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This special issue of the Journal of International Women's Studies gathers its articles from presentations delivered at the 2022 8th World Conference on Women's Studies, which focused on themes of women's precarity, borderlands, decoloniality, and transformative change. The global pandemic of COVID-19 left humanity to grapple with volatile socio-economic and socio-political realities across borders. The impacts of crises are never gender-neutral and COVID-19 is no exception, as often the most marginalized groups from the Global North and South continue to suffer the brunt of the consequences in an increasingly disaggregated world. On one hand, lockdowns and quarantines promoted developments in virtual digital worlds, encouraging the global exchange of ideas. On the other hand, this digital world is an exclusive one that does not include the voices of impoverished people—especially women—who remain marginalized, vulnerable, and invisible. Feminist interventions in knowledge discourses have revealed other important forms of exclusion faced by women in terms of an assumed objectivity, which neglects embedded biases in gender studies. The challenge in feminist interventions comes in two layers. First, it is the construction of the Other regarding gender subjectivity across the North and South. And second, it is in terms of cultural subjectivity as these two regions emerge from different histories, cultures, and indigenous forms of knowledge. © 2023, Journal of International Women''s Studies. All Rights Reserved.
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The new coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic completely changed individuals' daily lives and created economic disruption across the world. Many countries are using movement restrictions and physical distancing as their measures to slow down this transmission. Effective screening of COVID-19 cases is needed to stop the spreading of these diseases. In the first phases of clinical assessment, it was seen that patients with deformities in chest X-ray images show the signs of COVID-19 infection. Inspired from this, in this study, a novel framework is designed to detect the COVID-19 cases from chest radiography images. Here, a pre-trained deep convolutional neural network VGG-16 is used to extract discriminating features from the radiography images. These extracted features are given as an input to the Logistic regression classifier for automatic detection of COVID-19 cases. The suggested framework obtained a remarkable accuracy of 99.1% with a 100% sensitivity rate in comparison with other state-of-the-art classifier. © 2022 IEEE.
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In a world dominated by augmented reality (AR) and hyper-digitization, the education system is on the verge of revolution. However, this rapid change has come at the expense of the pillars of knowledge-providers (i.e., educators). Based on past literature reviews, this chapter identifies the predominant sources of stress and declined well-being of teachers. These include the wave of AR, the COVID-19-triggered online transformation of classroom teaching, and the increasing diversity within classrooms. Their impact has been studied under two classifications-declined personal (reduced self-efficacy and accelerated stress) and social well-being (isolation and alienation). This chapter proposes the 'Me Within We' model of social self-care to enable teachers to experience a high level of well-being by fostering belongingness through empathic relationships and the establishment of group identity. Future researchers are urged to empirically investigate the holistic efficacy of various dimensions of educator self-care-including social, physical, emotional, and spiritual. © 2022, IGI Global.
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Purpose: Describe associations between changes in employment during the COVID-19 pandemic and financial toxicity among adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients and survivors. Methods: Eligible individuals were diagnosed between 15-39 years of age, currently age ≥18, and recruited through the Huntsman-Intermountain Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Care Program. We sent the survey to N=709. Survey questions included demographics, employment, and the 11-item COmprehensive Score for financial Toxicity (COST) which captures financial toxicity in the last four weeks. COST is scored from 0 to 44 with lower scores indicating greater financial toxicity. Scores were dichotomized as high (0-21) or low (22-44). Changes in employment since March 2020 were categorized as no change, increase in hours, and decrease in hours/lost job. We calculated descriptive statistics and fit a multivariable logistic regression to examine the association between employment change and financial toxicity controlling for current age, gender, and treatment status. Results: Of 280 respondents (39.5% participation), 198 (70.7%) were employed prior to the pandemic and were thus included in analyses. Employed individuals were a mean of 29.4 years of age (range 18-58), 64.3% were female, and 50.5% had received cancer treatment since March 2020. Nearly a third (31.3%) had lost their job or reported reduced hours;50.3% reported high financial toxicity. Among those previously employed, participants who lost their job or had their hours reduced had nearly six times the odds of high financial toxicity than those who reported no change in hours (Odds Ratio [OR]=5.8, 95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 2.6-12.9). In the same model, the odds of reporting high financial toxicity was over twice as high among females than males (OR=2.3, 95% CI: 1.2-4.5). Treatment status and age were not significant. Conclusions: Employment changes during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in increased financial toxicity among a population already susceptible to high financial hardship. Societal gender inequity appears to be mirrored in participants' financial toxicity during the pandemic. Employment interventions for patients and survivors of AYA cancers who have experienced job loss or reduction in work hours during the pandemic are needed and may particularly benefit females.
