Share This month, we're joined by Lakshmi Padmanabhan to discuss two films centered around the acts of letter-reading: first up is the widely heralded News From Home, Akerman's 1976 feature juxtapozing the letters her mother wrote to her in the early 70s with contemporary images of New York life.
Steven Soderbergh's Haywire Boasts Fine Fight Scenes and a Striking Lead
Haywire, 10 Years Later With the exception of his oft-maligned Ocean’s trilogy, perpetually-retiring journeyman Steven Soderbergh is rarely content to experiment in only one dimension, which makes his 2012 foray into genre fare, Haywire, a left turn of sorts.
The Double Crams Two Many Ideas Into One Movie
Revisiting Richard Ayoade’s The Double Better to have an ungainly surplus of ideas than none at all; that seems to be Richard Ayoade’s philosophy behind The Double, a wild, uneven, but never dull sci-fi black comedy that purports to tackle Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name, but is at least as interested in pilfering visual ideas from films gone by while marrying them to Ayoade’s winningly dry comic sensibility.
Unsimulated eating, unsimulated sex (ft. Erin Nunoda) on Apple Podcasts
1 hr 57 min Special guest Erin Nunoda joins us for a fun and freewheeling (and queer theory-festooned!) chat about a stylistically diverse set of sharp, daring and often pretty funny movies set in Brussels, Paris, and points in between. Films discussed this month: La Paresse Je tu il elle J'ai faim, j'ai froid Portrait d'une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles Clips of "Suzanne" performed by: Françoise Hardy, Jorane, Peter Gabriel and Young Galaxy.
Part 1: Domestic orders (ft. Justine Smith)
Share Page Embed Code Subscribe & Share RSS Feed Download (84 MB) Link with Timestamp Tags RSS Share For our appropriately gargantuan first proper episode, we welcome back fellow Lodger and film-studies veteran Justine Smith to dive in at the deep end with discussion of some of Akerman's early shorts, before moving onto the film Akerman is still far and away best known for, the 200-minute colossus Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles .
The Akerman Year on Apple Podcasts
2 episodes Chantal Akerman's work stretched across mediums, formats, modes, concerns, countries, and production models, but only a handful of them have actually been seen by most cinephiles, especially in North America.
Oculus- An Essential Dose of Heart and Smarts
31 Days of Horror: Oculus Thanks to the likes of James Wan, paranormal horror was all the rage in the early 2010s. From Paranormal Activity to Insidious and The Conjuring, audiences were irretrievably hooked to tales of nuclear families being bloodlessly menaced by only-fleetingly visible entities of malicious intent.
Prevalence of frailty and reliability of established frailty instruments in adult elective colorectal surgical patients: a prospective cohort study
Prevalence of frailty and reliability of established frailty instruments in adult elective colorectal surgical patients: a prospective cohort study http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2799-8291Thomas Dale MacLaine1, Oliver Baker2, Dermot Burke2, Simon J Howell2 1 Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK 2 Leeds Institute of Medical Research at St James's, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Correspondence to Dr Thomas Dale MacLaine, Medical School, University of Warwick Warwick Medical...
ORIGINAL ARTICLE John C. Taylor, Corresponding Author j.c.taylor@leeds.ac.uk orcid.org/0000-0002-2518-5799 Leeds Institute of Medical Research at St James’s, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Corresponding author: J. C. Taylor, Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, Worsley Building, University of Leeds, LS2 9NL, Leeds, UK. Email: j.c.taylor@leeds.ac.uk Search for more papers by this author Lene H.
The Divide is a Dull, Cliché-Ridden Slog Through the End of the World
The Divide Review At one point late in Xavier Gens’s interminable The Divide, one character informs another that there remains one way out of the predicament facing the pitiless survivors holed up in a dank basement at the end of the world, but it’ll involve wading through a significant amount of shit. That’s the most useful visual metaphor offered by Gens’s third feature for the experience of watching it: pointlessly unpleasant, and seemingly without end.
Captain America: The First Avenger generally outclasses its superhero peers
Captain America: The First Avenger at 10 When the first “true” Summer of Superheroes winded down, most discerning viewers approached Joe Johnston’s entry into the Marvel Studios mega-canon, Captain America, with suspicion. After all, it’s a revisionist period piece with a conceptually silly hero, coming from a director whose previous movie (The Wolfman) was an unquestionable turd.
This was a circus, not a revolution - though it still had something to say
Picking through the debris of the week’s violence, we glimpse character, bravery, failures of leadership, crass opportunism, a desperate attempt to be heard 18 July 2021 - 00:00 By SIMON HOWELL History, it is said, repeats itself. In SA, however, history does not merely make itself felt from time to time but rather seems to ceaselessly haunt the present.
