Dental Students’ Experience, Impact, and Response to Patient Aggression in Saudi Arabia: A Nationwide Study

Patient aggression and violence comprise a wide range of behaviors and actions that may include verbal aggression and physical aggression. The aim of this study is to report dental students’ experience with, impact from, and response to patient aggression in Saudi Arabia. A cross-sectional analytical study was conducted among dental students from various health universities representing each region of Saudi Arabia. Data were collected using a self-administered, structured and validated questionnaire. A total of 375 participants responded to the questionnaire and 121 (32.3%) study participants reported experiencing patient aggression. Out of those, 91 (75.21%) experienced patients displaying anger or raising their voice toward them, 37 (30.58%) reported being insulted by a patient, 22 (18.18%) reported being threatened, 12 (6.2%) had experienced sexual harassment, and 65 (50.41%) had experienced verbal harassment. Furthermore, 91 (75.21%) participants reported being abandoned by patients because they were students. A total of 55 (45.45%) participants stated that aggressive patient behavior had an impact on their clinical performance, and 44 (36.36%) considered themselves stressed out. A total of 24 (19.83%) participants took time off due to incidents and 22 (18.18%) thought about quitting dentistry. Prevalence of patient aggression was significant among dental students in Saudi Arabia. These episodes of patient aggression negatively impacted students’ academic performance and wellbeing, necessitating urgent attention. Educational institutions should conduct periodic workshops for students in order to address these issues. Policymakers should develop better policies in order to reduce violence and aggression against health care providers

Management of various socio-economic factors under the United Nations sustainable development agenda

The objective of the study is to assess the United Nation's healthcare sustainable development agenda by controlling the number of socio-economic and environmental factors, including carbon emissions, particulate emission damages, natural resource depletion, communicable diseases, and per capita income in a panel of 40 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. The study covered a time period of 2000–2016 for robust inferences. The pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimator is used to controlled possible heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. The results confirmed the inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita income and natural resource depletion, while the U-shaped relationship is found between communicable disease and per capita income. The long-run results confirmed that communicable diseases and particulate emission damages both negatively linked with the country's per capita income, while there is a direct association between per capita income and carbon emissions across countries. The results further reveal that particulate emission damages and high mass carbon emissions largely associated with the communicable diseases that need sustainable healthcare policies to delimit carbon-particulate emissions growth in a panel of SSA countries. The undeniable health losses and low adaptability of environmental sustainability reforms lag behind the SSA countries from the assigned target of United Nation's sustainable development goals, which need national and international collaborations to designed better healthcare policies to prevent from infectious diseases that lead towards sustained global healthcare infrastructure

Socio-economic and environmental factors influenced the united nations healthcare sustainable agenda: evidence from a panel of selected Asian and African countries

The objective of the study is to evaluate socio-economic and environmental factors that influenced the United Nations healthcare sustainable agenda in a panel of 21 Asian and African countries. The results show that changes in price level (0.0062, p < 0.000), life risks of maternal death (4.579, p < 0.000), and under-5 mortality rate (0.374, p < 0.000) substantially increases out-of-pocket health expenditures, while CO 2 emissions (5.681, p < 0.003), prevalence of undernourishment (15.184, p < 0.000), PM 2.5 particulate emission (1557, p < 0.000), unemployment, and private health expenditures (30.729, p < 0000) are associated with high mortality rate across countries. Healthcare reforms affected by low healthcare spending, unsustainable environment, and ease of environmental regulations that ultimately increases mortality rate across countries. The Granger causality estimates confirmed the different causal mechanisms between socio-economic and environmental factors, which is directly linked with the country’s healthcare agenda, i.e., the causality running from (i) CO 2 emissions to life risks of maternal death and under-5 mortality rate, (ii) from depth of food deficit to incidence of tuberculosis and unemployment, (iii) from PM 2.5 emissions to infant mortality rate, (iv) from foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows to PM 2.5 emissions, (v) from trade openness to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and (vi) from mortality indicators to per capita income, while there is a feedback relationship between health expenditures and per capita income across countries. The variance decomposition analysis shows that (i) under-5 mortality rate will increase out-of-pocket health expenditures, (ii) unemployment rate will increase mortality indicators, and (iii) health expenditures will increase economic well-being in a panel of selected countries, for the next 10 years