ECHO Facts for Users 4/98

ECHO = European Community Humanitarian Offic

Purposeful Nurse Hourly Rounding: Plan to Decrease Patient Falls During a Pandemic

Problem: Patient falls remain a critical and persistent safety problem in healthcare today. The prolonged impact of the COVID-19 pandemic raises leadership concerns regarding the safe care of high-risk COVID patients and mitigating the increased stress and potential risks of infection to clinical staff. Context: This Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) scholarly project details implementation of an evidence-based purposeful nurse hourly rounding (PNHR) pilot project designed to decrease the incidence of patient falls on a designated COVID-19 unit. Measure: A modified PNHR rounding tool was implemented to guide focused elements for key nurse/patient interactions. Interventions: PNHR strategies were further augmented by innovative quantum caring healthcare leadership (QCHL) principles intended to support team engagement and enhance a culture of safety. The transformational leadership approach and theoretical foundations of QCHL were viewed as pivotal enculturation tactics and were aligned to sustainability goals. The project aim was to decrease the incidence of adult patient falls by 10% over baseline data during a four-month pilot on a designated COVID-19 nursing unit. Results: The post-implementation outcomes highlight a 58% reduction in patient falls from 4.29 to 1.79 falls per 1,000 patient days. Conclusions: Quantitative and qualitative findings support a proactive leadership approach to patient safety and staff engagement that utilizes an evidence-based, structured, timely, and sustainable nurse hourly rounding strategy. Dissemination: Low costs, improved clinical outcomes, and positive impact on patient safety and employee engagement increase the potential for spread of this scholarly project to non-COVID care units across the organization and to other systems

Review of the current status of research on smart homes and other domestic assistive technologies in support of the TAHI trials

The study provides an overview of developments in smart home technology and its use in the assistive technology sector. It includes an extensive literature review and detailed descriptions of current smart home installations in the UK and Europe. The report highlights the complexity of providing products and services in this area, and the relative immaturity of smart home technology in this sector. Many of the available products have emerged from office automation technologies developed for use in building control applications or from small niche markets in the assistive sector. Smart home developments have also concentrated on home control applications, but larger potential markets are also now being identified in other areas. Many of the trials described use technology to improve the safety and security of older and disabled people, concentrating more on the monitoring rather than home environment control. The report also demonstrates the practical difficulties faced in developing services in this sector. For many organisations these have been exploratory first steps in the use of technology to support care, and this lack of experience is reflected in common difficulties in specification and installation of equipment especially when retrofitting installations into buildings. Many developments have suffered from the lack of relevant experience of electrical and other contractors, so that it has proved difficult for organisations to identify both suppliers of equipment and people with the skills to install the technology. In the majority of cases there has been no formal evaluation of the developments, and it is therefore difficult to obtain evidence of the costs and benefits of using such technology to provide care and support independent living

Putting science at the heart of European policymaking: An exhibition of the European Commission’s science and knowledge service Joint Research Centre (JRC)

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) invites you on a journey to discover why and how it puts science at the heart of European policymaking. After taking in the main milestones of the JRC’s evolution from early years to maturity, immerse yourself in information. The JRC addresses the difficulty of making sense of collective scientific knowledge for policymaking and is at the forefront of the Open Data movement. The modern JRC today makes sense of knowledge, cuts through information overload, brings clarity to complexity and has become a one-stop shop for policy Directorate-Generals (DGs) in evidence-based policy making. Selected highlights offer a glimpse of the JRC’s recent contributions to a selection of 5 priority policy topics, while the ‘globe’ illustrates stories on some of the topics. A virtual visit to one of our labs is also offered, as well as a glimpse of some of the JRC science and knowledge services that are fit for the 21st centuryJRC.H.2-Knowledge for Thematic Coordinatio

Multidimensional Epidemiological Transformations: Addressing Location-Privacy in Public Health Practice

The following publications arose directly from this research: AbdelMalik P, Boulos MNK: Multidimensional point transform for public health practice. Methods of Information in Medicine. (In press; ePub ahead of print available online) http://dx.doi.org/10.3414/ME11-01-0001 AbdelMalik P, Boulos MNK, Jones R: The Perceived Impact of Location Privacy: A web-based survey of public health perspectives and requirements in the UK and Canada. BMC Public Health, 8:156 (2008) http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/8/156 The following papers were co-authored in relation to this research: Khaled El Emam, Ann Brown, Philip AbdelMalik, Angelica Neisa, Mark Walker, Jim Bottomley, Tyson Roffey: A method for managing re-identification risk from small geographic areas in Canada. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 10:18 (2010) http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/10/18 Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Andrew J. Curtis, Philip AbdelMalik: Musings on privacy issues in health research involving disaggregate geographic data about individuals. International Journal of Health Geographics. 8:46 (2009) http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/pdf/1476-072X-8-46.pdf Khaled El Emam, Ann Brown, Philip AbdelMalik: Evaluating predictors of geographic area population size cut-offs to manage re-identification risk. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16:256-266 (2009)The ability to control one’s own personally identifiable information is a worthwhile human right that is becoming increasingly vulnerable. However just as significant, if not more so, is the right to health. With increasing globalisation and threats of natural disasters and acts of terrorism, this right is also becoming increasingly vulnerable. Public health practice – which is charged with the protection, promotion and mitigation of the health of society and its individuals – has been at odds with the right to privacy. This is particularly significant when location privacy is under consideration. Spatial information is an important aspect of public health, yet the increasing availability of spatial imagery and location-sensitive applications and technologies has brought location-privacy to the forefront, threatening to negatively impact the practice of public health by inhibiting or severely limiting data-sharing. This study begins by reviewing the current relevant legislation as it pertains to public health and investigates the public health community’s perceptions on location privacy barriers to the practice. Bureaucracy and legislation are identified by survey participants as the two greatest privacy-related barriers to public health. In response to this clash, a number of solutions and workarounds are proposed in the literature to compensate for location privacy. However, as their weaknesses are outlined, a novel approach - the multidimensional point transform - that works synergistically on multiple dimensions, including location, to anonymise data is developed and demonstrated. Finally, a framework for guiding decisions on data-sharing and identifying requirements is proposed and a sample implementation is demonstrated through a fictitious scenario. For each aspect of the study, a tool prototype and/or design for implementation is proposed and explained, and the need for further development of these is highlighted. In summary, this study provides a multi-disciplinary and multidimensional solution to the clash between privacy and data-sharing in public health practice.Partially sponsored by the Public Health Agency of Canad

Human-machine communication for educational systems design

This book contains the papers presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) on the Basics of man-machine communication for the design of educational systems, held August 16-26, 1993, in Eindhoven, The Netherland