Publications by authors named "Ken Brackstone"

Armed conflict has negative mental health impacts on internally displaced people and refugees, however, much less is known of its effects on the mental health of displaced people and refugees with disabilities. We use pan-European data (N = 9,676), collected via an internet health needs survey across April-July 2022, to examine the mental health impacts of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on the mental health of displaced people with disabilities during the first months of the war. Regression models separately examined associations between functional impairment (vision, walking, existing mental health condition), access to healthcare, welfare payments, and anxiety and sleep quality, controlling for sociodemographic variables.

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Generalized anxiety and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are common among individuals forcibly displaced during war and conflict. Blast exposure may be one important contributor of such symptoms. The aims of this study were to provide data on blast-related experiences of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and to assess the influence of blast exposure on generalized anxiety, and PTSD flashbacks and nightmares.

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Togo is a low-income country in West Africa. Estimates from Our World in Data suggest that only 25% of the Togolese population have received at least one dose of any COVID-19 vaccine by June 2023. Whilst the early phase of the pandemic vaccine rollout across 2021 was dominated by higher-income countries taking much of the available supply, there have long been sufficient supplies for all nations.

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Introduction: Vaccination programs have been rolled out across the globe to contain and mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 infection. Until recently, such programs were limited to adults and the older population, thereby limiting children from getting vaccinated. Recently, the Malaysian government rolled out vaccination for children aged 5-11 years.

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With the emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant, large-scale vaccination coverage is crucial to the national and global pandemic response, especially in populous Southeast Asian countries such as the Philippines and Malaysia where new information is often received digitally. The main aims of this research were to determine levels of hesitancy and confidence in COVID-19 vaccines among general adults in the Philippines and Malaysia, and to identify individual, behavioural, or environmental predictors significantly associated with these outcomes. Data from an internet-based cross-sectional survey of 2558 participants from the Philippines (N = 1002) and Malaysia (N = 1556) were analysed.

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Introduction: Africa has the slowest COVID-19 vaccination rate of any continent in the world, with only 29.8% of the population receiving at least one dose of the vaccine. This includes Ghana, where only 37.

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Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, telehealth was expanded without the opportunity to extensively evaluate the adopted technology's usability.

Objective: We aimed to synthesize evidence on health professionals' perceptions regarding the usability of telehealth systems in the primary care of individuals with noncommunicable diseases (NCDs; hypertension and diabetes) from the COVID-19 pandemic onward.

Methods: A systematic review was performed of clinical trials, prospective cohort studies, retrospective observational studies, and studies that used qualitative data collection and analysis methods published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese from March 2020 onward.

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Introduction: It is clear that medical science has advanced much in the past few decades with the development of vaccines and this is even true for the novel coronavirus outbreak. By late 2020, COVID-19 vaccines were starting to be approved by national and global regulators, and across 2021, there was a global rollout of several vaccines. Despite rolling out vaccination programs successfully, there has been a cause of concern regarding uptake of vaccine due to vaccine hesitancy.

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