ABSTRACT
AUTH Why you should read this article: • To understand the clinical reasons for pre-treatment assessment of patients undergoing systemic anticancer therapy (SACT) • To appreciate the benefits of a digital SACT pre-assessment pathway for cancer patients • To familiarise yourself with the challenges of providing a digital service During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic measures have been implemented in healthcare systems to reduce transmission of the infection. People with cancer are immunocompromised and at higher risk of contracting infections, therefore many cancer services have been conducting routine reviews and pre-treatment assessments remotely through telephone and video consultations during the pandemic. Patients who are to receive systemic anticancer therapy (SACT) should have an additional consultation to provide them with specific information about the therapy, including side effects and who to contact for advice if they develop these at home. This article describes the development and implementation of a digital SACT pre-assessment pathway in a large university hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic, which aimed to deliver information to groups of patients remotely. The article explores the challenges to implementation and discusses some of the findings of a patient feedback survey, which suggest that the digital SACT pre-assessment sessions have been successful overall.
ABSTRACT
Background: Psychomotor skills are hands-on skills taught with the learner;giving feedback on the skill being taught. With the introduction of COVID-19 and social distancing, schools had to make several changes to continue to instruct students. To comply with social distancing, teaching psychomotor skills was transformed. The authors developed a virtual education activity to teach assessment of pressure injuries. Method: The authors developed a narrated module of content based on seven principles of wound assessment: pressure injury staging, anatomical location, assessment and documentation, accurate measurement, tissue types, clinical evaluation over time, and infection. These were taught using conversation style recordings between the authors. Within the slides were feedback on student performance and critical thinking explanations. Results: The results of the student evaluation survey showed significant learning occurred, with significance of P<0.00001 for three domains and P<0.01 for one domain. Conclusion: This level of success allows for great potential for other psychomotor skills to be taught virtually also.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has identified weaknesses and stresses in the existing healthcare and governance system, even in the most developed countries. Given the scale and scope of the pandemic, existing healthcare systems are heavily resource constrained, and home-based isolation has been considered as a potential first step for reducing both the disease spread and the stress on the healthcare system. However, the needs and requirements of home-based isolation are extremely unique for each patient, depending on their medical condition and comorbidities, family responsibilities, and environmental constraints. Therefore, it is necessary to develop personalized patient care plans to ensure that the needs of each patient are appropriately met. In this paper we propose a service oriented framework that allows dynamic composition and management of such plans assuming existence of an appropriate knowledge base and availability of web-services interfaces of the underlying systems of caregivers and service providers. We develop a prototype implementation to show the feasibility of the proposed framework and discuss the challenges/issues in deploying such a system in practice.