Lavaggio delle mani: confronto tra comportamenti dei Professionisti e degli Studenti in un grande Ospedale universitario

RIASSUNTO L'obiettivo principale dello studio è valutare le conoscenze, le opinioni e il rispetto delle procedure di operatori sanitari (medici, infermieri, studenti di medici e di infermieristica) sull'igiene delle mani (HH). Numerose ricerche indicano una minor accuratezza nel rispetto delle procedure di igiene della mani comparata agli infermieri mentre poche ricerche indagano l'atteggiamento durante gli studi. Un questionario è stato somministrato ad un campione di 756 partecipanti: 252 medici, 268 infermieri, 117 studenti infermieristica, 119 studenti di medicina in un grande Ospedale universitario (Roma), per determinare la conoscenza, la conformití  e le procedure rispetto all'igiene delle mani. Per l'analisi delle risposte dei questionari è stato utilizzato SPSS 17.0. La conoscenza e l'aderenza alle procedure dei futuri medici è inferiore a quella dei futuri infermieri. Sia nell'HBS (opinioni sull'igiene della mani) che nell'HHPI (procedure nell'igiene delle mani), gli studenti infermieri hanno punteggi più elevati rispetto agli infermieri, ai medici e agli studenti di medicina. Le domande sull'uso di detergenti a base di alcool sono state quelle in cui vi è il più basso numero di risposte corrette, in tutte le professioni. I medici hanno una minore aderenza alla pratica dell'igiene delle mani, rispetto gli infermieri. Future ricerche dovrebbe chiarire quali siano le differenze nella costruzione dello studio sulla pratica dell'igiene delle mani, quali sono le barriere che impediscono l' aderenza dei sanitari alla stessa e le migliori metodiche per trasmettere l'abitudine all'igiene della mani. I professionisti dovrebbero inoltre essere maggiormente coinvolti nella lotta contro le infezioni nosocomiali (ICA). Parole chiave: igiene delle mani, infezioni associate all'assistenza ICA, student di medicina, studenti infermieri, studenti delle professioni sanitarie, compliance nell'igiene delle mani, procedure per l'igiene delle mani ABSTRACT The main objective of the study is assessing knowledge, opinions and compliance with the procedures of health professionals (physician, nurses, medical and nursing students) about Hand Hygiene (HH). There is a number of research which indicates that physicians respect less than nurses Hand Hygiene, there are a smaller number which investigates the differences in the attitude of the aforementioned subjects during their studies. A questionnaire was administered to a sample of 756 participants (252 doctors, 268 nurses, 117 nursing students and 119 students of medicine) at a large University Hospital in Rome, to determine their knowledge, compliance and procedures with Hand Hygiene. Knowledge of medical students is lower than that of nursing students, as well as they have lower values in adherence to practice. In both HH Beliefs Scale (HBS) and HH Practicies Inventory (HHPI) questionnaires, nursing students have higher scores than nurses, doctors and medical students. The questions on the use of alcohol-based cleaners have been those where there was the lowest number of correct responses, across all professions. Physicians compared to nurses have a lower adherence to Hand Hygiene. Future research should clarify what the differences are in the construction of the study on the practice of washing hands, what are the barriers to health professionals and best methods for teaching habits, namely the effectiveness of hand washing. Professionals should be more involved in the fight against Healthcare-associated infections. Key words: hand hygiene, health care associated infection, medical students. Nursing students, health care professionals, hand hygiene compliance, hand hygiene procedure

Truly reconciled? A dyadic analysis of post-conflict social reintegration in Northern Uganda

In the aftermath of civil war or violent internal conflict, one of the key peacebuilding challenges is the reconciliation of former enemies who are members of the same small-scale societies. A failure of social reintegration may contribute to what is known as a conflict trap. To detect lingering hostile attitudes among a community’s various factions is crucial, but the approaches adopted in previous studies tend to focus on the impact of conflict on one or other aggregated indicator of social cohesion rather than on how violence-affected individuals regard and act towards their fellow community members. Here we demonstrate the value of concentrating on this latter dyadic component of social interactions and we use behavioural experiments and a social tie survey to assess, in an appropriately disaggregated manner, social cohesion in a post-conflict setting in northern Uganda. Whereas in self-reported surveys, ex-combatants appear to be well-connected, active members of their communities, the experiments unveil the continued reluctance of other community members to share or cooperate with them; fewer resources are committed to ex-combatants than to others, which is statistically significant. The dyadic nature of our analysis allows us to detect which groups are more prone to discriminate against ex-combatants, which may help facilitate targeted interventions

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Transmitting times

In response to concerns about infection rates at Southern Cross University in New South Wales, a study was undertaken to identify staff knowledge about infection, and to quantify the incidence of infections to develop a strategy to reduce it. Of the 294 staff sent questionnaires, 41 per cent responded. The survey, Infection transmission in the university workplace: incidents and staff knowledge of the modes of transmission, found that 60 per cent of staff suffered an infectious illness over the study period and one-third took an average of three days\u27 sick leave. The average score on questions regarding infection transmission was 48.5 per cent. There was no significant relationship between knowledge and incidence of illness, however a non-significant trend was noted between the frequency of handwashing and illness rates. Given that knowledge of disease transmission was poor and that the incidence of illness was lower in people who washed their hands more frequently, a workplace education strategy on hygiene may reduce the incidence of infectious illness

A comparison of the hand hygiene knowledge, beliefs and practices of Greek nursing and medical students (Presentation)

Background: Profession appears to influence adherence to hand hygiene (HH) guidelines amongst healthcare workers. This may be partly due to methods of HH education and assessment during undergraduate education. Methods: A questionnaire was administered to 90 nursing and 60 medical students in their final undergraduate year at the University of Athens, Greece, to determine their HH knowledge, beliefs and practices. The response rates were 85.6% and 36%. Results: Nursing students’ HH knowledge was significantly higher than that of medical students (p = 0.000). Nursing students had more positive beliefs about HH (p = 0.005), a greater perception that HH was important in their curriculum (p = 0.004), were more likely to be taught using a greater number of methods and resources (p = 0.001), and were assessed significantly more often on HH than medical students (p = 0.000). Students with greater HH knowledge and a greater sense of the importance given to HH in the curriculum, with more positive beliefs about HH, and who rated HH teaching strategies more effective, scored higher on the HH practices scale (p=0.000). Conclusions: Improving HH education and assessment in undergraduate courses may provide a means of improving graduates’ HH behaviour in the workplace

Is hand hygiene linked to health benefits in the community in developed countries?

Hygiene refers to practices associated with ensuring good health and cleanliness. The scientific term hygiene refers to the maintenance of health and healthy living. The term appears in phrases such as personal hygiene, domestic hygiene, dental hygiene, and occupational hygiene and is frequently used in connection with public health. The term hygiene is derived from Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health, cleanliness and sanitation. Hygiene is also a science that deals with the promotion and preservation of health. This new book presents recent and important research in this field