Orphan— Well-Executed, Very Dumb, and Deeply Twisted
Orphan 2009 Review When you see a major studio’s logo in front of a horror film, you’re generally in for one of three things: neutered PG-13 dreck (The Uninvited); crass torture porn (Captivity); or an unspeakably generic slasher (the Friday the 13th reboot).
Stake Land Blends Pulp Violence with Real-World Uncertainty
Revisiting Jim Mickle’s Stake Land A 60 Minutes report puts forth a startling figure: thanks to the high unemployment rate, soon 25% of all children in the United States will be living under the poverty line, many of them resorting to temporary shelter to survive. With the spectre of economic collapse – or at least sustained calamity – haunting anyone who pays enough attention to current events in this hemisphere, the post-apocalyptic narrative might well be an increasingly resonant one.
10 Years Later: Source Code is Swift, Bold Sci-Fi
Revisiting Duncan Jones’ Source Code Splitting the difference between big-ticket pyrotechnics and the burgeoning auteurist touches of director Duncan Jones (Moon), Source Code combines high-concept ambition with appealingly pared-down execution and crackerjack pacing. Its ideas are pilfered equally from a number of speculative-fiction touchstones (particularly 12 Monkeys, Total Recall, and, oddly, Groundhog Day), but it never feels overly derivative.
The Box is a Warped Morality Tale Dripping with Style
Revisiting Richard Kelly’s The Box A small wooden box arrives on the doorstep of a married couple, who knows that opening it will grant them a million dollars and kill someone they don’t know. If anyone was expecting Donnie Darko and Southland Tales director Richard Kelly to finally dial back on his idiosyncrasies in service of a familiar conceit when The Box was release, they might have been surprised to find his peculiar voice very much present in his third feature.
The Empty Man Shows us What a Cult Movie Looks Like in the Streaming Era
They tell me you love the movie Southland Tales. You do? I was in the thing, I’m on the set and I said to the director Richard Kelly, can I ask you a question? I read the script, I have just one question.
Measuring frailty in the older surgical patient: the case for evidence synthesis
The surgical population is ageing and within that population patients are becoming frailer. The number of patients more than 75 yr old undergoing surgery in the UK increased from 544 998 in 1999 to 1 012 517 in 2015. It is estimated that by 2030, one-fifth of people aged 75 yr and older will undergo surgery each year. A systematic review of studies in general surgery patients reported prevalence estimates ranging between 31.3% and 45.8% for pre-frailty, and 10.4% and 37.0% for frailty.
Prevalence of frailty and reliability of established frailty instruments in adult elective colorectal surgical patients: a prospective cohort study
Prevalence of frailty and reliability of established frailty instruments in adult elective colorectal surgical patients: a prospective cohort study http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2799-8291Thomas Dale MacLaine1, Oliver Baker2, Dermot Burke2, Simon J Howell2 1 Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK 2 Leeds Institute of Medical Research at St James's, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Correspondence to Dr Thomas Dale MacLaine, Medical School, University of Warwick Warwick Medical...
Why Spartacus is Better than You Remember
The biggest obstacle keeping Steven S. DeKnight’s Spartacus from mainstream respectability… In 2013 Spartacus: War of the Damned ended its run on Starz, concluding the overall series run for good after only 39 episodes, a decision made deliberately by showrunner Steven S. DeKnight and company.
‘Inland Empire’ and why David Lynch is the most Effective Horror Director of his Generation
31 Days of Horror So much has been written and posited about the works of David Lynch – not just his films, but his art and music as well – that more column inches will always struggle to unearth any new readings or insights. Lynch is probably the most acclaimed American filmmaker of the last 30 years; not one of his films (not even Dune) is considered universally worthless and many (Mulholland Dr., Eraserhead, Blue Velvet) are almost universally lauded as singular masterpieces.
Project Post Intensive Care eXercise (PIX): A qualitative exploration of intensive care unit survivors’ perceptions of quality of life post-discharge and experience of exercise rehabilitation - Wendy Walker, Judith Wright, Gerard Danjoux, Simon J Howell,
Introduction Many patients who survive critical illness suffer from problems that adversely impact on subsequent quality of life.1–3 These include physical conditions which may lead to muscle weakness and fatigue, in addition to psychological effects such as long-term cognitive dysfunction4 depression5,6 and post-traumatic stress disorder.7 Survivors therefore suffer a reduced health related quality of life (HRQoL) in comparison to their pre-morbid estimate.8 Long lasting restrictions in...
Aetiology of perioperative myocardial injury: a scientific conundrum with profound clinical implications
reported postoperative ECG changes consistent with myocardial ischaemia or infarction in 42 of 496 patients undergoing surgery under general anaesthesia. Studies in the succeeding decades have reinforced the impact of perioperative cardiac complications and have led to protracted debate regarding the aetiology of perioperative myocardial infarction. 2 Nathoe H.M. van Klei W.A. Beattie W.S. Perioperative troponin elevation: always myocardial injury, but not always myocardial infarction.
