Working conditions for healthcare workers at a Swedish university hospital infectious disease department during the COVID-19 pandemic: barriers and facilitators to maintaining employee wellbeing.

Background: Healthcare workers (HCWs) at infectious disease departments have held the frontline during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to identify barriers and facilitators to maintaining the employees' wellbeing that may be used to increase preparedness for future pandemics within ID Departments. Methods: In September 2020, a web-based survey on demographics and work environment was distributed to all HCWs at the Infectious Disease Department at Sahlgrenska University Hospital. Results were compared with a pre-COVID-19 survey from October 2019. A quantitative analysis of the overall effects of the pandemic on the working conditions of HCWs was conducted; in addition, a qualitative content analysis of open-ended responses was performed. Results: In total, 222 and 149 HCWs completed the pre-COVID-19 and COVID-19 surveys (84 and 54% response rate), respectively. Overall, we found significant changes regarding increased workload, lack of emotional support in stressful work situations, and inability to recover after shifts. These factors correlated both with younger age and concern of becoming infected. The open-ended answers (n = 103, 69%) revealed five generic categories (Workload; Organizational support; Worry and ethical stress; Capability; and Cooperation and unity) with a total of 14 identified factors representing plausible individual and organizational-level barriers or facilitators to sustained employee wellbeing. Conclusion: Younger HCWs as well as those expressing worries about contracting the infection were found to be particularly affected during the COVID-19 pandemic and these groups may require additional support in future outbreaks. Factors both increasing and decreasing the pandemic-induced negative health consequences for HCWs were identified; this knowledge may be utilized in the future.

The Impact of Mental Health Leadership on Teamwork in Healthcare Organizations: A Serial Mediation Study

Background: There is compelling evidence to suggest that leadership behaviour and teamwork are critical success factors in healthcare organisations facing increasingly complex demands and limited resources. Effective teamwork is essential to deliver high-quality care, requiring integrating different professionals in the healthcare sector. Leaders play a significant role in facilitating teamwork by managing conflicts and promoting cooperation among team members. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the importance of leadership in supporting the mental health and well-being of team members. Methods: A cross-lagged research design was used to examine the relationship between mental health-specific (MHS) leadership and teamwork. Participants were 118 healthcare professionals (76.3% female;44.9% aged between 45 and 54 years old). Results: A serial mediation model was confirmed, showing an indirect effect of mental health leadership on teamwork through interpersonal conflict and cooperation. Conclusions: Effective (MHS) leadership can positively impact the teamwork of healthcare professionals, particularly during times of crisis.

Generosity and Gender: Philanthropic Models for Women Donors and the Fund Development Professionals Who Support Them

The social, political, and economic environment is ripe with opportunity to engage women and their philanthropy. Professionals working in the field of philanthropy want ideas, practical information, research, and guidance about how to work with women donors, how to build women's philanthropy initiatives, and how to integrate this subset of donors into their current fund development departments. This book offers insight into the three historical waves of women's philanthropy and provides a summary of current research and inspiring stories collected from interviews with more than 70 women philanthropists and leaders. Each chapter begins with current research, followed by interviews and examples, and ends with suggestions for fundraisers on how to implement the information into a women's philanthropy initiative using a six-step process: Awareness, Assessment, Alignment, Action, Acknowledgement and Achievement. The last several chapters focus on lessons learned from successful programs in traditional organizational settings-healthcare, higher education, and environment-and what we have yet to learn from the new and emerging philanthropic models led by Laurene Powell Jobs, Priscilla Chan, Melinda Gates, Nancy Roob, and MacKenzie Scott. Throughout the book, themes of equity, diversity, and inclusion are evident and featured in stories and programs led by women of color and younger donors. Additionally, COVID has impacted how fundraisers work, requiring the philanthropy community to adapt and create new ways to reach women donors. The final chapter is a call to action to all women, to give bigger and bolder as the fourth wave of women's philanthropy rises. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022, corrected publication 2022.

Why healthcare managers should understand and apply the world of VUCA?

Today, amid a global pandemic, the world is changing rapidly. This bought a sense of urgency to adopt this change for the sustainability of both individual and corporate existence. The name given to the future world on the brink of this change and transformation is VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity). COVID-19 pandemic exposed leadership teams to novel challenges that required many changes to their practices. This has been the most volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) times in healthcare. VUCA software technologies that connect different geographies of the world over the Internet have provided institutions with standardization, harmonization, and acceleration. Understanding the VUCA world, adapting to it, focusing on the opportunities rather than the challenges it brings are the basis of sustainability. In order to increase or maintain the level of development of the countries, it is possible with the health institutions to provide a quality service and the development of standardization based on the VUCA approach. This global pandemic has clearly affected healthcare systems and workers throughout the world, with many worse affected than others. This chapter aimed to give information about the importance of why health managers should provide services based on the VUCA approach. © 2022 by Sema Ustgorul. All rights reserved.

