scholarly journals Conservative Management of Acute Appendicitis In The Era Of COVID 19: A Multicenter prospective observational study at The United Arab Emirates

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fatima Y. AL Hashmi ◽  
Abeer Al Zuabi ◽  
Ibrahim Y. Hachim ◽  
Guido H.H. Mannaerts ◽  
Omar Bekdache
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Acute Appendicitis ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Conservative Management ◽  
Length Of Hospital Stay ◽  
Operative Management ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
The Impact

Background Since its emergence in December 2019, the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic resulted in a profound impact on the health care system worldwide. We propose herein to evaluate the impact of implementing conservative management as an alternative approach to surgical appendectomy in the treatment of proven acute appendicitis during COVID19 pandemic. Methods Our study is a prospective multicenter study that includes a cohort of 160 patients admitted to the surgical departments in both Tawam Hospital and Sheikh Shakhbout Medical City, Abu Dhabi, UAE, for the period from February 2020 till July 2020. Results Our results showed that 56 of our patients (35%) were treated conservatively, while the other 104 (65%) underwent operative management. There was a significant decrease in length of hospital stay (LOS) (2.32 days) among the first group compared to the second (2.8 days). Also, short term follow-up showed that 90% of those patients did not require further operative intervention or developed any serious complications. Out of the 110 patients that were swapped for COVID19, nine (8.18%) were confirmed to be positive. Our protocol was to avoid surgical management for COVID19 positive patients unless indicated. This resulted in (8/9) of COVID19 positive patients to be treated conservatively. Follow up was achieved by using telemedicine-based follow-up with the aim of empowering social distancing and reducing risk of viral exposure to patients as well as the health care providers. In conclusion, our results showed that the implementation of conservative management in treating patients with acute appendicitis who were COVID19 positive is a safe and feasible approach that maybe essential in reducing viral transmission risks as well as avoiding operative risks on COVID19 positive patients.

scholarly journals Spotlight on International Quality: COVID-19 and Its Impact on Quality Improvement in Cancer Care

2021 ◽  
pp. 1513-1521
Author(s):  
Douglas W. Blayney ◽  
Giovanni Bariani ◽  
Devika Das ◽  
Shaheenah Dawood ◽  
Michael Gnant ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Quality Improvement ◽  
United Arab Emirates ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Cancer Care ◽  
Care Delivery ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
The Impact

This report from ASCO's International Quality Steering Group summarizes early learnings on how the COVID-19 pandemic and its stresses have disproportionately affected cancer care delivery and its delivery systems across the world. This article shares perspectives from eight different countries, including Austria, Brazil, Ghana, Honduras, Ireland, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates, which provide insight to their unique issues, challenges, and barriers to quality improvement in cancer care during the pandemic. These perspectives shed light on some key recommendations applicable on a global scale and focus on access to care, importance of expanding and developing new treatments for both COVID-19 and cancer, access to telemedicine, collecting and using COVID-19 and cancer registry data, establishing measures and guidelines to further enhance quality of care, and expanding communication among governments, health care systems, and health care providers. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cancer care and quality improvement has been and will continue to be felt across the globe, but this report aims to share these experiences and learnings and to assist ASCO's international members and our global fight against the pandemic and cancer.

From common sense to evidence-based: An evaluation of survivorship planning.

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (5_suppl) ◽  
pp. 76-76
Author(s):  
Sam Gaster
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Cancer Survivors ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Care Plans ◽  
Follow Up Care ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Impact

76 Background: The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM; 2005) seminal report, From Cancer Patient to Cancer Survivor: Lost in Transition, recommended survivorship care plans (SCPs) as a common sense approach to improve the care of cancer survivors. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO; Mayer et al., 2014) reiterated the importance of these plans and provided strategic guidance for their implementation. The American College of Surgeons’ Commission on Cancer requires SCP delivery from accredited cancer programs as of 2015. Despite the push from these organizations, SCPs remain understudied (Mayer, Birken, Check, & Chen, 2014). The impact of SCPs on patient outcomes is poorly understood. Additionally, there is limited data on patients’ preferences for SCPs. This evaluation describes the use and assessment of SCPs at six regional cancer centers in the Midwest. Methods: Feedback was collected from 30 cancer survivors after receipt of a SCP. Responses were collected with 22-item questionnaire. Outcomes included survivors’ satisfaction with the clarity and detail of SCPs, likelihood to use SCPs in the future, intention to share SCPs with other health care providers, and perceived knowledge about treatment and follow-up care. Results: Over 75% (n = 23) of survivors agreed that SCPs were easy to understand. Ninety-three percent (n = 28) of survivors indicated that SCPs contained the right amount of information. Fifty-three percent (n = 16) of survivors are very likely to use their SCP in the future, whereas 47% (n = 14) are somewhat likely to use their SCP in the future. The majority (77%; n = 23) of survivors intend to share their SCP with another health care provider. Ninety-seven percent (n = 29) of survivors felt more knowledge about their treatment and follow-up car as a result of receiving a SCP. Conclusions: This evaluation highlights the many benefits of SCPs for cancer survivors. Results suggest that SCPs educate survivors about their treatment and follow-up care. Additionally, results indicate that many survivors intend to share SCPs, perhaps allowing for better coordination between oncology and primary care. Further research is warranted on the adoption of healthy lifestyle behaviors and receipt of routine health care after delivery of SCPs.

