Crisis Management for Biobanks.

All organizations are subject to risk and uncertainty. Adverse events may disrupt normal organizational activity and may even cause complete failure of business operations. Biorepositories are also at risk and there have been instances where multiple samples or entire collections have been destroyed. Biobank guidelines accordingly recommend the establishment of contingency plans to reduce risk to an acceptable level. In this review article, we will use general theory on risk management and illustrate how such principles can be used to establish a practical crisis management plan for any biobank organization.

Learning by Erring: fire!

Biorepositories may be affected by a number of emergencies ranging from bad publicity to natural disasters, and biorepositories should have plans for handling such situations. The emergency management process includes all phases from mitigation to recovery. Fire is one disaster that may cause extensive damage to both physical structures and humans. In this article, we analyze events related to a fire in a storage facility for mechanical freezers. The analysis covers both the pre-crisis stage, the fire itself, and the post-crisis stage. Even the best intended planning cannot stop a crisis from happening. However, an open-minded analysis of the crisis with focus on learning and quality improvement can improve an organization's ability to handle the next emergency situation.

Evaluating the usability of a virtual reality-based Android application in managing the pain experience of wheelchair users.

Pain constitutes an important medical concern that can have severe implications to a wheelchair user's quality of life. Results from studies indicate that pain is a common problem in this group of individuals, having a reported frequency of always (12%) and everyday (33%). This incidence signifies the need for more applicable and effective pain management clinical tools. As a result, in this paper we present an Android application (PainDroid) that has been enhanced with Virtual Reality (VR) technology for the purpose of improving the management of pain. Our evaluation with a group of wheelchair users revealed that PainDroid demonstrated high usability among this population, and is foreseen that it can make an important contribution in research on the assessment and management of pain.