A Psychometric Examination of Persian Self-Care Activities Screening Scale (SASS-14) during COVID-19 (preprint)

Introduction: Self-care is an important and valuable principle in today's society due to its emphasis on the active role of individuals in maintaining their health. This study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the Persian version of the Self-Care Activities Screening Scale (SASS-14) during COVID-19.Methods: After obtaining the written permission, SASS-14 was translated into Persian from the original English version. A convenient sampling of 400 Iranian people from March to November 2021 completed the online Persian questionnaire through social media. The construct validity evaluated via Explanatory Factor Analyses (EFA) and confirmed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). The convergent validity was evaluated using Spearman correlation coefficients between the SASS-14 and Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) and 36-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36). It’s reliability was assessed through internal consistency and test-retest intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC). Results: The results of the present study showed that the Persian version of the scale (SASS-14) has the desired content and construct validity for use in Iranian society as the original scale. All items of the questionnaire obtained CVR scores greater than 0.62 and only two items were revised for CVI value. The results of the CFA confirmed the structure of the four-factor model with 14 items, and the indices of model fit showed that the model was sufficiently consistent with the data. Moreover, Cronbach's alpha coefficient and ICC values indicate a desirable level of internal consistency and test-retest reliability.Conclusion: The results of the study showed that the Persian SASS-14 scale enjoys good reliability and validity. This scale is useful for assessing the self-care activities in Iranian people during COVID-19.

Prevention, Control and Safety of Health Care Providers during COVID-19: A Review Study (preprint)

Background: Infection prevention, control, and health workers’ safety in the face of biological agents are among the vital issues in healthcare systems across the world. Considering the high prevalence of COVID-19 infection in the world and its high mortality rate, this epidemic can be tackled to some extent through infection control in the general population and promoting the safety of health centers. This study aims to scrutinize the literature in terms of measures adopted for infection control and safety of healthcare workers in health centers during COVID-19.Methods:  We searched key words related to the study namely, “prevention and control”, “safety”, “coronavirus”, “COVID-19”, and “health personnel” in PubMed, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Scopus databases, Google Scholar, and also in Persian data bases such as SID, Magiran, Irandoc, and Iran Medex using AND/OR functions. To select the documents, the titles of the retrieved studies were first evaluated for relevance; then, the abstracts and full texts of the papers with relevant titles were inspected. Results: Out of 136 retrieved studies, 10 were relevant and their data were analyzed. Four of the articles highlighted the importance of prevention, three enunciated the importance control and three of them related to care providers’ safety. The results showed that the COVID-19 epidemic has affected the healthcare providers’ health; however, it is possible to prevent a catastrophe through strategic planning, prevention and control measures. Conclusions: Considering the importance of the healthcare workers’ health, it is necessary to implement COVID-19 prevention and control management principles according to scientific evidence.