Vaccination status, personal and workplace experiences of early career health professionals in the WiSDOM cohort study during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa.

Introduction: The knowledge gaps on the experiences of early career health professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic informed this study, which examined their vaccination status, personal and workplace experiences in South Africa.

Methods: ts longitudinal tudy to etermine the peration of the labour arket among its health professional graduates (WiSDOM), a prospective longitudinal cohort study established in 2017, consists of eight health professional groups of clinical associates, dentists, doctors, nurses, occupational therapists, oral hygienists, pharmacists and physiotherapists. As a part of annual follow-up surveys, we examined the personal and workplace experiences and the vaccination status of cohort members during the COVID-19 pandemic years: 2020 until 2022.

The impact of the nurse practice environment, workload, and professional support on job outcomes and standards of care at primary health care clinics in South Africa: A structural equation model approach.

Background: There is substantial evidence on the associations between a positive nurse practice environment and improved nurse and patient outcomes, as well as the factors that mediate these associations, in high-income countries and in hospital settings. The knowledge gaps in African and primary health care settings motivated this empirical study.

Objective: The objective of this study was to examine the impact of the dimensions of the nurse practice environment, specifically human resource management, foundations for nursing care, and participation in clinic affairs, on job outcomes and standards of care.

Preferences for Delivery of HIV Prevention Services Among Healthcare Users in South Africa: A Discrete Choice Experiment.

Progress has been made to scale oral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) as part of combination HIV prevention, with the WHO recommending differentiated, simplified and demedicalized approaches. This study explored user preferences for components of a PrEP service delivery package, through a discrete choice experiment (DCE) among 307 people accessing primary healthcare services in South Africa between November 2022 and February 2023. Attributes included were: Source of information about HIV prevention and PrEP; Site for PrEP initiation and follow-up; Frequency of follow-up; PrEP pick-up point; HIV testing whilst using PrEP; Contact between appointments.

Examining the extent, forms and factors influencing multiple job holding among medical doctors, professional nurses and rehabilitation therapists in two South African provinces: a cross-sectional study.

Objective: Multiple job holding (MJH), or working in more than one paid job simultaneously, is a common characteristic of health labour markets. The study examined the extent (prevalence), forms and factors influencing MJH among public sector medical doctors, professional nurses and rehabilitation therapists in two South African provinces.

Design: A cross-sectional, analytical study.

A Wireless Neural Stimulator IC for Cortical Visual Prosthesis.

We propose a 0.25 × 0.25 × 0.

Levels and determinants of overprescribing of antibiotics in the public and private primary care sectors in South Africa.

Although overprovision of antibiotics in primary care is a key driver of antibiotic resistance, little is known about its determinants in low-income and middle-income countries. Patient demand and financial incentives for providers are often held responsible for overprovision. Yet, inadequate provision exists in their absence and could be fuelled by quality of care issues and incorrect beliefs of providers regarding patients' expectations.

Rapid Real-time Squiggle Classification for Read until using RawMap.

ReadUntil enables Oxford Nanopore Technology's (ONT) sequencers to selectively sequence reads of target species in real-time. This enables efficient microbial enrichment for applications such as microbial abundance estimation and is particularly beneficial for metagenomic samples with a very high fraction of non-target reads (> 99% can be human reads). However, read-until requires a fast and accurate software filter that analyzes a short prefix of a read and determines if it belongs to a microbe of interest (target) or not.

nPoRe: n-polymer realigner for improved pileup-based variant calling.

Despite recent improvements in nanopore basecalling accuracy, germline variant calling of small insertions and deletions (INDELs) remains poor. Although precision and recall for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) now exceeds 99.5%, INDEL recall remains below 80% for standard R9.

Perspectives of the cohort of health professionals in the WiSDOM study on the learning environment, transformation, and social accountability at a South African University.

Background: The dearth of empirical research on transformative health professions education informed this study to examine the factors that influence the perspectives of the cohort of health professionals in the WiSDOM study on the learning environment, transformation, and social accountability at a South African university.

Methods: WiSDOM, a prospective longitudinal cohort study, consists of eight health professional groups: clinical associates, dentists, doctors, nurses, occupational therapists, oral hygienists, pharmacists, and physiotherapists. At study inception in 2017, participants completed a self-administered questionnaire that included four domains of selection criteria (6 items); the learning environment (5 items); redress and transformation (8 items); and social accountability (5 items).

Development of an innovative strategy to determine functioning attributed to health conditions in low-resource settings.

Objectives: Rehabilitation is a health strategy that aims to reduce functioning problems. There is a lack of country-level data on the burden and type of functioning problems to inform service planning and management of patients' rehabilitation needs, particularly at primary care level in low-resource settings. Health researchers need an application that automates synthesis of data extracted from several peer-reviewed publications to determine the most prevalent functioning problems compared across several health states.

Organisational and individual readiness for change to respectful maternity care practice and associated factors in Ibadan, Nigeria: a cross-sectional survey.

Objectives: This study assessed health providers' organisational and individual readiness for change to respectful maternity care (RMC) practice and their associated factors in Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria.

Design: A cross-sectional survey using standardised structured instruments adapted from the literature.

Setting: Nine public health facilities in Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria, 1 December 2019-31 May 2020.

Directly observed and reported respectful maternity care received during childbirth in public health facilities, Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria.

Respectful maternity care (RMC) is believed to improve women's childbirth experience and increase health facility delivery. Unfortunately, few women in low- and middle-income countries experience RMC. Patient surveys and independent observations have been used to evaluate RMC, though seldom together.

A Light-Tolerant Wireless Neural Recording IC for Motor Prediction With Near-Infrared-Based Power and Data Telemetry.

