ABSTRACT
Introduction. The Seasonal Continuity of Care (CAS) is a service of the Bergamo Health Protection Agency that provides medical and healthcare services, gua-ranteeing outpatient or home care to Italian and foreign tourists and seasonal workers during the months of July and August. The Covid-19 pandemic and the shortage of doctors made it impossible to provide the service in 2021 as in previous summer seasons. Aims. To activate a CAS service with the involvement of nurses. Methods. A "Hub -Spoke" network model was activated;nurses in the Spoke sites, with the patient in attendance, through teleconsul-tation by video call, made remote contact with a doctor in the Hub. Results. In the 3 Spoke CASs, from 2 to 22 August 2021, 274 services (of which 14.3% were telecon-sultations between the nurse at the Spoke CAS site and the doctor at the Hub site) and 162 repeat prescription re-quests were made. Teleconsultation was mainly performed for patients with acute pathology (71.8%), mainly for arth-ralgia and fever. In the majority of cases, it was sufficient to answer to the needs of the patient (87.2%);a small num-ber of cases were referred to a doctor's appointment (10.3%) or to Emergency Department (2.6%). Conclusions. Nurse triage reduced the time of medical visits, allowing more patients to be taken care of. The need for digital in-frastructure, training and integration with district servi-ces emerged.
ABSTRACT
When the Covid19 pandemic closed schools including K-12 and colleges, hands-on science labs and outreach events were also canceled. The question was how to continue to engage students and adults of all ages in optics outreach while they were at home and school lab equipment was not available. Our solution was to provide optics at-home workshops that teachers and students could do with their families using readily available items. The authors with the assistance Optica (formerly The Optical Society, OSA) developed and presented a series of eight outreach workshops through the We Are On program.
ABSTRACT
The demand for biophotonics technologies has rapidly increased over the years and supply of professionals capable of working in multi- and inter-disciplinary topics associated with tissue optics and translating optical technologies to the clinic are still scarce. Despite the number of programs to created to increase the number of high-quality biophotonics professionals, most of these programs are focused on post-graduate audiences and involve in-person activities. Particularly on the education side, online teaching and learning (OTL) have exponentially grown over the years as universities adopted online courses. During the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing restrictions required courses to be offered fully online. Educators have adopted combinations of resources including online apps, simulations, virtual labs, and massive open online courses (MOOCs) to complement recorded or video-conferenced classes. However, most of these resources were not designed to be integrated into virtual courses, compromising the quality of instruction/education especially in events relying on in-person activities to convey information quicker than online activities. These events include short-term courses and outreach events, where fostering students' engagement and interest with fully online activities can be challenging. The quality of instruction is further compromised when events involve multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary OTL, which includes biophotonics and biomedical optics courses. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we have developed and tested a variety of activities and resources for a short-term virtual biophotonics workshop (BW) including webinars, at-home experiments, and computer simulations. Our BW targeted undergraduate students and secondary-school teachers with diverse backgrounds and offered activities to meet needs of learners with diverse backgrounds, learning styles and education levels. Resources provided self-paced learning over the duration of the workshop. Our participants' feedback for 2020 and 2021 BWs showed >78.6% of participating respondents considered every activity of the BW important for their learning process. Also, every BW activity received >69.2% "Very good"and ""Good"responses for overall learning, >91.7% for quality of teaching, >90% for quality of subject matter. Similarly, >75% of participants were "Very interested"or "Interested"in every activity. © COPYRIGHT SPIE.
ABSTRACT
Gender stereotypes often deter women from pursuing STEM-related studies at secondary and tertiary levels of education. Control engineering in particular is an example of a discipline where women are underrepresented in all stages of academia;from undergraduate students through to faculty and technical board members. The Girls in Control workshop targets 10-to-15-year-old girls and aims to educate them about control engineering at a level that is understandable and engaging to stimulate an interest in STEM. Moreover, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic resulted in new and innovative ways of collaborating and designing outreach programs. The Girls in Control workshop uses online platforms to provide accessibility to girls worldwide by removing language barriers. The workshop runs in almost 20 different languages and materials are openly available online. The Girls in Control workshop ran successfully at the 21st World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control 2020, the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2020, the 2021 American control conference, and the 29th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation 2021;all of which ran on virtual platforms. Overall, over 500 girls have participated in the Girls in Control workshops in 19 languages with a large amount of positive feedback. A more advanced, follow-up workshop is being tested where girls are challenged further by tackling problems with disturbances and requiring complex control solutions. Copyright (C) 2021 The Authors.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on HIV services globally, including community-based outreach programmes. This article draws on a qualitative study of HIV outreach workers for men who have sex with men (MSM) in Jakarta, Indonesia undertaken between July and September 2020. The research documented the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on HIV outreach programmes for MSM based on interviews, focus group discussions and video diaries collected from outreach workers. As a result of the pandemic, and in response to the guidelines issued by international donors and the Indonesian government, outreach workers shifted activities to 'virtual outreach' where possible. However, outreach workers consistently performed in-person work to address what they referred to as 'urgent' cases (e.g. required them to attend the clinic). Regardless of delivery mode, the steps comprising outreach work during the pandemic aligned with the 'cascade of care', which forms the dominant policy narrative for the management of HIV. Outreach work during the pandemic therefore continued to be based primarily on the objective of maintaining testing and treatment rates. Although outreach workers responded innovatively to the pandemic, including to the risk of COVID-19 infection, they were limited by the prevailing emphasis on targets in HIV programmes.