Erratum: Malnutrition in children under the age of 5 years in a primary health care setting

No abstract available.

Differential Effectiveness of the Minnesota Safe Patient Handling Act by Health Care Setting

The Minnesota Safe Patient Handling (SPH) Act requires nursing homes, hospitals, and outpatient facilities to develop comprehensive SPH programs and acquire mechanical lifts. The law was designed to prevent the adverse outcomes of manual patient handling among workers (e.g., musculoskeletal injuries) and care recipients (e.g., falls, skin tears). Reducing manual handling is of particular concern in nursing homes where residents’ care needs necessitate frequent lifts and transfers. To date, research has focused on the effects of SPH laws separately in nursing homes and hospitals. Our study aimed to assess whether change in worker injury rate differed between nursing homes and other health care settings following enactment of the 2007 Minnesota law. We used 2005-2017 claims data from a large workers’ compensation insurer and assessed the effects of time, health care setting, and their interaction on claim rate using negative binomial regression models. The claim rate for patient handling injuries was highest in nursing homes (2.8/million payroll), followed by hospitals (1.4/million payroll), and outpatient facilities (0.04/million payroll). Across settings, patient handling claims declined by 38% (95% CI 19-53%) between pre-law (2005-2007) and post-implementation (2014-2017). The decline in claims over time did not differ by health care setting (Wald χ2 for interaction=3.40, p=0.758). Our results suggest that nursing homes are successfully addressing the unique mobility needs of their residents in their mandated SPH programs. Future work should seek to describe the magnitude and nature of care recipient injuries caused by lifting and transferring and evaluate trends in care recipient injuries over time.

Composition of nasal bacterial community and its seasonal variation in health care workers stationed in a clinical research laboratory

The microorganisms at the workplace contribute towards a large portion of the biodiversity a person encounters in his or her life. Health care professionals are often at risk due to their frontline nature of work. Competition and cooperation between nasal bacterial communities of individuals working in a health care setting have been shown to mediate pathogenic microbes. Therefore, we investigated the nasal bacterial community of 47 healthy individuals working in a clinical research laboratory in Kuwait. The taxonomic profiling and core microbiome analysis identified three pre-dominant genera as Corynebacterium (15.0%), Staphylococcus (10.3%) and, Moraxella (10.0%). All the bacterial genera exhibited seasonal variations in summer, winter, autumn and spring. SparCC correlation network analysis revealed positive and negative correlations among the classified genera. A rich set of 16 genera (q < 0.05) were significantly differentially abundant (LEfSe) across the four seasons. The highest species counts, richness and evenness (P < 0.005) were recorded in autumn. Community structure profiling indicated that the entire bacterial population followed a seasonal distribution (R2-0.371; P < 0.001). Other demographic factors such as age, gender and, ethnicity contributed minimally towards community clustering in a closed indoor laboratory setting. Intra-personal diversity also witnessed rich species variety (maximum 6.8 folds). Seasonal changes in the indoor working place in conjunction with the outdoor atmosphere seems to be important for the variations in the nasal bacterial communities of professionals working in a health care setting.