Reclaiming and Reshaping Life: Patterns of Reconstruction After the Suicide of a Loved One

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (7) ◽  
pp. 994-1005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolores Angela Castelli Dransart
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Suicide Survivors ◽  
Loved One ◽  
Life Patterns ◽  
Survivors Of Suicide ◽  
And Coping ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Depth Interviews

The objective of this study is to identify patterns (components and processes) of reconstruction of suicide survivors. In-depth interviews were conducted with 50 survivors of suicide in Switzerland. Data were analyzed using ATLAS.ti and according to the Grounded Theory principles. Survivors of suicide face four major challenges: dealing with the impact of suicide, searching for meaning, clarifying responsibility, and finding a personal style of reaction and coping. The various ways in which survivors fare through the specific processes of the challenges result in various patterns of reconstruction: the vulnerability, transformation, commitment, and hard blow. The unique characteristics and dynamics of each of them are highlighted. Health care providers would benefit from an approach based on the dynamics of the various patterns of reconstruction in providing appropriate support to survivors of suicide.

The Use of and Attitude Towards Telehealth in Rural Communities

2007 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Mauldon
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Primary Health Care ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Health Care Professionals ◽  
Routine Practice ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Urban Hospital ◽  
Primary Health ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Rural Patients

This paper reports on the attitudes of a sample of health care providers towards the use of telehealth to support rural patients and integrate rural primary health and urban hospital care. Telehealth and other information technologies hold the promise of improving the quality of care for people in rural and remote areas and for supporting rural primary health care providers. While seemingly beneficial for rural patients, study participants believed that telehealth remains underused and poorly integrated into their practice. In general, participants thought that telehealth is potentially beneficial but places constraints on their activities, and few actually used it. Published literature usually reports either on the success of telehealth pilot projects or initiatives that are well resourced and do not reflect the constraints of routine practice, or has an international focus limiting its relevance to the Australian context. Because of the paucity of systematic and generalisable research into the effects of the routine use of telehealth to support rural patients, it is unclear why health care professionals choose to provide such services or the costs and benefits they incur in doing so. Research and policy initiatives continue to be needed to identify the impact of telehealth within the context of Australian primary health care and to develop strategies to support its use.

Health Care Providers in War and Armed Conflict: Operational and Educational Challenges in International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions, Part I. Historical Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (02) ◽  
pp. 109-115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick M. Burkle ◽  
Adam L. Kushner ◽  
Christos Giannou ◽  
Mary A. Paterson ◽  
Sherry M. Wren ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Geneva Convention ◽  
World Health ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
The Impact

AbstractSince 1945, the reason for humanitarian crises and the way in which the world responds to them has dramatically changed every 10 to 15 years or less. Planning, response, and recovery for these tragic events have often been ad hoc, inconsistent, and insufficient, largely because of the complexity of global humanitarian demands and their corresponding response system capabilities. This historical perspective chronicles the transformation of war and armed conflicts from the Cold War to today, emphasizing the impact these events have had on humanitarian professionals and their struggle to adapt to increasing humanitarian, operational, and political challenges. An unprecedented independent United Nations–World Health Organization decision in the Battle for Mosul in Iraq to deploy to combat zones emergency medical teams unprepared in the skills of decades-tested war and armed conflict preparation and response afforded to health care providers and dictated by International Humanitarian Law and Geneva Convention protections has abruptly challenged future decision-making and deployments. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2019;13:109–115)

TELE-MONITORING SYSTEM OF RISK IN RESPIRATORY PATIENTS

2021 ◽  
pp. 2150041
Author(s):  
Awad Al-Zaben ◽  
Lina M.K. Al-Ebbini ◽  
Badr Qatashah
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Signal Processing ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Mobile Phones ◽  
Model Parameters ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Server Side ◽  
Respiration Signal ◽  
At Home

In many situations, health care professionals need to evaluate the respiration rate (RR) for home patients. Moreover, when cases are more than health care providers’ capacity, it is important to follow up cases at home. In this paper, we present a complete system that enables healthcare providers to follow up with patients with respiratory-related diseases at home. The aim is to evaluate the use of a mobile phone’s accelerometer to capture respiration waveform from different patients using mobile phones. Whereas measurements are performed by patients themselves from home, and not by professional health care personnel, the signals captured by mobile phones are subjected to many unknowns. Therefore, the validity of the signals has to be evaluated first and before any processing. Proper signal processing algorithms can be used to prepare the captured waveform for RR computations. A validity check is considered at different stages using statistical measures and pathophysiological limitations. In this paper, a mobile application is developed to capture the accelerometer signals and send the data to a server at the health care facility. The server has a database of each patient’s signals considering patient privacy and security of information. All the validations and signal processing are performed on the server side. The patient’s condition can be followed up over a few days and an alarm system may be implemented at the server-side in case of respiration deterioration or when there is a risk of a patient’s need for hospitalization. The risk is determined based on respiration signal features extracted from the received respiration signal including RR, and Autoregressive (AR) moving average (ARMA) model parameters of the signal. Results showed that the presented method can be used at a larger scale enabling health care providers to monitor a large number of patients.

Using ePROMs for follow-up after palliative radiotherapy: an exploratory study with patients and health care providers.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Oldenburger ◽  
Inge Neyens ◽  
Annemarie Coolbrandt ◽  
Sofie Isebaert ◽  
Aline Sevenants ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care Providers ◽  
Exploratory Study ◽  
Palliative Radiotherapy ◽  
Care Providers
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