Nutrition has been acknowledged as crucial in IBD and is relevant to patients' motives behind food choices, which are affected by health engagement (HE) and food involvement (FI). This study aimed to profile IBD patients according to their levels of health engagement and food involvement to identify patterns of different motives behind food choices, particularly regarding the use of food to regulate mood. A cross-sectional study was conducted with 890 Italian IBD patients who completed an online survey in April 2021.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVaccine hesitancy became a more and more important issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the emergence of new variants, many international health agencies have already begun administering booster doses of the vaccine in response to these threats. Studies have emphasized the effectiveness of different types of incentive-based strategies to increase vaccination behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA cross-sectional survey between 29 January 2022 and 3 February 2022 was conducted to understand the public rationale for accepting or rejecting the use of COVID-19 immunity certificates and to identify the psychosocial factors that mostly predict the positive/negative individuals' perceptions of this measure. One thousand twenty-two Italian adults were recruited by a professional panel provider by employing a stratified sampling strategy controlled for gender, age, geographical area of residence, size of the urban centre of residence, employment, and wage. Eight Welch's ANOVAs were then carried out to compare the perception of benefits and the perception of harms among different population groups.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth care professionals (HCPs) working in pediatric and perinatal settings have a strong influence on parental vaccine decision making. Furthermore, HCPs' motivations behind vaccine acceptance are associated with their likelihood of recommending vaccines to their patients. Understanding these motivations in the context of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign may aid in the development of interventions that improve pediatric practitioners' vaccine confidence and prescription.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn March 2021, the possible link between the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and some cases of blood clots lead several governments to suspend the administration of said vaccine, or to adjust their administration strategies, regardless of the fact that both EMA and WHO claimed the benefits of the vaccine to far outweigh its risks. The lack of a coordinated decision-making process between different health authorities possibly had an impact on people's trust in the health authorities themselves, and on their willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19. In this study, we assessed the impact of the Astrazeneca case on a sample of 1000 Italian participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCOVID-19 exerted a strong impact on the Italian healthcare systems, which in turn resulted in a reduction in the citizens’ trust towards healthcare authorities. Moreover, the focused attention on the typical COVID-19 symptoms (fever, cough) has also impacted the social representation of health priorities, potentially reducing the perceived importance and severity of other symptoms. This study aimed to determine the association of general-practitioner (GP) contact with various symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic in Cremona, an Italian city at the very epicentre of the pandemic.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGrowing bodies of literature show that a controlled diet is important in controlling the symptoms of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD). This leads patients to avoid foods considered potentially harmful. However, food is not just a nutrient but entails a series of hedonistic, cultural and social values.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of citizens' behaviors in the containment of the virus. Individuals might change their intention to adhere to public health prescriptions depending on various personal characteristics, including their own emotional status, which has been recognized to be a crucial psychological factor in orienting people's adherence to public health recommendation during emergency settings. In particular, it is crucial to support citizens' alliance with authorities and feeling of trust: public engagement is a concept that refers to the general involvement of citizens into public affairs which is generally considered an effective approach to enhance citizens' understanding of their crucial role in public affairs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study aimed to evaluate the impact of the COVID-19 emergency on patients with IBD's psychological distress, understanding the role of patient engagement as a mediator. An online questionnaire was created, measuring perceived risk susceptibility toward COVID-19, perceived stress, and patient engagement. The questionnaire was distributed to a purposive sample of IBD patients who belonged to the Italian Association for patients with IBD (AMICI Onlus) in April 2020.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Lav
August 2021
Introduction: Several studies described burnout levels of healthcare workers (HCWs) during the COVID-19 pandemic; however, sex-related differences remain poorly investigated.
Objective: To describe sex-related differences in burnout and its determinants among HCWs during the first pandemic wave of the COVID-19 in Italy.
Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed between April and May 2020.
