In order to assess attitudinal barriers that could impede the proper implementation of criterion-based audit, we conducted a survey of health care providers in the three districts (Salima, Kasungu, Lilongwe) of Malawi.
Our conditional recommendation reflects the lack of direct high quality evidence of the effectiveness, costs and benefits of specific criteria for referral, and of whether implementation of standard referral criteria can improve awareness among health professionals of the need to assess prenatal alcohol exposure and consider FASD as a potential diagnosis.
While many studies have reported the validity of the Consensus criteria, implementation of the criteria in daily work has raised many practical questions.
Unlike reported studies where the superiority of this criterion was only demonstrated through off-line simulation, both the theoretical modeling and practical implementation of this criterion is presented here using the one machine infinite bus system.
Under others loading cases, the numerical implementation of the criterion is very simple and can be easily integrated in a damage model or in a finite element code.
The implementation of the criterion in finite element programs, however, presents some numerical difficulties due to the gradient discontinuities which occur at both the edges and the tip of the hexagonal yield surface pyramid.
