The study aimed to identify the factors that influence the disaster preparedness of hospitals and validate an evaluation framework to assess hospital disaster preparedness (HDP) capability in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

A cross-sectional survey of all hospitals (n = 72) in the Eastern Region of Saudi Arabia was conducted. A factor analysis method was used to identify common factors and validate the evaluation framework to assess HDP capacity.

Sixty-three (63) hospitals responded to the survey. A 3-factor structure was identified as key predicators of HDP capacity. The first factor was the most highly weighted factor, which included education and training (0.849), monitoring and assessing HDP (0.723), disaster planning (0.721), and command and control (0.713). The second factor included surge capacity (0.708), triage system (0.844), post-disaster recovery (0.809), and communication (0.678). The third factor represented safety and security (0.638) as well as logistics, equipment, and supplies (0.766).

The identified 3-factor structure provides an innovative approach to assist the operationalization of the concept of HDP capacity building and service improvement, as well as serve as a groundwork to further develop instrument for assessing HDP in future studies.

This study aimed to investigate the nurse-patient trust among in-patients in the context of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic; it further analyzed the related influencing factors, which will provide a theoretical basis for developing corresponding measures.

This study employed a mixed-method design and analyzed 149 patients at the Hongqi Hospital, affiliated with Mudanjiang Medical University, from December 2020 to February 2021. Quantitative analysis was carried out using the “Nurse Patient Trust Scale,” and qualitative analysis was performed using a semi-structured interview with in-patients.

The average score on the scale was 46.65 ± 2.83, and the scores of the 2 dimensions were: 23.24 ± 1.51 for ability and peace of mind, and 23.32 ± 1.53 for attitude and care. According to the interview data, the factors included 3 aspects: a comfortable hospital environment and humane management measures; the nurse’s own competence; and effective communication with patients.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, there are still many factors affecting patients’ trust in nurses that can be addressed by taking different measures. All these factors must be considered by the relevant managers and clinical nursing staff to maintain a better nurse-patient trust relationship.

Among natural disasters, earthquake is associated with heavy fatalities and financial damages, causing considerable mortality. The complications resulting from getting trapped in rubble, secondary traumas, obligation to reside in temporary shelters, along with other factors such as limited mobility, stress, and dehydration, predispose earthquake survivors to Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT). The aim of the present study is to investigate the rate of DVT after an earthquake using a systematic review and meta-analysis.

To perform the present study, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guideline was used. The protocol of this review study has been registered in the International Perspective Register of Systematic Review (PROSPERO) with the code of CRD42021290375. Credible data resources including PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, Science Direct, Google Scholar, Magiran, SID, and Embase were used for extracting relevant studies. Random effect model was used to perform the meta-analysis. I2 was ritualized to investigate heterogeneity across the studies. Publication bias of studies was evaluated using the Begg test.

In this study, 267 primary studies were identified and extracted. After removing the duplicate ones and the screening, eventually 12 final studies were chosen for the meta-analysis. Based on the meta-analysis results, the total rate of DVT was 9.07% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 7.32-10.81; I2 = 97.9%; P = 0<0.001). Analysis of DVT in the subgroups of the general population and patient survivors were 11.43% (95% CI: 9.06-13.79; I2 = 98%; P = 0<0.001) and 2.51% (95% CI: 0.04-4.63; I2 = 77.7%; P = 0.001). Also, based on the Begg test, the publication bias in the chosen studies was not considerable.

DVT rate in earthquake survivors is higher compared with other disasters, and over time it finds a growing trend. After earthquake, the focus of rescue and health-care teams is on individuals with observable injuries and damages. Because DVT is first asymptomatic but has fatal consequences, including pulmonary embolism and sudden death, it should be incorporated in health’s status assessment of earthquake-stricken people as well as screening and diagnostic programs of health-care providers.

This study explores interprofessional collaboration among medical and non-medical personnel planning and implementing international crisis health and medical relief efforts, and how disciplinary and professional background influences these activities.

This study analyzes semi-structured interviews with individuals involved in organizations medical or health services to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa (2014-2016) or the 2015 Nepal earthquake.

Disciplinary background, sometimes coupled with organization role, shaped how relief workers engaged in the process of planning and implementing crisis medical relief. There were 3 thematic areas where these differences emerged: issue focus, problem -solving approaches, and decision-making approaches. Solutions from the field emerged as a fourth theme.

