Pre-operative self-efficacy education vs. usual care for patients undergoing joint replacement surgery: a pilot randomised controlled trial

Background Hip and knee replacement is a major surgical procedure performed worldwide. Despite 20 or so years of clinical research and care guidelines, the management of acute postoperative pain continues to be a concern. A growing number of self-efficacy strategies are being included in education programs for patients to enable then to have a central role in managing their illness and symptoms. Aims and Objectives The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the feasibility of testing an education intervention to improve self-efficacy in patients undergoing hip or knee replacement. Methods A single-blinded, parallel, pilot randomised control trial design was used. Ninety-one patients undergoing hip or knee replacement surgery were randomly assigned to an intervention or control group. Intervention group participants were given a DVD demonstrating self-efficacy activities to undertake four times before admission. Feasibility criteria related to recruitment, protocol adherence and missing data were assessed. Participants were assessed for pain, anxiety, self-efficacy and healthcare utilisation. Results In relation to recruitment, 55% of screened patients were eligible and of these 81% enrolled (n = 91). Exclusion following randomisation was 10% with missing data ranging from 0 to 20.7%. Nineteen per cent of participants were lost to follow up in the control group and 20% lost to follow up in DVD group. Protocol adherence to components of the intervention varied. Both groups were generally satisfied with pain management during hospitalisation, and there were no differences in groups on clinical outcome measures. Conclusions Preliminary evidence for the benefits of self-efficacy-based education for patients undergoing hip or knee replacement was identified. Additional findings included a need to strengthen the intervention and reducing the number of data collection points to improve the protocol, missing data and numbers lost to follow up before a larger trial is undertaken

How to think about health promotion ethics

Health promotion ethics is moral deliberation about health promotion and its prac­ tice. Although academics and practitioners have been writing about ethics, and especially values, in health promotion for decades, health promotion ethics is now regaining attention within the broader literature on public health ethics. Health promotion is difficult to define, and this has implications for health promotion ethics. Health promotion can be approached in two complementary ways: as a normative ideal, and as a practice. We consider the normative ideal of health promotion to be that aspect of public health practice that is particularly concerned with the equity of social arrangements: it imagines that social arrangements can be altered to make things better for everyone, whatever their health risks, and seeks to achieve this in collaboration with citizens.This raises two main ethical questions. First: what is a good society? And then: what should health promotion contribute to a good society? The practice of health promotion varies widely. Discussion of its ethical implications has addressed four main issues: the potential for health promotion to limit or increase the freedom of individuals; health promotion as a source of collective benefit; the possibility that health promotion strategies might “blame the victim” or stigmatise those who are disabled, sick or at higher risk of disease; and the importance of distributing the benefits of health promotion fairly. Different people will make different moral evaluations on each of these issues in a way that is informed by, and informs, their vision of a good society and their understanding of the ends of health promotion. We conclude that future work in health promotion ethics will require thoughtfully connecting social and political philosophy with an applied, empirically informed ethics of practice. Key Words:Ethics, health education, health promotion, moral philosophy, political philosophy, public healthNHMR

Maternal smoking during pregnancy and scholastic achievement in childhood: evidence from the LIFECOURSE cohort study.

To access publisher's full text version of this article, please click on the hyperlink in Additional Links field or click on the hyperlink at the top of the page marked FilesResearch on the impact of maternal smoking during pregnancy (MSDP) on scholastic achievement in the offspring has shown conflicting findings. The objective of this study was to assess the impact of MSDP on scholastic achievement in a birth cohort of children in 4th, 7th and 10th grades.We analysed data from the LIFECOURSE study, a cohort study of risk and protective factors in all children born in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the year 2000 (N = 1151, girls = 49.3%). Retrospective registry data for 2014-2015 were merged with prospective survey data that were collected in April 2016. Data on MSDP were assessed during regular antenatal visits at the end of the first trimester. Standardized academic achievement scores were obtained from official school transcripts. Data were analysed using OLS regressions that were entered in three hierarchical blocks.Children of mothers who smoked tobacco during the first trimester consistently revealed between 5% and 7% lower scores on standardized academic achievement in 4th, 7th and 10th grade (∼6-8 points on a normally distributed 120 point scale) than those of mothers who had not smoked tobacco during this period (P < 0.05). These findings held after controlling for several factors associated with the time of birth (e.g. birth weight, maternal age at birth, birth order, parental cohabitation and household income), as well as the year of scholastic assessment (parental cohabitation, household income and parental education).Maternal smoking during pregnancy was negatively related to scholastic achievement in the offspring during 4th, 7th and 10th grade.European Research Counci

Public Health Challenges and Priorities for Kazakhstan

The Republic of Kazakhstan is one of the largest and fastest growing post-Soviet economies in Central Asia. Despite recent improvements in health care in response to Kazakhstan 2030 and other state-mandated policy reforms, Kazakhstan still lags behind other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States of the European Region on key indicators of health and economic development. Although cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of mortality among adults, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and blood-borne infectious diseases are of increasing public health concern. Recent data suggest that while Kazakhstan has improved on some measures of population health status, many environmental and public health challenges remain. These include the need to improve public health infrastructure, address the social determinants of health, and implement better health impact assessments to inform health policies and public health practice. In addition, more than three decades after the Declaration of Alma-Ata, which was adopted at the International Conference on Primary Health Care convened in Kazakhstan in 1978, facilitating population-wide lifestyle and behavioral change to reduce risk factors for chronic and communicable diseases, as well as injuries, remains a high priority for emerging health care reforms and the new public health. This paper reviews the current public health challenges in Kazakhstan and describes five priorities for building public health capacity that are now being developed and undertaken at the Kazakhstan School of Public Health to strengthen population health in the country and the Central Asian Region

