The impact of inpatient suicide on psychiatric nurses and their need for support

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The nurses working in psychiatric hospitals and wards are prone to encounter completed suicides. The research was conducted to examine post-suicide stress in nurses and the availability of suicide-related mental health care services and education.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Experiences with inpatient suicide were investigated using an anonymous, self-reported questionnaire, which was, along with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised, administered to 531 psychiatric nurses.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The rate of nurses who had encountered patient suicide was 55.0%. The mean Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) score was 11.4. The proportion of respondents at a high risk (≥ 25 on the 88-point IES-R score) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was 13.7%. However, only 15.8% of respondents indicated that they had access to post-suicide mental health care programmes. The survey also revealed a low rate of nurses who reported attending in-hospital seminars on suicide prevention or mental health care for nurses (26.4% and 12.8%, respectively).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These results indicated that nurses exposed to inpatient suicide suffer significant mental distress. However, the low availability of systematic post-suicide mental health care programmes for such nurses and the lack of suicide-related education initiatives and mental health care for nurses are problematic. The situation is likely related to the fact that there are no formal systems in place for identifying and evaluating the psychological effects of patient suicide in nurses and to the pressures stemming from the public perception of nurses as suppliers rather than recipients of health care.</p

Reduction of White Spot Defects in CMOS Image Sensors Fabricated Using Epitaxial Silicon Wafer with Proximity Gettering Sinks by CH₂P Molecular Ion Implantation

Using a new implantation technique with multielement molecular ions consisting of carbon, hydrogen, and phosphorus, namely, CH2P molecular ions, we developed an epitaxial silicon wafer with proximity gettering sinks under the epitaxial silicon layer to improve the gettering capability for metallic impurities. A complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor fabricated with this novel epitaxial silicon wafer has a markedly reduced number of white spot defects, as determined by dark current spectroscopy (DCS). In addition, the amount of nickel impurities gettered in the CH2P-molecular-ion-implanted region of this CMOS image sensor is higher than that gettered in the C3H5-molecular-ion-implanted region; and this implanted region is formed by high-density black pointed defects and deactivated phosphorus after epitaxial growth. From the obtained results, the CH2P-molecular-ion-implanted region has two types of complexes acting as gettering sinks. One includes carbon-related complexes such as aggregated C–I, and the other includes phosphorus-related complexes such as P4–V. These complexes have a high binding energy to metallic impurities. Therefore, CH2P-molecular-ion-implanted epitaxial silicon wafers have a high gettering capability for metallic impurities and contribute to improving the device performance of CMOS image sensors. (This manuscript is an extension from a paper presented at the 6th IEEE Electron Devices Technology & Manufacturing Conference (EDTM 2022))