Correlation between quality of healthcare and safety culture in Saudi Arabia organizations

Background: The current study aimed to examine the association between hospital nurses’ attitudes about the safety culture and patients’ views about the quality of healthcare services delivered to them during their hospitalization. Methods: This study was cross section study as well as adopted the correlational design. The study used the hospital survey on patient safety culture to assess nurses’ perceptions about the safety culture, and the consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems survey to assess patients’ experience of care. The current study was conducted in a tertiary healthcare organization in Riyadh city in Saudi Arabia. Results: The response rates for nurses and patients were 79% and 80%, respectively. In nurses’ sample, the majority 92.9% was female and 90.6% was non-Saudi; while 43.5% of patients were male and the majority was Saudi 97.1%. More than half of the nurses 57.2% were married and 35.4% identified themselves as single. On the other hand, the majority of patients 81.5% were married and 48.7% of patients had a diploma or high school or less. Conclusions: The results of canonical correlation analysis showed positive and strong correlations between nurses’ perceptions of safety culture (facilitators and threats to patient safety) and patients’ perceptions of quality of healthcare (interpersonal care communication and technical quality of care). The canonical variates for both root pairs (canonical correlation coefficients = 0.89 and 0.81). This finding clearly proves that in workplaces where staffs have more positive perceptions of patient safety culture, patients have more positive experiences of care

Moral dilemma: is there a moral difference between killing and letting die in healthcare?

The purpose of this paper was to prove that there was no moral difference between killing and letting one die in healthcare. It was important to be aware of the moral equivalence of killing and letting die. The Abrahamic religions; Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all argue for the sanctity of life. The world’s major religions Islam, Christianity and Judaism all have doctrines concerning the sanctity of life and they support the main arguments of this paper that there is no moral difference between killing and letting die. In relation to patient autonomy and the patient's right to die, it is very important to highlight that doctors have a moral and legal responsibility to save lives. In addition, we discussed the distinction centres on the true definition of patient autonomy and who was responsible for defining the quality of life. The intention and foresight were critical points that supported the thesis statement that killing and letting one die were one in the same. The acts and omissions doctrine as described in this paper showed that there were no moral difference to kill a person or to let him die. Finally, we extensively discussed the various viewpoints regarding whether or not there was a moral difference between killing and letting die. There is no doubt that the debate over killing and letting die will continue for years to come. It is critical that the issue be addressed at this particular time in history with the advent of modern medical technology

The Impact of Pre-Task Planning on the Oral Production of Saudi EFL Learners

The motive of this paper was to examine the impact of pre-task planning on Saudi EFL learners and to find out how planning could influence their accuracy and fluency The study also intended to investigate the different outcomes from guided and unguided planning For this purpose thirty-six Saudi EFL learners took part in this study They have participated in Picture-Cued Storytelling Task PCST The findings of the study revealed that guided planning made a minor influence on Saudi EFL learners accuracy Fluency on the other hand was not affected positively by neither guided nor unguided plannin

The Impact of Pre-Task Planning on the Oral Production of Saudi EFL Learners

The motive of this paper was to examine the impact of pre-task planning on Saudi EFL learners and to find out how planning could influence their accuracy and fluency The study also intended to investigate the different outcomes from guided and unguided planning For this purpose thirty-six Saudi EFL learners took part in this study They have participated in Picture-Cued Storytelling Task PCST The findings of the study revealed that guided planning made a minor influence on Saudi EFL learners accuracy Fluency on the other hand was not affected positively by neither guided nor unguided plannin

Developing dialogic interactions : teacher talk in Saudi Arabian secondary schools' English language classes

