Mental Health and the Covid-19 Pandemic Many aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the public health response to it will undoubtedly contribute to widespread emotional distress and increased risk fo...
Bianca Forrester, Georgia Fisher, Louise A. Ellis
et al.
Abstract Introduction The COVID‐19 pandemic challenged primary care to rapidly innovate. In response, the Western Victorian Primary Health Network (WVPHN) developed a COVID‐19 online Community of Practice comprising general practitioners (GPs), practice nurses, pharmacists, aged care and disability workers, health administrators, public health experts, medical specialists, and consumers. This Experience Report describes our progress toward a durable organizational learning health system (LHS) model through the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis and beyond. Methods In March 2020, we commenced weekly Community of Practice sessions, adopting the Project ECHO (Extension of Community Health Outcomes) model for a virtual information‐sharing network that aims to bring clinicians together to develop collective knowledge. Our work was underpinned by the LHS framework proposed by Menear et al. and aligned with Kotter's eight‐step change model. Results There were four key phases in the development of our LHS: build a Community of Practice; facilitate iterative change; develop supportive organizational infrastructure; and establish a sustainable, ongoing LHS. In total, the Community of Practice supported 83 unique COVID‐19 ECHO sessions involving 3192 h of clinician participation and over 10 000 h of organizational commitment. Six larger sessions were run between March 2020 and September 2022 with 3192 attendances. New models of care and care pathways were codeveloped in sessions and network leaders contributed to the development of guidelines and policy advice. These innovations enabled WVPHN to lead the Australian state of Victoria on rates of COVID vaccine uptake and GP antiviral prescribing. Conclusion The COVID‐19 pandemic created a sense of urgency that helped stimulate a regional primary care‐based Community of Practice and LHS. A robust theoretical framework and established change management theory supported the purposeful implementation of our LHS. Reflection on challenges and successes may provide insights to support the implementation of LHS models in other primary care settings.
BACKGROUND:
Verbal abuse is a pervasive yet underrecognized form of emotional maltreatment among adolescents, with significant psychological consequences. Despite its prevalence, a validated instrument for measuring verbal abuse among Indonesian adolescents remains unavailable. This study aimed to develop and validate the Indonesian Verbal Abuse Questionnaire (I-VAQ) using Rasch analysis to ensure its psychometric robustness and cultural relevance.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
A total of 1,197 junior high school students from three schools in Palangka Raya, Indonesia, participated in this study. The I-VAQ was adapted from the original Verbal Abuse Questionnaire (VAQ) and underwent a rigorous translation, cultural adaptation, and validation process. Data were analyzed using Winsteps Version 5.1.5.1 (Linacre, J.M., Winsteps® Rasch measurement computer program, Winsteps.com, Beaverton, Oregon, USA), employing Rasch modeling to assess item fit, unidimensionality, person-item reliability, and separation indices.
RESULTS:
The 14-item I-VAQ demonstrated strong construct validity and internal reliability (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.92). Item and person reliability were 0.99 and 0.84, respectively, indicating high measurement precision. The Wright map confirmed the instrument’s ability to differentiate individuals based on their exposure to verbal abuse. The I-VAQ effectively captured multiple dimensions of verbal abuse, including teasing, insults, threats, and diminished self-esteem, making it an effective screening tool for Indonesian adolescents.
CONCLUSION:
The I-VAQ is a psychometrically sound and culturally appropriate instrument for measuring verbal abuse among adolescents. This validated tool provides valuable insights for educators, psychologists, and policymakers, supporting the development of targeted intervention programs and mental health policies. Future research should explore the I-VAQ’s applicability across different socioeconomic and cultural settings in Indonesia and beyond.
Special aspects of education, Public aspects of medicine
T K Rostovskaya, E A Knyazkova, N V Miroshnichenko
The article presents analysis of National Federal and Regional legislation regarding social support of parents bringing up disabled children as exemplified by Moscow and Moscow Oblast. It is concluded that despite active legislative activity of the state concerning amelioration of quality of life and income levels of families bringing up disabled children. Consequently, there is certain positive dynamics trend. However, caring from the state and society is not yet at higher level due to both negative nature of various economic processes and tense foreign-policy situation that does not allow state and regional authorities to fully focus on acceptable legislative support of families bringing up disabled child.
