Ethical challenges for school nurses during COVID-19

School nurses balance ethical challenges with the moral responsibility to students and the public health of the school community during a global pandemic. This balance reveals the critical role of the school nurse. We encourage school nurses to harness lessons learned during this pandemic to make proactive changes and eliminate structures that did not support practice. School nurses must use their voices and demand change;school systems have a moral responsibility to all stakeholders. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

Identifying essential nonprofits with a novel NLP Method

In this research note, we propose a classification method for identifying whether a 501c3 nonprofit organization is considered essential for economic recovery. During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many nonprofit organizations experienced negative financial effects from the economic recession. While these nonprofits saw increased demand for their services, the weakness in the overall economy led to a decline in donations. Fiscal assistance by local, state, and federal government to essential organizations was a critical element to an economic recovery, and governments needed to prioritize aid to the most essential organizations first. By identifying essential nonprofit organizations in advance, these organizations could quickly and efficiently receive financial assistance. Using descriptive text data provided by Ohio nonprofit organizations in their IRS tax filings, we propose a novel natural language processing (NLP) technique to measure the degree of "essentialness" to a nonprofit's work. We show that our model offers an improvement to the classification system known as the National Taxonomy of Exempt Organizations (NTEE). Our machine learning model is also compared to an independent evaluation of a nonprofit's essentialness produced by human researchers.

EXERCISING HEALTHY BEHAVIORS: A LATENT CLASS ANALYSIS OF POSITIVE COPING BEHAVIORS DURING COVID-19 AND ASSOCIATIONS WITH ALCOHOLRELATED AND MENTAL HEALTH OUTCOMES

Purpose: To evaluate endorsement of health (coping) behaviors by history of Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to examine how endorsement relates to participants' self-reported drinking motives and behaviors, perceived stress, mental health and loneliness. Methods: 448 participants (Mean Age = 45 years;51.8% Female;50.2% White;56.5% non-AUD) completed baseline assessments of the NIAAA COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Alcohol Study. Questionnaires were completed by phone and online, and asked whether participants were doing any of the following due to the COVID-19 pandemic: taking media breaks, taking care of your body, engaging in healthy behaviors (e.g. exercise, healthy diet, refraining from substances), making time to relax, and connecting with others. Data: Latent class analysis (LCA) identified distinct patterns of positive coping behavior endorsement. Multiple regression models controlling for age, gender, race, marital status and income level were used to examine latent class differences in alcohol use (AUDIT), coping motives (DMQ Coping), perceived stress (PSS), anxiety (GAD-7) and depressive symptoms (PHQ-9), loneliness (UCLA), and test history of AUD as a potentialmoderator. Results: The two-class solution yielded optimal model fit in the LCA. Class 1 had moderate- to-high probabilities of endorsing positive coping behaviors (High Positive Coping, 82.1%). Class 2 had low probabilities of endorsement (Low Positive Coping, 17.9%). Low Positive Coping participants had significantly greater AUDIT, DMQ Coping, PSS, GAD-7 and PHQ-9 scores than High Positive Coping participants. Participants with AUD had significantly greater AUDIT, DMQ Coping, PSS, GAD-7, PHQ-9 and UCLA scores than participants without AUD. Associations between Positive Coping and AUDIT, GAD-7 and PHQ-9 scores weremoderated by history of AUD such that Low Positive Coping individuals with AUD demonstrated the highest scores, and High-Positive Coping dampened the effect of history of AUD on these outcomes. Conclusions: Most participants had high probabilities of endorsing positive coping behaviors, but those with low probabilities demonstrated significantly greater alcohol use, coping motives, perceived stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms and loneliness. Positive coping behaviors may help mitigate alcohol problems and mental health symptoms in individuals with AUD. Future alcohol interventions should target populations with poor coping behaviors.