ABSTRACT
Background: Healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) pose a significant threat to the health and safety of patients, staff, and visitors. Infection prevention and control (IPC) teams play a crucial role in ensuring that systems and processes are in place to keep everyone safe within the healthcare environment. Aim: The aim of this study was to identify components of infection prevention services, priorities, indicators of successes and how they are measured, and facilitators and barriers to success. Methods: A survey questionnaire was developed and circulated to infection prevention leaders and managers. Findings/results: Seventy IPC leaders/managers completed the survey. Participants were responsible for a range of IPC services within and across healthcare organisations, with significant variations to IPC delivery components. Additionally, a range of budget availability was reported. Several IPC service requirements were considered core work of IPC teams, including providing IPC advice and support, surveillance and audit and education and training. Discussion: An optimal IPC service needs to be in place to ensure HCAIs are minimised or prevented. In a post pandemic era, this is more important than ever before. This is also as crucial for the health and wellbeing of those working in IPC, who have endured unprecedented demand for their services during the pandemic.
ABSTRACT
Coronary heart disease (CHD) remains the leading cause of premature death worldwide. Better risk stratification tools and personalized care of patients are needed for reducing the morbidity and mortality of CHD and the associated economic burden. However, contemporary e-learning solutions lack personalization and shared decision making and as a result, overwhelm patients with large amounts of information. CoroPrevention is a multiyear, EU-funded Horizon 2020 research project aiming to shape and implement a personalized secondary prevention strategy for patients with established CHD. As a part of the project, new digital tools will also be validated. In this paper, we discuss the process of creating audio-visual content for the CoroPrevention mobile application during the challenging COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 has been sweeping the world for nearly two years. As the virus continues to mutate, epidemic prevention and control has become a long and experienced war. In the face of the sudden spread of virus strains, how to quickly and effectively formulate prevention and control plans is the most important to ensure the safety and social stability of cities. This paper is based on the characteristics of the persistence of the epidemic and the rapid transmission of the mutant strain, as well as the database of epidemic prevention and control plans formed by the existing prevention and control. Then, epidemic prevention experts select effective alternatives from the program database and rank their preferences through the preliminary analysis of the local epidemic situation. The process of the integration scheme is to minimize the differences to maximize the needs of the local epidemic, and then obtain the consensus ranking of the scheme and determine the final prevention and control scheme. The proposed method of this paper, on the one hand, can optimize the opinions of the epidemic prevention expert group and form a consensus decision. On the other hand, it can save time and carry out the work effectively, which is of certain practical significance to the prevention and control work of local outbreaks. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.