Applying Human Factors to Modify and Design Healthcare Workspaces and Processes in Response to COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present unique challenges to healthcare organizations around the world. Members of a provincial Human Factors team supported several workspace design projects prompted by the pandemic. This article highlights some of the challenges identified in a selection of these projects. It also presents the human factors methods and recommendations that were used to improve workspace designs, processes, and patient safety in healthcare environments. © 2023 by Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Global Perception of Telemedicine before and after COVID-19 : A Text Mining Analysis

Determining the perception and sentiment of public's opinion of telemedicine and telecare has benefits to healthcare organizations, physicians and patients. Determining a relationship between opinion and demographic elements will aid in developing ways to close the gap between perception and readiness to implement healthcare technology for patients. The concept of telemedicine becomes more critical due to the onset of pandemics such as COVID-19. In addition, with telemedicine being a viable option to reduce cost and inconvenience for the patient, while delivering care that is effective and efficient, having patient buy in will be a key element. This study aims to identify the perception about telemedicine and telecare based on the posts by Twitter users eighteen months before and after COVID-19 pandemic. We leveraged VADER sentiment analysis model to identify the sentiment of the public using the tweets they posted. Out of approximately 1,073,817 tweets included, 491,695 unique tweets from 10,495 unique users met the inclusion criteria Among all countries, United States dominated the tweet volume. Among all the states in US, it is interesting to note that district of Columbia dominated the tweet volume. Among tweets from top five English speaking countries, interestingly after March 2020, the average sentiment of all countries seems to converge to the same value. Results indicate that before COVID-19 outbreak, people had neutral perception or sentiment towards telemedicine, while after the onset of increased cases and high alert situations, people tend to support Telemedicine and the overall perception started to grow towards the positive side. © 2022 IEEE.

A Lean Approach for Reducing Downtimes in Healthcare: A Case Study

Lean Management is considered one of the most successful management paradigms for enhancing operational performance in the manufacturing environment. However, it has been applied throughout the years to several sectors and organisational areas, such as service, healthcare, and office departments. After the Covid-19 outbreak, increasing attention has been given to potential performance improvements in healthcare organisations by leveraging Lean. This paper intends to add further knowledge to this field by presenting a case study in a hospital. In this paper, a pilot project is presented carried out in a healthcare organisation. Lean methods were used to improve the operating room performance, particularly by reducing the operating room changeover time. The A3 template was used to drive the project and implement a new procedure using the Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) method. With the implementation of the new procedure, the changeover time between two different surgeries in the operating room was significantly reduced, together with a more stable and reliable process. © 2023, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Technology Innovation and Healthcare Performance among Healthcare Organizations in Saudi Arabia: A Structural Equation Model Analysis

The number of people in need of healthcare is increasing over time despite the limited resources available in each country;hence, access to healthcare, quality of healthcare, and cost of healthcare remain contemporary global issues. The limitations of travel and access to healthcare during the global pandemic (COVID-19) have triggered the further search for improved and sustainable healthcare services through technology innovation and digital transformation in the healthcare sector. This study examines the impact of technology innovation on healthcare performance among 241 healthcare organizations in Saudi Arabia. The study utilizes the structural equation model (SEM) method to unravel the nature of technology innovation and its influence on healthcare performance. The results of SEM reveal that innovation efforts, in terms of R&D, training, and the acquisition of new software and acquisition of new medical machinery/equipment, have a significant influence on technology innovation and healthcare performance. Furthermore, the results further indicate that technology innovations measured by mobile technology, digitalization of health records, telehealth/telemedicine and artificial intelligence have great likelihood and significant influence on healthcare performance among the healthcare organizations surveyed. This implies that continuous innovative efforts and spending on various technology innovations would further improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare service which give a competitive advantage to healthcare organizations in Saudi Arabia. Hence, innovation which encompasses all stakeholders should be continuously reinforced in Saudi Arabia's health policy as this would further strengthen healthcare performance. © 2023 by the authors.

Perceptual Encryption-based Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis

The widespread adoption of deep learning (DL) solutions in the healthcare organizations is obstructed by their compute intensive nature and dependability on massive datasets. In this regard, cloud-services such as cloud storage and computational resources are emerging as an effective solution. However, when the image data are outsourced to avail such services, there is a privacy concern that the data should be kept protected not only during transmission but during computations as well. To meet these requirements, this study proposed a privacy-preserving DL (PPDL) scheme that enable computations without the need of decryption. The encryption is based on perceptual encryption (PE) that only hides the perceivable information in an image while preserves other characteristics that are necessary for DL computations. Precisely, we have implemented a binary classifier based on EfficientNetV2 for the COVID-19 screening in the chest X-ray (CXR) images. For the PE algorithm, the suitability of two pixel-based and two block-based PE methods was analyzed. The analysis have shown that when global contents are left unmodified (pixel-based PE), then the DL-based model achieved the classification accuracy same as that of the plain images. On the other hand, for block-based PE algorithms, there is up to 3% drop in the model's accuracy and sensitivity scores. © 2023 IEEE.