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Purpose: To describe adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients' and survivors' experiences with telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Eligible participants were identified through the Huntsman Intermountain Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Care Program, which provides age-specific programming and patient navigation to AYA cancer patients and survivors in Utah and surrounding Mountain West states. Participants were emailed an online survey if they were currently age 18 or older and had been diagnosed with cancer between the ages of 15-39 years. We applied descriptive statistics to summarize demographics, comfortability with technology, access to reliable internet connection, and perceived quality of care while using telehealth. Results: AYAs (N=280) were an average of 29.4 years old at survey (range 18-58);65.2% were female and 82.4% non-Hispanic white. Over half (54.2%) had received cancer treatment since March 2020. All participants reported owning a computer, tablet, and/or smart phone they could use for telehealth appointments. The majority (93.5%) reported almost always or always having a reliable internet connection. AYAs felt most comfortable having a telehealth appointment in their own home (96.4%);only 12.5% felt comfortable using telehealth at work. Since March 2020, (N=183) 65.4% had a health care visit moved to a telehealth platform due to COVID-19. Of those who recently moved to telehealth, 60.1% had an oncology visit, 33.9% had a primary care visit, and 31.1% had a mental health visit. Additionally over one-third (35.2%) reported the quality of their medical care had decreased since moving to telehealth. This was most commonly due to 1) troubles with audio, video, or connecting through telehealth platforms;2) telehealth visits feeling impersonal;and 3) feeling that providers more easily dismissed or did not fully address their symptoms. Conclusions: Although AYAs are digital natives, over one third of AYAs feel the quality of their medical care has decreased since moving to telehealth for COVID-19. Further research should explore medical provider training in using telehealth systems and encourage telehealth practices that help AYAs feel more supported and understood.
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Purpose of Study It is understood that pregnant women are at higher risk for severe COVID-19 illness compared to nonpregnant people. Because of this, careful monitoring should be carried out. The purpose of this study was to identify the clinical characteristics, neonatal outcomes, and population demographics of COVID-positive pregnant women admitted to UMC Health Center in Lubbock, Texas. Methods Used We reviewed the charts of 35 pregnant patients with confirmed COVID-19 admitted to UMC Medical Center between April 12, 2020 and January 25, 2021. Results were reported with summative statistics such as mean and standard deviation along with percentages and counts for categorical values. Summary of Results The average patient age was 29 ± 4.8 years, and 71.43% of patients identified their ethnicity as Hispanic or Latino origin. Average length of stay was 3.33 ± 3.56 days, and average number of weeks at delivery was 37.79 ± 2.27 weeks. No deaths were reported among the mothers, but there were three pregnancies that did not result in live birth. Notable findings were an increased rate of preterm birth (18.18%), an increased rate of NICU admission (16.67%), and an increased rate of gestational diabetes (13.89%) compared to national averages among pregnant women. Conclusions Many of our findings confirmed the existing literature concerning pregnancy outcomes among COVID-19 positive pregnant women, including relatively high preterm birth and NICU admission rates. The number of women who identified their ethnicity as Hispanic or Latino was over-represented, which may be reflective of Lubbock's overall demographics or health inequities in West Texas. Furthermore, our gestational diabetes rate was higher than the national average, potentially reflective of Lubbock's high obesity rates. We recommend further research on the mechanisms of preterm birth in COVID-19 illness and ways to improve the health and healthcare equity of West Texas residents.
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Introduction: The Reset, Restore & Recover initiative by the Royal College of Paediatricians (RCPCH), encouraged innovations which minimise exposure to and transmission of COVID-19. Objectives: We introduced a virtual surveillance initiative for Type 1 Diabetic (T1D) children in North West London. This consisted of integrating remote consultations with home HbA1c testing kits to optimise diabetic control. Methods: An initial telephone survey was conducted of 190 patients to ascertain preference for mode of remote testing.79/190 opted for drivethrough HbA1c testing and 106/190 for home testing kits. Home testing kits containing an instruction leaflet and sampling equipment were posted out to patients attending clinics virtually on 4 occasions over a period of 6months (December 2020-June 2021). The samples were sent to the hospital laboratory for testing via local GP practices with a result ready prior to the next Diabetes clinic appointment. During clinic appointments, parents were asked to provide qualitative feedback on the sampling process. Results: Out of 35 recruited patients,71.4% had a successfully reported HbA1c result in time for clinic appointment.28.6% of patients failed to receive a result in time for appointment. Within this cohort,30% of samples clotted,10% contained insufficient sample,10% were mis-labelled and 50% of samples were not received by the laboratory. Qualitative feedback highlighted challenges with the sampling process which prompted changes to the instruction leaflet and an alternate lancet device was provided in the packs. Conclusions: Our experience of using home testing kits was encouraging with a large proportion of patients successfully obtaining HbA1c results. This single method did not, however, work for all patients due to issues with obtaining enough blood and pain. For our large, diverse patient population, both home testing kits and drive-through point of care testing for HbA1c may need to be offered in order to continue with virtual consultations.
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The measures put in place to fight the Covid-19 pandemic have a strong impact on many programs to fight several other infectious diseases in Africa. The disruption of drug and equipment supply chains, the interruption of therapies, or the under-detection of new cases produce excess morbidity and mortality linked to many other diseases, including HIV, malaria and tuberculosis. These indirect impacts could ultimately turn out to be much greater than the direct impacts associated with the current Covid-19 pandemic. Mitigation measures for these indirect impacts are underway, but most require access to quality and up-to-date data on the state of health services.