10 Years Later: ‘Black Swan’ is a Gloriously Insane Film
Darren Aronofsky does not have a medium setting. However one might feel about any of his films – from the agitated anti-drug parable Requiem for a Dream to the time-bending metaphysical sci-fi mini-epic The Fountain to working-man’s tragedy The Wrestler – it’s difficult to argue that he holds back in any respect.
Fantasia Film Festival 2020: Air Doll- the Story of a Life-Size Blow-Up Doll Which Develops a Soul
Fantasia Film Festival8 seconds ago Fantasia Film Festival 2020: Air Doll— the Story of a Life-Size Blow-Up Doll Which Develops a Soul Fantasia Film Festival2 mins ago Fantasia Film Festival 2020: Feels Good Man Chronicles the War Over a Cartoon Frog Fantasia Film Festival4 mins ago Fantasia Film Festival 2020: Cosmic Candy Hides Reality Behind a Quirky Exterior Fantasia Film Festival6 mins ago Fantasia Film Festival 2020: A Witness Out of the Blue Doesn’t Stray Enough from The HK Thriller...
'Piranha 3d': Sex and Horror
10 Years Later There is nothing particularly funny or poetic about the carnage in Piranha 3D. Even “disturbing” seems a bit too strong a word to describe the excessive, but still somehow palatably cartoonish bloodshed on display – can a film about pre-historic. bloodthirsty piranha really be disturbing? Tonally, this film is nearly impossible to pin down, and that is part of its appeal.
Catching Up Neil Marshall's' Centurion'
10 Years Later Genre director Neil Marshall is not what you might call an “ideas man.” His best film, the terrifying spelunking creature feature The Descent, thrived not on any elaborate concepts or carefully developed characters, but instead on the shrewd, cunning use of the film’s incredibly claustrophobic spaces to generate naturalistic dread.
The Image and Sound of Darren Aronofsky's 'Requiem for a Dream'
The apotheosis of ADD. MTV-era filmmaking, Requiem for a Dream is designed to divide. Its mathematically precise editing and histrionic message-driving make it perhaps the shrillest anti-drug movie of any age, yet its hyperbolic sense of terror and frenetic rhythms manage not to obscure its less obvious gifts. It announces its creator as a force to be reckoned with, even if some will rightly take issue with the film’s combustible content.
Christopher Nolan's 'Inception' and a New Definition of “Critic-Proof"
Revisiting Inception, Ten Years Later For a filmmaker often accused of possessing a cold, clinical, fussy approach, Christopher Nolan seems to produce an awful lot of movies propelled by obsession. His 2000 breakthrough, Memento, used its backwards structure to underline the jumbled frustration of its protagonist – in the same way, Nolan has consistently employed unorthodox delivery methods for his particular brand of pathos.
Surveying Acclaimed Dutch Filmmaker, Paul Verhoeven
Paul Verhoeven Retrospective Common wisdom dictates that cynicism and sentimentality are carefully linked, if not outright synonymous. In filmic terms, the most comfortable formulation of that argument is to align, for instance, romantic comedies with socially-acceptable (and, often, utterly noxious) notions of gender politics.
‘Angst’- An Important Film for its Esteemed Place in the Slasher Lineage
Gerald Kargl’s Angst is a Demented Masterpiece Roger Ebert famously observed that, “Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.” If that’s the case, Angst might be the deepest that cinema has ever plunged into the mind of a psychopath. Dispassionate, clinical, and obsessed with the minutiae of tortured fantasies, director Gerald Kargl ensnares his audience in a monstrous trap.
‘Cocksucker Blues’ the Notorious Documentary about the Rolling Stones
The unreleased documentary directed by Robert Frank chronicling The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972 in support of their album Exile on Main St. **** Rock critics, like film critics, abhor a narrative vacuum. Blues begets R&B begets rock n’ roll, which begets the British Invasion, and from there, it’s a multi-pronged evolution into hard rock, glam, punk, and onwards into a million sundry subgenres. Each generation rebels against their forbears and creates a new antithesis.
What Made Joe Cornish’s 'Attack the Block' so Fresh and Lively
2011 was not a banner year for the Hollywood blockbuster. Bloated sequels and limp comic-book adaptations had made a trip to the multiplex a dismal choose-your-own-adventure of mediocrity. What made Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block so fresh and lively in comparison to its American counterparts?
Revisiting the Banksy Documentary, 'Exit Through the Gift Shop'
“Banksy’s film has a very different endgame in mind than the one its first half suggests.” “Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash – the triumphs, the frauds.
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