Unlabelled: Policy Points Preventive measures such as the national lockdown in Italy have been effective in slowing the spread of COVID-19. However, they also had psychological and economic impacts on people's lives, which should not be neglected as they may reduce citizens' trust and compliance with future health mandates. Engaging citizens in their own health management and in the collaboration with health care professionals and authorities via the adoption of a collaborative approach to health policy development is fundamental to fostering such measures' effectiveness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The purpose of the present cross-sectional study is to investigate the role of perceived COVID-19-related organizational demands and threats in predicting emotional exhaustion, and the role of organizational support in reducing the negative influence of perceived COVID-19 work-related stressors on burnout. Moreover, the present study aims to add to the understanding of the role of personal resources in the Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R) by examining whether personal resources-such as the professionals' orientation towards patient engagement-may also strengthen the impact of job resources and mitigate the impact of job demands.
Methods: This cross-sectional study involved 532 healthcare professionals working during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy.
The COVID-19 pandemic is exerting a high pressure on healthcare systems all over the world. Italy, in particular, being one of the first Western countries to be struck by the contagion, has seen the number of recovered -and deceased- patients increase alarmingly, thus increasing the workload and the demands for healthcare professionals. This situation has the potential to put several healthcare operators at risk of developing high levels of work-related distress and burnout due to the exposure to emotionally difficult situations, uncertainty, and personal risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe actual effectiveness of the still-to-come vaccination against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 might be challenged by vaccine hesitancy, a rather common and known phenomenon whose psychological predictors are, nevertheless, still largely debated. Our study aims at understanding how adult citizens' health engagement, perceived COVID-19 susceptibility and severity, and general vaccine-related attitudes affect the willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19. To that end, on a sample of Italian citizens, we implemented a path model to test the impact of health engagement on the willingness to vaccinate against SARS-CoV-2, and whether this relationship is direct or mediated by the general attitude towards vaccines and the risk perception.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In January 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started to spread in Italy. The Italian government adopted urgent measures to slow its spread. Enforcing compliance with such measures is crucial in order to enhance their effectiveness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearchers have been working quickly and collaboratively for the development of vaccines against the COVID-19 virus. The effort of the scientific community in searching a vaccine for COVID-19 may be hampered by a diffused vaccine hesitancy. Two waves of data collection on representative samples of the Italian population (during the "first" and "second" phase of the Italian Covid-19 mitigation strategy) were conducted to understand citizens' perceptions and behaviors about preventive behaviors willingness to vaccine for COVID-19.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEngaging patients in raising their voices to advocate for their priorities being taken into account is today acknowledged as essential to improve research and decision-making in healthcare. However, literature is scarce regarding an evaluation framework to monitor the extent to which this approach is successful, in particular in mental health, where the application of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) is particularly difficult. In this study, we describe the process of development and first implementation of a new assessment framework-"Co-production Compass" (COCO) framework-for monitoring patient preference collection in co-production of healthcare services within the scope of a national-based project (namely, Recovery.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Diabetes mellitus is a widely diffused chronic condition which impacts on several aspects of patients' lives. In the current clinical practice, the implementation in the clinical routine of monitoring systems of patients' outcomes has led to an increased generation and use of several measures for the assessment of patients' quality of life (QOL). Nevertheless, this construct appears to be particularly complex, and its operationalization is variable across different measures.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFItaly is among the most severely hit nations in terms of hospital patients' overload, and its healthcare workforce is struggling to cope with challenges that could threaten their own wellbeing. In this scenario, understanding the health-related consequences of COVID-19 outbreak on Italian frontline healthcare professionals is urgent. Our study provides a first account of the huge psycho-physical impact of COVID-19 outbreak for healthcare workers in Italy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals with low health literacy (HL) are known to have poorer health outcomes and to have higher mortality rates compared to individuals with higher HL; hence, the improvement of HL is a key outcome in modern healthcare systems. Healthcare providers are therefore asked to support patients in becoming more and more engaged in their healthcare, thus augmenting their literacy skills. Our main hypothesis is that the well-known relationship between patients' perceived autonomy supportive healthcare climate and HL skills is mediated by the Patient Health Engagement Model (PHE-model) which describes the patients' progressive maturation of a psychological readiness to become active players in their healthcare.
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