COVID-19 pandemic cybersecurity issues

This paper studies the cybersecurity issues that have occurred during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. During the pandemic, cyber criminals and Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups have taken advantage of targeting vulnerable people and systems. This paper emphasizes that there is a correlation between the pandemic and the increase in cyber-attacks targeting sectors that are vulnerable. In addition, the growth in anxiety and fear due to the pandemic is increasing the success rate of cyber-attacks. We also highlight that healthcare organizations are one of the main victims of cyber-attacks during the pandemic. The pandemic has also raised the issue of cybersecurity in relation to the new normal of expecting staff to work from home (WFH), the possibility of state-sponsored attacks, and increases in phishing and ransomware. We have also provided various practical approaches to reduce the risks of cyber-attacks while WFH including mitigation of security risks related to healthcare. It is crucial that healthcare organizations improve protecting their important data and assets by implementing a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity. © 2020 The Authors. Internet Technology Letters Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Black Physicians' Experiences with Anti-Black Racism in Healthcare Systems Explored Through An Attraction-Selection-Attrition Lens.

Anti-Black racism is a specific form of racism directed at Black people. In healthcare, there are poignant examples of anti-Black racism in the recruitment, selection, and retention stages of the job cycle. Research shows that anti-Black racism is associated with inequitable work outcomes and the under-representation of Black physicians. However, empirical findings are scattered with no organizing framework to consolidate these findings. To add to the literature, in this paper we present the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) model (Schneider, 1987) as an organizing framework to discuss Black physicians' experiences with anti-Black racism and discrimination throughout their careers. We draw from previous literature to highlight specific experiences of Black physicians at each stage of the job cycle (i.e., attraction, selection, retention), and we offer considerations on how practitioners can mitigate anti-Black racism throughout the job cycle. In the wake of COVID-19 and highly publicized social justice movements, healthcare systems are seeking ways to increase the recruitment, selection, and retention of Black physicians to ensure health equity. We believe this guide will be valuable to practitioners, leaders, researchers, and program directions seeking to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion of Black physicians in their healthcare systems. We conclude by providing practical implications and directions for future research.

Patient Portal Adoption, Use, and Satisfaction among U.S. Adults in Late-stage COVID-19 Pandemic

Patient portals have been around for decades, but only became widely available to patients in the last 10 years as cultural shifts (i.e., patient-centered care) and policies (e.g., HITECH Act) encouraged healthcare organizations to offer patients electronic access to their medical records, as well as digital health services such as secure messaging with their healthcare team. Unfortunately, despite high interest among patients, research has documented generally slow uptake and low levels of use. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought new incentives to adopt and use portals (e.g., to access video visits, COVID-19 test results). While evidence from some healthcare organizations suggests that this has translated to higher patient engagement with portals, there have not been national-level studies to investigate this. Our cross-sectional survey addresses that gap by assessing a sample of U.S. adults' use, perceptions of, and satisfaction with patient portals at the end of 2021. We found high levels of portal awareness, adoption, and use, as well as satisfaction among survey participants that, in many cases, exceeds what has been found in past surveys of U.S. adults. In addition, while we did find some evidence of some disparities in portal adoption and use (e.g., lower adoption among those with lower levels of education completed), many of the factors that have been found in previous literature such as race were not associated with portal engagement in this study. Our results provide early evidence that there may finally be some progress in portal adoption and use, but more research is needed to understand what is driving this and whether and how this progress can be maintained post-pandemic. Addressing common patient concerns and suggestions may be one path forward. © 2022 IEEE.

Issues on Japanese COVID-19 Exposure Notifications Application (COCOA)

This study investigates problems related to COCOA, which is a smartphone app officially provided by Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW) that is designed to notify users when they have been in close contact with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) positive persons, and thus help the government and healthcare organizations contain the spread of the virus. The information we have obtained thus far indicates that poor utilization rates of the app are due to significant program flaws, which caused the initial usage to be sluggish, as well as the failures of various health centers to adequately provide polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for COCOA notification recipients, which exacerbated sluggishness issues. Furthermore, a related survey revealed that although the government provides an integrated data system called the Health Center Real-time Information-sharing System on COVID-19 (Japanese abbreviation HER-SYS), information on fever outpatients (hospital names, locations, consultation times, presence or absence of PCR testing, etc.) corresponding to each local government is still not fully available. © 2022 IEEE.