Melissa Martins Souto, Micael Doria de Andrade, Rosangela Andrade Aukar de Camargo
Nascimento pré-termo é aquele que ocorre com menos de 37 semanas de idade gestacional. Considera-se com baixo peso o bebê que nasce com menos de 2.500 gramas. Ambos são fatores de risco para o desenvolvimento de afecções perinatais. Embora existam estigmas envolvidos no nascimento de um bebê com essas condições – tais como falta de informações dos familiares –, o Método Canguru, como parte da educação em saúde, pode contribuir para mitigar mortalidades nesses recém-nascidos. Tais estratégias educativas podem ser realizadas pela utilização de tecnologias educacionais, como infográficos animados norteados por roteiros. O presente estudo objetivou a concepção e a execução da elaboração do conteúdo (roteiro) para o desenvolvimento de infográfico animado sobre o Método Canguru. Trata-se de um estudo metodológico. No roteiro, após análise documental e de similares (vídeos semelhantes na rede), delimitou-se o tema Método Canguru, com descrição de suas etapas e vantagens, focado em famílias de recém-nascidos pré-termo e/ou com baixo peso, hospitalizados em Unidades de Terapia Intensiva. Articulou-se a criação da identidade dos personagens com a locução e auxílios visuais, possibilitando explorar diferentes formas de aprendizagens e melhorar a capacidade de recepção das informações. Totalizaram-se 22 cenas que abordam a apresentação das personagens e dos conceitos, a descrição de etapas, as atribuições do enfermeiro neste contexto, as vantagens da realização da posição canguru e a importância do acompanhamento do bebê e da família pela Atenção Primária à Saúde. Apesar da complexidade que envolve a elaboração de recursos educacionais, foi possível construir um roteiro para o desenvolvimento do infográfico animado sobre o Método Canguru com informações que buscam atender às necessidades do público-alvo. Espera-se que este estudo possa fomentar e ampliar a prática da utilização de recursos educacionais para o cuidado qualificado do recém-nascido pré-termo e promover a reflexão de profissionais da saúde-gestores-comunidade sobre o tema.
Miscellaneous systems and treatments, Public aspects of medicine
The ongoing reform of border agencies in Ukraine, which is one of the important law enforcement components in the field of ensuring the protection of national interests from external threats manifested in the border area, predetermines the need for further study and analysis of the public management content in the field of ensuring the state border functioning. The paper discusses the directions in the border scope threats appearance, which depend on a variety of conditions and factors, especially during wartime. Based on this, the paper emphasizes that ensuring national security as an object of management activity is carried out in the process of functioning of a specially created mechanism of state-legal influence, aimed at achieving the set goals and practical solution of important state tasks through the implementation of a set of relevant interrelated measures of a political, military, legal, organizational, logistical nature.
Nicolae BACINSCHI, Lorina VUDU, Stela BACINSCHI-GHEORGHITA
et al.
Туберкулез — инфекционное заболевание, поражающее практически все органы, в том числе и щитовидную железу. Одновременно изменение функции щитовидной железы может повысить восприимчивость к инфекции Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Лечение туберкулеза, особенно препаратами второго ряда, может обуславливать раз- витие гипотиреоза. Установлено, что рифампицин, этионамид, протионамид и парааминосалициловая кислота являются одними из наиболее распространенных противотуберкулезных препаратов, ответственных за развитие гипотиреоза. Эти препараты могут вызывать дисфункцию щитовидной железы путем увеличения метаболизма и клиренса тиреоидных гормонов за счет индукции ферментов цитохрома Р-450, нарушения регуляции поглощения йода и синтеза тиреоидных гормонов, изменения действия гормонов на уровне рецепторов и передачи внутрикле- точного сигнала. Лечение этими препаратами требует контроля функции щитовидной железы во время лечения, особенно в первые 3 месяцa, а также в пост-лечебный период. Развитие клинического и/или субклинического гипотиреоза потребует применения адекватных доз левотироксина на фоне противотуберкулезного лечения.