Adolescent substance use and peer use: a multilevel analysis of cross-sectional population data

Background: Limited evidence exists concerning the importance of social contexts in adolescent substance use prevention. In addition to the important role schools play in educating young people, they are important ecological platforms for adolescent health, development and behaviors. In this light, school community contexts represent an important, but largely neglected, area of research in adolescent substance use and prevention, particularly with regard to peer influences. This study sought to add to a growing body of literature into peer contexts by testing a model of peer substance use simultaneously on individual and school community levels while taking account of several well established individual level factors. Method: We analyzed population-based data from the 2009 Youth in Iceland school survey, with 7,084 participants (response rate of 83.5%) nested within 140 schools across Iceland. Multilevel logistic regression models were used to analyze the data. Results: School-level peer smoking and drunkenness were positively related to adolescent daily smoking and lifetime drunkenness after taking account of individual level peer smoking and drunkenness. These relationships held true for all respondents, irrespective of socio-economic status and other background variables, time spent with parents, academic performance, self-assessed peer respect for smoking and alcohol use, or if they have substance-using friends or not. On the other hand, the same relationships were not found with regard to individual and peer cannabis use. Conclusions: The school-level findings in this study represent context effects that are over and above individual-level associations. This holds although we accounted for a large number of individual level variables that studies generally have not included. For the purpose of prevention, school communities should be targeted as a whole in substance use prevention programs in addition to reaching to individuals of particular concern

Adolescent substance use and peer use: a multilevel analysis of cross-sectional population data

Background Limited evidence exists concerning the importance of social contexts in adolescent substance use prevention. In addition to the important role schools play in educating young people, they are important ecological platforms for adolescent health, development and behaviors. In this light, school community contexts represent an important, but largely neglected, area of research in adolescent substance use and prevention, particularly with regard to peer influences. This study sought to add to a growing body of literature into peer contexts by testing a model of peer substance use simultaneously on individual and school community levels while taking account of several well established individual level factors. Method We analyzed population-based data from the 2009 Youth in Iceland school survey, with 7,084 participants (response rate of 83.5%) nested within 140 schools across Iceland. Multilevel logistic regression models were used to analyze the data. Results School-level peer smoking and drunkenness were positively related to adolescent daily smoking and lifetime drunkenness after taking account of individual level peer smoking and drunkenness. These relationships held true for all respondents, irrespective of socio-economic status and other background variables, time spent with parents, academic performance, self-assessed peer respect for smoking and alcohol use, or if they have substance-using friends or not. On the other hand, the same relationships were not found with regard to individual and peer cannabis use. Conclusions The school-level findings in this study represent context effects that are over and above individual-level associations. This holds although we accounted for a large number of individual level variables that studies generally have not included. For the purpose of prevention, school communities should be targeted as a whole in substance use prevention programs in addition to reaching to individuals of particular concern

Testing risk and protective factor assumptions in the Icelandic model of adolescent substance use prevention

Iceland has witnessed a dramatic decline in adolescent substance use that may be partly the result of efforts related to the Icelandic prevention model (IPM). We sought to test risk and protective factor assumptions of the IPM using a prospective cohort study with 12 months separating baseline from follow-up. Participants were students in grades 8 and 9 in the national Icelandic school system enrolled in the spring of 2018 and 2019 (N=2165). Participants self-reported their experiences of cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and cannabis use and seven risk and protective factors. Analyses were conducted with generalized linear modeling with extension to general estimating equations with correlated outcomes data. Both individual main-effects models and collective models including all main-effects were tested. Out of 28 individual main-effects models, 23 produced findings consistent with study premises (P<0.05). Multiple main-effects models largely sustained the findings of the individual main-effects models. Findings support the assumption that the risk and protective factors commonly emphasized in the IPM are associated with the four different substance use outcomes in the hypothesized direction. Communities that plan to implement the IPM among adolescents might consider these factors in their work

Stress and adolescent well-being: the need for an interdisciplinary framework

Stress and strain among adolescents have been investigated and discussed largely within three separate disciplines: mental health, where the focus has been on the negative effects of stress on emotional health; criminology, where the emphasis has been on the effects of strain on delinquency; and biology, where the focus has been to understand the effects of stress on physiology. Recently, scholars have called for increased multilevel developmental analyses of the bio-psychosocial nature of risk and protection for behaviors of individuals. This paper draws on several different but converging theoretical perspectives in an attempt to provide an overview of research relevant to stress in adolescence and puts forth a new framework that aims to provide both a common language and consilience by which future research can analyze the effects of multiple biological, social and environmental factors experienced during specific developmental periods, and cumulatively over time, on harmful behavior during adolescence. We present a framework to examine the effects of stress on diverse behavioral outcomes among adolescents, including substance use, suicidal behavior, self-inflicted harm, and delinquency