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.This study investigated the nature of teacher talk in Saudi EFL secondary school classrooms. The study explores how teacher talk assisted or hindered the development of the students’ dialogic skills. By analysing aspects of teacher talk (TT), in particular the role of the F-move in the IRF (initiation, response, feedback) interaction sequence, it investigated how TT was affected by certain cultural, educational and teaching practices in learning of the target language. This is a qualitative research, in which data were collected from naturalistic settings through classroom observations, audio recordings of classroom interactions and interviews with 18 EFL teachers teaching in six different secondary schools within Hafr Al-Batin province (a region in Saudi Arabia). The findings showed that the F-moves of repetition and evaluation were commonly used in Saudi EFL classrooms, whereas the F-moves of elaboration and reformulation were less dominant in teacher talk. The former are less likely to promote discussion and dialogue; they restrict learners’ engagement with meaning-making in classroom talk because both F-moves function as indirect corrective feedback which impedes students’ output and uptake and encourage low order thinking. Students were not provided with appropriate learning opportunities but were merely exposed to teachers’ subject matter knowledge, specifically, grammatical knowledge. The brief nature of the exchanges was insufficient to stimulate learning. The study also found that some teachers failed to utilise macro-teaching strategies that encourage productive teacher talk, especially in the areas of negotiated interaction facilitation, promoting learner autonomy, raising cultural awareness and maximising learning opportunities. Instead, the teacher’s role did not promote dialogic talk but merely reinforced teacher authority. Some teachers spent considerable time on managing students’ behaviour; as a result, they paid little attention to building positive relationships in the classroom. The findings also showed that there is a strong interconnection between pedagogy and culture. In other words, dialogic teaching is not independent of the sociocultural setting of the classroom, institution and community in Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, classroom talk cannot be transformed into dialogic talk without cultural modifications in EFL teaching, such as providing freedom of speech and space for dialogue and debate. It is therefore. recommended that professional development programs include material related to dialogic talk/teaching in order to increase teachers’ awareness and understanding of the role of TT in managing classroom talk and to enhance their ability to help students achieve their full potential in language learning and development

Antiplatelet Intake Medications for Patients Undergoing Dental Surgery

This study aims at exploring the patients taking antiplatelet medications who are undergoing dental surgery, physicians and dentists must weigh the bleeding risks in continuing antiplatelet medications versus the thrombotic risks in interrupting antiplatelet medications. Bleeding complications requiring more than local measures for hemostasis are rare after dental surgery in patients taking antiplatelet medications. Conversely, the risk for thrombotic complications after interruption of antiplatelet therapy for dental procedures apparently is significant, although small. When a clinician is faced with a decision to continue or interrupt antiplatelet therapy for a dental surgical patient, the decision comes down to “bleed or die.” That is, there is a remote chance that continuing antiplatelet therapy will result in a (nonfatal) bleeding problem requiring more than local measures for hemostasis versus a small but significant chance that interrupting antiplatelet therapy will result in a (possibly fatal) thromboembolic complication. The decision is simple: It is time to stop interrupting antiplatelet therapy for dental surgery

Energy Efficient QoS Routing Protocol for Handling Hidden Nodes in in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are comprised of sensor nodes that form the momentary network and do not rely on the support of any orthodox centralized infrastructure or administration. Such a given situation mandates every sensor node to get the support of other sensor nodes to advance the packets to the desired destination node, and specifically to the sink node. In this poster, we introduce energy efficient quality of service protocol for WMSNs, in this work the focus will be to study hidden node problems in WMSNs (Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks) and how it can affect the network performance

An Optimized Hidden Node Detection Paradigm for Improving the Coverage and Network Efficiency in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Successful transmission of online multimedia streams in wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) is a big challenge due to their limited bandwidth and power resources. The existing WSN protocols are not completely appropriate for multimedia communication. The effectiveness of WMSNs varies, and it depends on the correct location of its sensor nodes in the field. Thus, maximizing the multimedia coverage is the most important issue in the delivery of multimedia contents. The nodes in WMSNs are either static or mobile. Thus, the node connections change continuously due to the mobility in wireless multimedia communication that causes an additional energy consumption, and synchronization loss between neighboring nodes. In this paper, we introduce an Optimized Hidden Node Detection (OHND) paradigm. The OHND consists of three phases: hidden node detection, message exchange, and location detection. These three phases aim to maximize the multimedia node coverage, and improve energy efficiency, hidden node detection capacity, and packet delivery ratio. OHND helps multimedia sensor nodes to compute the directional coverage. Furthermore, an OHND is used to maintain a continuous node– continuous neighbor discovery process in order to handle the mobility of the nodes. We implement our proposed algorithms by using a network simulator (NS2). The simulation results demonstrate that nodes are capable of maintaining direct coverage and detecting hidden nodes in order to maximize coverage and multimedia node mobility. To evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms, we compared our results with other known approaches.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s1609143