The study demonstrates medical relief required collaboration across medical and non-medical professions and highlights the importance of relief workers’ disciplinary background in shaping the planning and implementation of crisis medical relief. Successful collaboration requires that people involved in crisis relief communicate the relevance of their own expertise, identify limits of their own and others’ disciplinary perspective(s), seek out strengths in others’ expertise, and can identify/ respond appropriately to others who do not see their own disciplinary limits, as well as learn these skills before engaging in relief.

Healthcare and social organizations (HSOs) are first respondents after natural disasters. Hence, their preparedness and resilience are critical components for addressing future disasters. However, little is known about HSOs’ experiences prior to, during, and after hurricanes.

To describe preparedness, response, and recovery experiences from hurricanes Irma/ Maria among HSOs in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

Using a convenience sample, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 52 key-informants. Content analysis for common and recurring themes and patterns was performed by HSO type.

Most HSOs (80.8%) had a preparedness plan and 55.8% responded providing emergency supplies. HSOs’ human resources (61.2%) was the main recovery facilitator/ enabler, while 36.5% identified the lack of economic resources and the lack of an integrated emergency plan as the top barriers. The main lesson learned include understanding the need to make improvements to their emergency preparedness plans (56.3%), and to establish an integrated/ centralized plan between relevant parties.

Lessons learned after hurricanes allowed HSOs to identify gaps and opportunities to become more resilient. Infrastructure capacity, human resources, communication systems, and economic support, as well as training, partnerships, and new policies should be defined, revised, and/ or integrated into the HSOs’ preparedness plans to mitigate the impact of future disasters.

Study the effect of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic on emergency room (ER) utilization for musculoskeletal (MSK) complaints.

Data from ER encounters in a teaching hospital for years 2019 and 2020 were extracted from an electronic database. The ICD-10-CM codes were used to assign the primary diagnosis. Joinpoint regression was applied to a time-series to detect changes in daily encounters (all-cause and MSK). Total number and median daily encounters were calculated by year, sex, age groups, and diagnostic codes for each year.

Overlapping intervals within March 2020 showed drops of 8.1 all-cause encounters per day (95% CI: 4.8-11.5), and 1.2 MSK encounters per day (95% CI: 0.8-1.7), resulting in net losses for the year of 33.2% for all-cause and 35.8% for MSK encounters. Reductions were observed for both sexes and all age groups. MSK codes with largest declines were low back pain, joint pain, and limb pain.

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in major reductions in all-cause and MSK encounters in the ER of an academic hospital probably due to governmental restrictions and a change in patients behaviors. Persistence of the observed reduction suggests that patients requiring ER services delayed seeking care for MSK and other health conditions.

Telemedicine enables patients to communicate with physicians effectively, especially during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. However, few studies have explored the use of online health care platforms for a comprehensive range of specialties during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study aimed to investigate how telemedicine services were affected by the announcement of human-to-human transmission in China.

Telemedicine data from haodf.com in China were collected. A difference-in-differences analysis compared the number of telemedicine use and the number of active online physicians for different specialties in 2020 with the numbers in 2019, before and after the announcement of human-to-human transmission.

Data from 2 473 734 telemedicine use during the same calendar time in 2020 and 2019 were collected. Telemedicine use in 2020 increased by 349.9% after the announcement of human-to-human transmission in China, and the number of active online physicians increased by 23.2%. The difference-in-differences analysis indicated that the announcement had statistically significant positive effects on the numbers of telemedicine use for almost all specialties, except cosmetic dermatology, pathology, occupational diseases, sports medicine, burn, medical imaging, and interventional medicine.

Telemedicine services increased significantly after the announcement of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19. Online activities of most specialties increased, except where providers had to conduct in-person testing and provide bedside therapies.

School testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was implemented in some countries to monitor and prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmissions. Here, we analyze infection chains in primary schools and household members of infected students based on systematic real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase-chain-reaction (rRT-PCR)–gargle pool testing.

Students and school staff (N = 4300) of all 38 primary schools in the rural county of Cham, Germany, were tested twice per week with a gargle pool rRT-PCR system from April to July of 2021. Infection chains of all 8 positive cases identified by school testing were followed up.

In total, 8 positive cases were found by gargle pool PCR testing based on 96,764 school tests. While no transmissions occurred in the school setting, 20 of 27 household members of the 8 cases tested positive. The overall attack rate was 74.1% in families.

