Survey Instrument for Measuring Level of Preparedness amongst Healthcare Personnel in Radiation Emergency

Drills and exercises are globally practiced to investigate the level of preparedness towards disaster events. However, these activities are rarely conducted because they require substantial investment, specifically to budget and time. A self-reported survey may serve as an alternative approach, although it may not be as effective as drills and exercises. As part of the survey development process, this article discusses preliminary validation of a survey instrument to measure the level of preparedness towards radiation emergency amongst healthcare personnel. Prior to this validation process, extensive literature reviews pointed out that the instrument consists of three constructs of preparedness, namely readiness, willingness, and ability. A total of seven subject matter experts were invited to judge the contents for verification purposes. Randolph Kappa analysis was then conducted to analyse their judgment to allow irrelevant items to be filtered from the rest prior to any improvements. Initially, the survey instrument consisted of 69 items; however, the analysis omitted 16 of them. The following values for each preparedness construct were: Readiness (0.77), Willingness (0.70), and Ability (0.73). These findings indicate that contents of the instrument are valid. Further analysis should be fulfilled to complete validation process to ensure its practicality prior to using it as an evaluation tool.

Examining Safety Culture among University Employees in the Klang Valley

Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) Malaysia reported that accident and fatality rate are anticipating to rise constantly over next few years. Physical, psychological and social hazards are the factors that cause occupational accidents and illness, subsequently jeopardised workers’ health and safety. There are extensive occupational health and safety studies conducted in various sectors, but it is less focused on the public sector, particularly public university. Therefore, this paper intends to examine the factors impact safety culture, which involve attitude and practice among public sector’s workers particularly in public university. The study employed quantitative approach specifically mail questionnaire were utilised as the main instrument to collect the information. The data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Science version 25. In anticipation to investigate association between physical, psychological and social hazards with safety culture, Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient was deployed. Besides that, to scrutinise relationship among variables, ordinal logistic regression analysis was performed. The study finds that only psychological hazards has significant correlation with attitude (?=.272). Further examination on the relationship between variables, the study discovers that only psychological factors have significant influence on practice (p=.002, OD=7.264). This study has exposed empirical relationship between physical hazards, psychological hazards and social hazards factors with safety culture. The university management must diligently address these factors as the exposure to these hazards can cause occupational diseases and work accidents.

Factors Influenced the Students’ Intention to Study STEM Stream in Upper Secondary School

STEM is an important stream in Malaysia education to become a developed country. However, students show less interest in this stream as there is a declining trend of students taking STEM subjects. The objective of the study is to investigate the factors that influence students’ intention to study science stream in upper secondary school. The study framework has three independent variables named attitude towards science, normative social influences, and self-efficacy and the dependent is students’ intention to study science stream. By using cluster-sampling, a total of 339 data were collected through the questionnaire survey method from two schools out of 16 schools in the rural area of Kota Bharu, Kelantan. The data was analysed using Correlation Analysis, Multiple Linear Regression, Independent T-test, and One-Way ANOVA test. The main finding of the study shows that attitude towards science, normative social influences, and self-efficacy had a significant relationship with students’ intention to study science stream in upper secondary. This study offers an insight to parents, teachers, and policymakers in improving policy and encouraging students to pursue their study in the STEM stream to achieve the government goal that earlier set the ratio of science to art students at 60:40.