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Public Health Workers (public + health_worker)
Selected AbstractsPre-admission consultation and late referral in infants with neonatal cholestasisJOURNAL OF PAEDIATRICS AND CHILD HEALTH, Issue 1-2 2008Way Seah Lee Aims: To study factors leading to delayed referral in neonatal cholestasis at a tertiary centre in Malaysia. Methods: A prospective, observational study on consecutive infants with neonatal cholestasis referred to a tertiary unit paediatric liver unit in Malaysia. Results: Thirty-one of the 65 (43%) patients studied encountered delay or had an inappropriate action taken before referral. Factors leading to delayed referral, which adversely affected the outcome of biliary atresia (BA) and neonatal acute liver failure, were repeated reassurances by medical and paramedical staff (n = 17, 26%), failure of hospital services at the referring hospital (n = 7, 11%) and parental refusal for referral (n = 5, 8%). Only three (14%) of the 22 patients who developed liver failure had liver transplantation (LT). The 1-year survival rate with native liver for BA was 35%, while overall 1-year survival rate (native liver and LT) was 41%. Conclusions: Repeated false reassurance, failure of hospital services and parental refusal all contributed to delayed referral in neonatal cholestasis. In addition to education of medical and public health workers, and parents on the importance of early referral in neonatal cholestasis, health authorities in Malaysia should consider the feasibility of universal stool colour screening in newborn infants to improve the outcome of BA. [source] Sterilizing Vaccines or the Politics of the Womb: Retrospective Study of a Rumor in CameroonMEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2000Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg In 1990 a rumor that public health workers were administering a vaccine to sterilize girls and women spread throughout Cameroon. Schoolgirls leapt from windows to escape the vaccination teams, and the vaccination campaign (part of the Year of Universal Child Immunization) was aborted. This article traces the origin and development of this rumor. Theories of rumor and ambiguous cultural response to new technologies shed some light on its genesis and spread, but explain neither its timing nor its content. For this task we need to examine the historical context of Cameroonian experience with colonial vaccination campaigns and the contemporary contexts of the turmoil of democratization movements and economic crisis, concurrent changes in contraceptive policy, and regional mistrust of the state and its "hegemonic project." Drawing on Bay art's politique du ventre and White's thoughts on gossip, we explore this rumor as diagnostic of local response to global and national projects. This response, expressed in this case through the idiom of threats to local reproductive capacity, reveals a feminine side to local-global relations, a politics of the womb, [rumor, immunization, public health, Cameroon, fertility] [source] Empathic understanding: Constructing an evaluation scale from the microcounseling approachNURSING & HEALTH SCIENCES, Issue 1 2000Hiroko Nagano RN Abstract The Empathic Understanding Scale measures the depth of the nurse,patient relationship. As a nurse cares for a patient it is necessary to first establish a relationship. The author identified empathic understanding as the key concept for this study. The primary theme was to develop a scale to measure the nurse's level of empathic understanding of the patient. The purpose of the study was to examine a 23-item questionnaire using the microcounseling model to prove whether empathy is an effective tool in establishing a nurse,patient relationship. Using these results, factors were extracted to measure the level of the nurse's empathic understanding of the patient. Eighteen subjects participated in the pilot study: eight nurses employed by the psychiatric ward of one of Shizuoka's prefectural hospitals, Yoshinso, and 10 students learning to be public health workers. All 18 subjects verbally agreed to participate in the study. Data collection was through experimental interviews according to microtraining models and through questionnaires comprising four elements: moral, emotional, cognitive and communication action. The results were analyzed by principle factor analysis, two-way analysis of variance and multiple regression analysis of variance. Analysis resulted in four factors being extracted. Using the Emotional Empathy Scale for comparison, the content validity of those factors was confirmed. In the second study, these four factors were used as an evaluation instrument in the form of a list of 20 items of evaluation. Measurements were derived by evaluating the 327 nursing students who were the subjects for this study. The subjects performed pseudo-counseling role plays based on the microcounseling method. Five evaluators studied the counselor's behavior and attitude by observing the interaction between the client and counselor roles as the subjects performed role plays. A Likert scale was used to collect data and the data were analyzed by principle factor analysis. The Empathic Understanding Scale consists of four factors: ,acceptance attitude', ,cognitive awareness attitude', ,reflective attitude regarding emotions and meaning' and ,verbalization prompting attitude'. These four factor structure groups that were extracted were found to be the same in both the pilot study and the second study. In the second study, however, a more valid and reliable Empathic Understanding Scale was established. [source] The Public Health Nurse and the Emotions of PregnancyPUBLIC HEALTH NURSING, Issue 3 2010Kent A. Zimmerman ABSTRACT The excerpts taken from this historical article by Kent Zimmerman, M.D., a mental health consultant to the California State Department of Health, provide insight about the role of public health nurses in working with pregnant women. Dr. Zimmerman, an expert in the field of the psychological problems of pregnancy and early childhood, was a part of an international group of psychiatric dignitaries who met in 1952 in France at a conference examining the state of psychological knowledge and care of children (Soddy, 1999). In this paper, the psychiatrist addresses the need for education and support in providing mental health services to clients in public health venues, a theme he reiterated in 1952. In this piece, he argued that staff nurses in public health agencies be trained in basics of psychiatry and that specialists be hired to serve as permanent consultants to public health workers to help with the most challenging nurse-client interactions, and with the emotions that accompany difficult interpersonal work. While knowledge has developed a great deal since the publication of this article in February 1947 in Public Health Nursing, readers may be surprised to see that interdisciplinary collaboration and teamwork were ideals more than 50 years ago. [source] | ||||||||||