No school outbreaks occurred during the study period. All cases but 1 were initially picked up by school testing. No transmission from school to families was observed.

Vaccine hesitancy impacts the ability to cope with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) effectively in the United States. It is important for health organizations to increase vaccine acceptance. Addressing this issue, this study aimed to predict citizens’ acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine through a synthetic approach of public segmentation including cross-situational and situational variables. Controlling for demographics, we examined institutional trust, negative attitudes toward, and low levels of knowledge about vaccines (ie, lacuna public characteristics), and fear of COVID-19 during the pandemic. Our study provides a useful framework for public segmentation and contributes to risk and health campaigns by identifying significant predictors of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance.

We conducted an online survey on October 10, 2020 (N = 499), and performed hierarchical regression analyses to predict citizens’ COVID-19 vaccine acceptance.

This study demonstrated that trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and federal government, vaccine attitude, problem recognition, constraint recognition, involvement recognition, and fear positively predicted COVID-19 vaccine acceptance.

This study outlines a useful synthetic public segmentation framework and extends the concept of lacuna public to the pandemic context, helping to predict vaccine acceptance. Importantly, the findings could be useful in designing health campaign messages.

To assist communities who suffered from hurricane-inflicted damages, emergency responders may monitor social media messages. We present a case-study using the event of Hurricane Matthew to analyze the results of an imputation method for the location of Twitter users who follow school and school districts in Georgia, USA.

Tweets related to Hurricane Matthew were analyzed by content analysis with latent Dirichlet allocation models and sentiment analysis to identify needs and sentiment changes over time. A hurdle regression model was applied to study the association between retweet frequency and content analysis topics.

Users residing in counties affected by Hurricane Matthew posted tweets related to preparedness (n = 171; 16%), awareness (n = 407; 38%), call-for-action or help (n = 206; 19%), and evacuations (n = 93; 9%), with mostly a negative sentiment during the preparedness and response phase. Tweets posted in the hurricane path during the preparedness and response phase were less likely to be retweeted than those outside the path (adjusted odds ratio: 0.95; 95% confidence interval: 0.75, 1.19).

Social media data can be used to detect and evaluate damages of communities affected by natural disasters and identify users’ needs in at-risk areas before the event takes place to aid during the preparedness phases.

For the pediatric population, there is no consensus on which triage system to use for mass-casualty incidents (MCI). A scoping review was conducted to identify the most accurate triage system for pediatric patients in MCIs.

MEDLINE (NLM, Bethesda, MA, USA), Embase (Elsevier Inc., Amsterdam, Netherlands), CINAHL (EBSCO Information Services, Ipswitch, MA, USA), and The Cochrane CENTRAL Register of Controlled Trials (John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, USA), as well as Scopus (Elsevier Inc., Amsterdam, Netherlands), Global Health (Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International, Wallingford, UK), Global Health Archive (Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International, Wallingford, UK), and Global Index Medicus (World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland) were searched for relevant studies that were divided into 3 categories: accuracy of a single system, comparison of 2 or more primary triage system and comparison of secondary triage systems. Grey literature was also searched.

996 studies were identified from which 18 studies were included. Systems studied were found to have poor inter-rater reliability, had a low level of agreement between providers, had missed critically ill patients or were not externally validated. 11 studies compared pediatric MCI triage algorithms using different strategies and the most accurate algorithm was not identified. A recently developed secondary triage system, specifically for pediatric patients, was found to perform better than the comparison triage system.

Although some algorithms performed better than others, no primary triage algorithm was accurate enough for the pediatric population. However, only 1 secondary triage algorithm was found to be superior to the others.

This study explores the opinions of academic and practicing pharmacists about ways to prepare pharmacy students for disaster management to enable them to optimize their role in disaster health management.

Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted for data collection from April through June 2021. The research participants were 9 pharmacists who were involved in disaster management. The interview guide was developed following a comprehensive literature review on disaster management. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis.

The main themes identified are knowledge of health and disaster management, specific skills in disaster management, positive attitudes toward involvement in disaster management, and appropriate behavior in the face of a disaster, as well as personal readiness and training to achieve competence and readiness. Participants mentioned that special training in soft skills, especially communication and problem-solving, is essential for students.

Disaster-specific competencies and personal readiness through training can prepare pharmacy students for disaster management. Soft skills such as communication and problem-solving must be the highest priority.