Abstract The lockdown due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a major healthcare challenge, is a worldwide threat to public health, social stability, and economic development. The pandemic has affected all aspects of society, dramatically changing our day-to-day lives and habits. It has also changed clinical practice, including practices of clinical laboratories. After one year, it is time to rethink what has happened, and is still happening, in order to learn lessons for the future of laboratory medicine and its professionals. While examining this issue, I was inspired by Italo Calvino’s famous work, “Six memos for the next millennium”.But I rearranged the Author’s six memos into “Visibility, quickness, exactitude, multiplicity, lightness, consistency”.
The rise of non-communicable diseases, many of which share common risk factors of smoking, alcohol, poor diet, and physical inactivity, has resulted in calls to develop and expand lifestyle medicine, giving ‘hope to those suffering from chronic illness’ (https://bslm.org.uk/). It has been argued that lifestyle medicine should be recognised as a new medical specialty,1 with primary care leading. There are numerous drivers for lifestyle medicine (Box 1). Our analysis does not aim to argue against the importance of these drivers as many of them are well informed. Instead we seek to balance existing discussions with aspects that, in our opinion, have been less well considered. With this in mind, we focus on the unintended consequences of uncritical endorsement and application of lifestyle medicine including the infiltration of pseudoscience, profiteering, and the potential for widening health inequalities by a continued focus on the ‘individual’. We stress the need for greater attention to public health and community-level interventions and a more critical approach to current practice.
Galileo Galilei’s quote ‘ measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so ’ has particular relevance to health behaviours, such as physical activity (PA), sitting and sleep, whose measurement during free living is notoriously difficult. To date, much of what we know about how these behaviours affect our health is based on self-report by questionnaires which have limited validity, are prone to bias and inquire about selective aspects of these behaviours. Although self-reported evidence has made great contributions to shaping public health and exercise medicine policy and guidelines until now,1 the ongoing advancements of accelerometry-based measurement and evidence synthesis methods are set to change the landscape. The aim of this editorial is to outline new directions in PA and sleep-related epidemiology that open new horizons for guideline development and improvement; and to describe a new research collaboration platform: the Prospective Physical Activity, Sitting, and Sleep consortium (ProPASS) (figure 1). Figure 1 Measurement technology used in epidemiology has made measurable what was not so until recently. Several population-based studies use accelerometers that are worn by participants for 24 hours a day for a whole week, offering unprecedented insights into the health attributes of PA, sitting and sleep. One of the most exciting aspects of accelerometers is that they show great promise for capturing nearly complete accounts of movement behaviour, including posture and activity type detection.2 However, advanced measurement methods and optimal evidence synthesis are not synonymous. Individual …
Abstract With the development of communication and information technologies, the telemedicine system has infiltrated many aspects of medicine field. It allows doctors to simultaneously diagnose patients in different areas, which provides great convenience to people. However, the increasing medical data brings serious challenges to people, such as data storage and processing. To reduce data management costs and enjoy convenient services, more and more individuals and medical institutions prefer to store data in the cloud. Recently, many public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) schemes have been designed to address the security and privacy of the outsourced data. However, most of the existing schemes support only single-keyword search, and cannot suitable for multi-user environment. To resolve these issues, we construct a certificateless public key encryption with conjunctive keyword search scheme for multi-user system (mCLPECK), in which the same data only needs to be encrypted once and can be searched by multi-receiver. At the same time, the mCLPECK scheme supports multi-keyword search. Furthermore, we show the proposed scheme can resist chosen keyword attacks, and has lower storage and computation overhead compared to other related schemes.
Emojis are frequently used picture characters known as possible surrogates for non-verbal aspects of behavior. Considering the ability of emojis to enhance and facilitate communication, there has been a growing interest in studying their effects in scientific and health-related topics over the past few years. Infection prevention and control (IPC) is a field of medicine that is directly associated with specific behaviors. These include hand hygiene, which is the cornerstone of the prevention of healthcare-associated infections, and essential in stemming the spread of antimicrobial resistance. This paper aims to provide an overview of how emojis have been used in the medical and public health literature and proposes their possible use in IPC and hand hygiene to put forth a vision for the future research.