Miniaturized and wireless near-infrared (NIR) based neural recorders with optical powering and data telemetry have been introduced as a promising approach for safe long-term monitoring with the smallest physical dimension among state-of-the-art standalone recorders. However, a main challenge for the NIR based neural recording ICs is to maintain robust operation in the presence of light-induced parasitic short circuit current from junction diodes. This is especially true when the signal currents are kept small to reduce power consumption.

Ultra-rapid somatic variant detection via real-time targeted amplicon sequencing.

Molecular markers are essential for cancer diagnosis, clinical trial enrollment, and some surgical decision making, motivating ultra-rapid, intraoperative variant detection. Sequencing-based detection is considered the gold standard approach, but typically takes hours to perform due to time-consuming DNA extraction, targeted amplification, and library preparation times. In this work, we present a proof-of-principle approach for sub-1 hour targeted variant detection using real-time DNA sequencers.

A low-power communication scheme for wireless, 1000 channel brain-machine interfaces.

. Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) have the potential to restore motor function but are currently limited by electrode count and long-term recording stability. These challenges may be solved through the use of free-floating 'motes' which wirelessly transmit recorded neural signals, if power consumption can be kept within safe levels when scaling to thousands of motes.

A Power-Efficient Brain-Machine Interface System With a Sub-mw Feature Extraction and Decoding ASIC Demonstrated in Nonhuman Primates.

Intracortical brain-machine interfaces have shown promise for restoring function to people with paralysis, but their translation to portable and implantable devices is hindered by their high power consumption. Recent devices have drastically reduced power consumption compared to standard experimental brain-machine interfaces, but still require wired or wireless connections to computing hardware for feature extraction and inference. Here, we introduce a Neural Recording And Decoding (NeuRAD) application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) in 180 nm CMOS that can extract neural spiking features and predict two-dimensional behaviors in real-time.

A qualitative inquiry into pregnant women's perceptions of respectful maternity care during childbirth in Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria.

Women's perceptions of respectful maternity care (RMC) are critical to its definition and measurement globally. We evaluated these in relation to globally defined RMC norms. We conducted a descriptive study involving eight focus group discussions with 50 pregnant women attending antenatal clinic at one primary and one secondary health facility each in the North-west and South-west local government areas of Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria.

Introducing an Ethics Framework for health priority-setting in South Africa on the path to universal health coverage.

Background: South Africa (SA) has embarked on a process to implement universal health coverage (UHC) funded by National Health Insurance (NHI). The 2019 NHI Bill proposes creation of a health technology assessment (HTA) body to inform decisions about which interventions NHI funds will cover under UHC. In practice, HTA often relies mainly on economic evaluations of cost-effectiveness and budget impact, with less attention to the systematic, specific consideration of important social, organisational and ethical impacts of the health technology in question.

A Comparative Study of Two Bone Graft Substitutes-InterOss Collagen and OCS-B Collagen.

Bone is a complex hierarchical tissue composed of organic and inorganic materials that provide structure, support, and protection to organs. However, there are some critical size defects that are unable to regenerate on their own and therefore require clinical repair. Bone graft substitutes allow repair by providing a temporary resorbable device.

A Light Tolerant Neural Recording IC for Near-Infrared-Powered Free Floating Motes.

A key challenge for near-infrared (NIR) powered neural recording ICs is to maintain robust operation in the presence of parasitic short circuit current from junction diodes when exposed to light. This is especially so when intentional currents are kept small to reduce power consumption. We present a neural recording IC that is tolerant up to 300 μW/mm light exposure (above tissue limit) and consumes 0.

Methodological considerations in establishing and maintaining longitudinal health workforce studies: Lessons learned from the WiSDOM cohort in South Africa.

Background: Health workforce cohort studies are uncommon in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs), especially those in sub-Saharan Africa.

Objective: Describe the methodology and lessons learned from establishing and maintaining the WiSDOM (ts longitudinal tudy to etermine the peration of the labour arket among its health professional graduates) health professional cohort study in South Africa.

Methods: WiSDOM is a prospective longitudinal cohort study that commenced in 2017.

A three-pronged approach to waste composition determination.

Understanding solid waste composition has frequently been cited as one of the most valuable resources to those responsible for the proper management of solid waste. The unique contribution of this article lies in the fact that a waste characterisation study, conducted in a remote rural town in South Africa, was combined with an illegal dumping contents mapping and a household survey. This enabled researchers to gain a more thorough understanding of household waste management practices and challenges in this community, bridging the knowledge gap that is created when illegal dumping and household perceptions are omitted from waste characterisation studies in study areas where illegal dumping is an ongoing concern.

SquiggleNet: real-time, direct classification of nanopore signals.

We present SquiggleNet, the first deep-learning model that can classify nanopore reads directly from their electrical signals. SquiggleNet operates faster than DNA passes through the pore, allowing real-time classification and read ejection. Using 1 s of sequencing data, the classifier achieves significantly higher accuracy than base calling followed by sequence alignment.

Bridging the"Last Millimeter" Gap of Brain-Machine Interfaces via Near-Infrared Wireless Power Transfer and Data Communications.

Arrays of floating neural sensors with high channel count that cover an area of square centimeters and larger would be transformative for neural engineering and brain-machine interfaces. Meeting the power and wireless data communications requirements within the size constraints for each neural sensor has been elusive due to the need to incorporate sensing, computing, communications, and power functionality in a package of approximately 100 micrometers on a side. In this work, we demonstrate a near infrared optical power and data communication link for a neural recording system that satisfies size requirements to achieve dense arrays and power requirements to prevent tissue heating.