Articles: pandemics.
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Southern medical journal · Feb 2022
Disaster Preparedness Training Needs of Healthcare Workers at the US Department of Veterans Affairs.
Training healthcare workers in disaster preparedness has been shown to increase their willingness and ability to report to work during disasters. Little is known, however, about the relation between sociodemographic, household, and workforce characteristics and the desire for such training. Accordingly, this study aimed to assess healthcare workers' desire for additional workforce preparedness training, and the determinants that influence the need for such training, for three types of disasters (natural, pandemic, manmade). ⋯ Identifying which factors encourage participation in disaster preparedness training can help hospitals and other healthcare providers create targeted training and educational materials to better prepare all hospital staff for future disasters.
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COVID-19 has had an unprecedented effect on faculty of academic family medicine departments. We sought to characterize faculty's self-reported changes in engagement and productivity in clinical, education, and scholarly efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to correlate the changes with age, gender, and level of COVID-19 exposure. We also sought to determine if differences in faculty engagement and productivity were related to departmental efforts to create virtual community, manage conflict, foster engagement with colleagues, and support faculty emotional well-being. ⋯ Clinical, teaching, and research engagement and productivity for academic family physicians decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Faculty well-being and departmental interventions lessened the impact of diminished productivity and research engagement.
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In the Republic of Korea, social distancing policies relied on voluntary participation by citizens and exhibited short-term changes. In this situation, the effects of such policies varied depending on each community's capacity to comply. ⋯ We found that the mean percent change in subway ridership was fitted by an additive model of the log-transformed percent ratio of the restaurant industry (estimated degrees of freedom (EDF) = 3.24, P < 0.001), the Deprivation Index (DI) (EDF = 3.66, P = 0.015), and the proportion of essential workers (β = - 0.10 (95% confidence interval - 0.15 to - 0.05, P < 0.001). We found a distinct decrease in subway ridership only in the least deprived areas, suggesting that social distancing is costly.
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The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic necessitated the use of telemedicine for most medical specialties, including neurosurgery, although before the pandemic, neurosurgeons infrequently used telemedicine for outpatient visits. We conducted a patient-centric evaluation of telemedicine in our endovascular neurosurgery practice, covering a 4-month period early in the pandemic. ⋯ Our patients expressed satisfaction with their telemedicine visits, and telemedicine will likely play an important role in future outpatient endovascular neurosurgery consultations.