ABSTRACT
Too often African knowledge systems are excluded from formal discussions surrounding public health, as they are often perceived traditional mechanisms that operate outside the sphere of mainstream science and medicine. Yet with the diffusion of COVID-19 across the globe, new conversations have emerged in relation to Africa's community-based successes in responding to the virus and its impacts. This chapter employs a geographical analysis of Senegal in order to highlight the ways in which Senegalese have approached the diffusion of COVID-19 and successfully controlled its spread. Using maps and qualitative data, this chapter underscores the ways in which global public health experts can draw from the expertise of African nations given the complex ways they have responded to both this pandemic and previous health emergencies. Findings indicate that science and community-based response systems are the key to Senegal's management of coronavirus. This chapter aims to subvert dominant discourses, which suggest that African states somehow stumbled upon their pandemic-related successes. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic brings many unexpected disruptions, such as frequently shifting markets and limited human workforce, to manufacturers. To stay competitive, flexible and real-time manufacturing decision-making strategies are needed to deal with such highly dynamic manufacturing environments. One essential problem is dynamic resource allocation to complete production tasks, especially when a resource disruption (e.g. machine breakdown) occurs. Though multi-agent methods have been proposed to solve the problem in a flexible and agile manner, the agent internal decision-making process and resource uncertainties have rarely been studied. This work introduces a model-based resource agent (RA) architecture that enables effective agent coordination and dynamic agent decision-making. Based on the RA architecture, a rescheduling strategy that incorporates risk assessment via a clustering agent coordination strategy is also proposed. A simulation-based case study is implemented to demonstrate dynamic rescheduling using the proposed multi-agent framework. The results show that the proposed method reduces the computational efforts while losing some throughput optimality compared to the centralised method. Furthermore, the case study illustrates that incorporating risk assessment into rescheduling decision-making improves the throughput. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: With the COVID-19 pandemic still ongoing, and the majority of deaths in the first waves occurring in residential aged care, infection prevention and control (IPC) in this setting has been put under the spotlight. It has been recognised that expertise in the sector was lacking (Safety 2021). To address this, the federal Department of Health mandated every residential aged care facility (RACF) employ an on-site "infection control lead nurse"1. However, no stipulation was made as to the minimum full-time equivalent (FTE) dedicated to this position. A literature review was undertaken to explore evidence and trends to determine what the minimum FTE should be dedicated to this particular role. Method(s): The Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) framework guided a systematic integrative literature review conducted. Electronic databases Medline, CINHAL, EMBASE & Proquest were searched between 1/1/2000 and 30/4/2022. Grey literature was also searched. The mixed-methods appraisal tool (MMAT) was used to critique the quality of articles for inclusion. Result(s): The literature search yielded 1486 articles, with 17 articles meeting the inclusion criteria. Results showed bed numbers per FTE has been trending downwards in the acute care sector. Most recent studies indicate FTE for IPC is appropriate at 1.0 FTE for every 67 beds. Conclusion(s): Study on what the FTE is suitable for nurses working in IPC in any healthcare setting has been scant. Only four studies that met the inclusion criteria were found to have attempted to quantify the time taken to carry out infection control activities.Copyright © 2022
ABSTRACT
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the global supply chain is disrupted at an unprecedented scale under uncertain and unknown trends of labor shortage, high material prices, and changing travel or trade regulations. To stay competitive, enterprises desire agile and dynamic response strategies to quickly react to disruptions and recover supply-chain functions. Although both centralized and multi-agent approaches have been studied, their implementation requires prior knowledge of disruptions and agent-rule-based reasoning. In this paper, we introduce a model-based multi-agent framework that enables agent coordination and dynamic agent decision-making to respond to supply chain disruptions in an agile and effective manner. Through a small-scale simulated case study, we showcase the feasibility of the proposed approach under several disruption scenarios that affect a supply chain network differently, and analyze performance trade-offs between the proposed distributed and centralized methods. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic brings highly dynamic effects to manufacturing environments, such as frequently shifting markets and unexpected disruptions. Such dynamic environments increase the demand for flexible and real-time manufacturing decision -making strategies. One essential problem is dynamic resource allocation to complete production tasks, especially when a resource disruption (e.g. machine breakdown) occurs. Multi -agent frameworks have been proposed to improve the flexibility and responsiveness of manufacturing systems in a distributed decision -making manner. This work introduces a clustering method based on resource agent (RA) capabilities and an RA coordination strategy that enables dynamic resource reallocation when the manufacturing system is subject to resource disruptions. Copyright (C) 2021 The Authors.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major stressor for adolescents with T1D, a group already at risk for elevated mood concerns. Objectives: We aimed to describe teens' perspectives on pandemicrelated stress and their coping strategies and resilience resources. Methods: In a 2-site clinical trial of a psychosocial resiliencepromotion intervention, enrolled adolescents were 13-18 years old with T1D ≥ 1 year and diabetes distress (PAID-T) ≥30. Participants enrolled August 2020-June 2021 were asked to write responses to 2 open-ended prompts about: 1) how COVID-19 affected their lives and 2) what was helping them through the pandemic. Qualitative analysis included: conventional content analysis by 3 coders to develop code categories and thematic analysis to identify overarching themes reflecting pandemic-related stress and resilience. Themes were subsequently mapped onto 3 domains of resilience. Results: Adolescents (n=120) were 56% female, 75% White race, 18% Hispanic with mean A1C of 8.5% ± 2.1%. Adolescents described numerous negative effects of COVID-19 cutting across many major domains of life: Family, Social, School, Medical/Physical, and Mental Health. They also described numerous resources and strategies consistent with stress, coping and resilience theories. Note: 6 participants reported nothing was helping them through the pandemic. Conclusions: Adolescents' responses underscore the pervasive stress impact of COVID-19 across nearly all major life domains. Coping strategies align with theory and suggest likely resilience in the face of pervasive stress. Given the elevated risks for distress in this population, there is a need for interventions to offer diverse stress management tools and resilience resources for adolescents with T1D. (Table Presented).