Safety and health at the workplace in the context of COVID-19: The case of a dental clinic

Governments of different countries and healthcare organisations working in various areas face enormous challenges when trying to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and protect employees, their families and communities. Workplaces can be high-risk environments in terms of the virus outbreak and transmission. This paper aims to disclose the ways for workplace safety improvement in dentistry in the context of COVID-19. The authors present the theoretical model of workplace safety improvement with regard to COVID-19 infection prevention and control measures. The expectations, fears and tasks of dental employees at their workplace in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic were investigated based on the systematic literature review and the qualitative empirical study conducted in Lithuania. The study disclosed that unmet employee expectations could lead to different kinds of fear;the most common sources of anxiety are linked to a higher risk of getting infected, a lack or misuse of protection measures and inadequately performed work. Occupational risks are closely related to the components of a workplace system. Therefore, it is important to apply a holistic approach to improve workplace safety, enhance work performance and minimise the negative effects on an employee, an organisation, a patient and a society. © 2022 R. Čiutienė et al.

A Patient-Centric Interoperable, Quorum-based Healthcare System for Sharing Clinical Data

In the current Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems, the healthcare organizations have the ownership of patient's EMR. Patients have only limited information of the EMR in the form of discharge summary and reports. This was viewed a problem in eHealth consultations during a pandemic like COVID-19, when doctors does not have access to patient data. Patient is the owner of the data and patient should have control over his medical data and should be able to share the data according to his requirement. So currently work is being undertaken to develop patient-centric EMR system. One major challenge here is to ensure the privacy and access management of data being accessed and shared. This paper aims to solve these challenges by using a permissioned blockchain network based FHIR solution for secure interoperability. The proposed system was evaluated by developing a prototype on Quorum Blockchain. The throughput and latency characteristics of the system was analyzed with different workloads and results was promising. © 2022 IEEE.

Role of Fog-Assisted Internet of Things-Enabled System for Managing the Impact of COVID-19

The effect of pandemic COVID-19 outbreak has become a big matter of concern in the world. Healthcare industry demands for new technologies to fight against the pandemic. Fog-assisted IoT-enabled technology (Fog-IoT) is the alternative to cloud technology, which has potential strength to fulfill the requirements of patients as well as healthcare organization. In this paper, we explore and review the fog computing technology to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. Fog computing technology provides resources to IoT at proximity of network. This integrated technology is useful for dynamic monitoring of patients and provides rapid diagnosis to high risk patients. In healthcare industry, the delay sensitive patient information should be accessed in a fraction of seconds. So, fog computing could be a better solution for providing response intensive IoT application for medical emergencies. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Applying Telemedicine for Stroke Remote Diagnosis: The TeleStroke System

In the healthcare context, one of the branches where we assisted in a remarkable evolution in the last decade is telemedicine. Enhancements in the ICT landscape have driven this evolution toward the current state of the art. Nonetheless, despite its undeniable benefits - both for patients health and local health authorities economics - nowadays, telemedicine has not been fully adopted as much as it could be. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has further strengthened the role and importance of telemedicine nowadays, also highlighting the existing gaps. This paper describes a telemedicine-oriented software system called TeleStroke to support the remote diagnosis of a possible stroke, applied to an Hub&Spoke healthcare organisation. © 2021 Elsevier B.V.. All rights reserved.

Assessment of COVID-19 prevention and protection measures in hospitals.

This paper aims to develop an assessment framework for the Covid-19 prevention and protection measures in hospitals. The conceptual model is developed by using fifty-four attributes, fifteen criteria, and three enablers. The multi-grade fuzzy approach is used to develop the assessment framework, and Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) identifies the weaker attributes in the case organization. The case hospital's preventive and safety measures assessment level is 8.05, which is 'very highly focused on protection measures,' and fourteen weaker attributes were identified. The case hospital management should focus on the guidelines of Covid-19 preventive and protection measures, strict protocols, regular audits, education and training of the staff, and active surveillance. Case hospital managers should also focus on staffing and timings, the formulation of policies, and abiding by those policies without any fail. This proposed assessment model is a new initiative in-hospital assessment in preventive and safety measures in the healthcare sector during the Covid-19 era. This framework will enable hospital managers as a continuous assessment tool to improve their Covid-19 prevention operations.

Blockchain digital test certificates for COVID-19

COVID-19 is a pandemic outbreak for each country worldwide. Each government needs to monitor every citizen and the COVID-19 test becomes an essential evidence for people who are travelling. This gives rise to the necessity of disruptive technologies such as Blockchain. In this paper, we provide an overview of the Hyperledger and Ethereum platforms and present how healthcare organizations can control and monitor digital health test certificates with citizens or other stakeholders. We also present a smart contract structure and implementation for COVID-19 test certificates in both blockchain platforms. © 2021 The authors and IOS Press.