Alberto Molina-Pérez, D. Rodríguez-Arias, J. Delgado-Rodríguez
et al.
a Ethical Legal and Psychosocial Aspects of organ Transplantation (ELPAT), a section of the European Society for Organ Transplantation (ESOT) b FiloLab-UGR Scientific Unit of Excellence, Department of Philosophy I, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Granada, Campus Cartuja s/n, 18011 Granada, Spain c University Hospital of Canary Island, University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain d Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King's College London, United Kingdom e Department of Philosophy, Faculty of History and Philosophy, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Cluj, Romania f Institute for Health Research, University of Bedfordshire, Luton, England, United Kingdom g Dutch Transplant Foundation, Department of Public Information & Education, Leiden, the Netherlands h Dutch Transplant Foundation, Department of Policy, Leiden, the Netherlands i Department of Medical Ethics and History of Medicine, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
Abstract This article focuses on policy and law concerning violence against women as a public health issue. In Sweden, violence against women is recently recognized as a public health problem; we label this shift “The public health turn on violence against women”. The new framing implies increased demands on the Swedish healthcare sector and its’ ability to recognise violence and deal with it in terms of prevention and interventions. The aim was to describe and discuss the main content and characteristics of Swedish healthcare law, and national public health and gender-equality policies representing the public health turn on violence against women. Through discursive policy analysis, we investigate how the violence is described, what is regarded to be the problem and what solutions and interventions that are suggested in order to solve the problem. Healthcare law articulates violence against women as an ordinary healthcare issue and the problem as shortcomings to provide good healthcare for victims, but without specifying what the problem or the legal obligation for the sector is. The public health problem is rather loosely defined, and suggested interventions are scarce and somewhat vague. The main recommendations for healthcare are to routinely ask patients about violence exposure. Violence against women is usually labelled “violence within close relationships” in the policies, and it is not necessarily described as a gender equality problem. While violence against women in some policy documents is clearly framed as a public health problem, such a framing is absent in others, or is transformed into a gender-neutral problem of violence within close relationships. It is not clearly articulated what the framing should lead to in terms of the healthcare sector’s obligations, interventions and health promotions, apart from an ambivalent discourse on daring to ask about violence.
Lorina Badger-Emeka, Yasmeen Al-Mulhim, Fatimah Al-Muyidi
et al.
Background: The 21st century has seen a wide range of diseases resulting from zoonotic infections, of which bacterial infections have led to outbreaks of food-borne diseases. Aim: The study looks at bacterial pathogen carriage by farm rats and their antimicrobial susceptibility, with the view of providing insights for antimicrobial surveillance. Method: Farm rats of Rattus rattus species where randomly collected alive from farms in Al-Ahsa using food baits. They were anaesthetize with urethane within 4 h of collection and were unconscious for the collection of samples. Basic bacteriological culturing methods were used for culturing of bacterial isolates on selective media while the Vitek 2 compact automated system (BioMerieux, Marcy L’Etoile, France) was used for bacteria identification and antimicrobial susceptibility test. Obtained data were analysed using chi-square and paired t -test with significant difference between sensitive and resistance to antimicrobial susceptibility taken at P < .05. Results: Isolated Gramme-negative pathogenic bacteria included strains of Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas oryzihabitans , strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa , and Salmonella. For the Gramme-positive bacteria, 4 strains of Staphylococcus aureus were encountered. Other Gramme-positive bacteria were coagulase-negative Staphylococcal species (CoNS) as well as Staphylococcus lugdunensis . There was a 100% resistance to the penicillins and a high resistance to imipenem (71%) by the Staphylococcal isolates. Resistance was also high against the β-lactams by the Gramme-positive bacteria isolates. For the Gramme-negative bacteria, there was a higher than 50% resistance by the isolates against the following antibiotics: ampicillin (78%), amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (67%), cefotaxime (77%), ceftazidime (67%), cefepime (78%), norfloxacin (67%), nitrofurantoin (67%), and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole (78%). Conclusion: The results showed high antimicrobial resistance that will need monitoring for control of spread from farm rats to humans.
Environmental sciences, Public aspects of medicine