Equipping residential aged care facilities for acute respiratory illness: The Western Sydney experience of improving outbreak management.

Objectives: Acute respiratory illnesses have a disproportionate impact on older people, and especially those living in residential aged care facilities where transmission risks are heightened. Additionally, staff in these facilities have been working under challenging conditions, often ill-equipped in terms of both training and resources to successfully manage the outbreaks of these illnesses. This paper examines the actions of an Australian public health unit to improve influenza outbreak management in residential aged care facilities and critiques the outcomes through a contemporary lens.

Broad ligament ectopic pregnancy with full-term live birth: a rare case report from Syria.

Ectopic pregnancy, the implantation of a fertilized zygote outside the uterine cavity, presents with abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. Diagnosis relies on clinical signs, and treatment involves surgery or methotrexate in selected cases. A 24-year-old woman at 37 weeks of gestation underwent elective cesarean delivery under general anesthesia, revealing an unexpected broad ligament ectopic pregnancy.

Nurse-led framework to improve the safety and quality of residential aged care (HIRAID® Aged Care): protocol for a stepped-wedge cluster randomised controlled trial.

Background: The health issues experienced by older people can often be severe and complex, and an increasing number are using residential aged care services to meet their care needs. High-quality nursing care is fundamental to the health and safety of aged care residents and is contingent on nurses' accurate assessment, informed decision-making, and delivery of timely interventions. However, the role of the aged care nurse is often challenging, impeded by factors such as understaffing, high workloads, and a lack of access to clinical infrastructure and resources.

Data-Driven Implementation Strategy to Optimise Clinician Behaviour Change at Scale in Complex Clinical Environments: A Multicentre Emergency Care Study.

Aim: To develop an evidence-driven, behaviour change focused strategy to maximise implementation and uptake of HIRAID (History including Infection risk, Red flags, Assessment, Interventions, Diagnostics, communication and reassessment) in 30 Australian rural, regional and metropolitan emergency departments.

Design: An embedded, mixed-methods study.

Methods: This study is the first phase of a step-wedge cluster randomised control trial of HIRAID involving over 1300 emergency nurses.

Credentialling in Australia for infection prevention and control: Philosophy, principles and practice.

Infection prevention and control programs are vital to ensuring the health and wellbeing of healthcare consumers and staff. Infection control professionals who lead these programs are uniquely positioned with the knowledge, skills and attributes to direct effective infection control practices and policies within their healthcare setting. As with many specialisations, these individuals may choose to undertake a credentialling process, where their expertise and competence are evaluated and formally recognised by a professional body.

Post-COVID anxiety, depression, and quality of life among Egyptian hemodialysis patients.

Introduction: This study examined the impact of Coronavirus disease 2019  on anxiety, depression, and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) among Egyptian hemodialysis (HD) patients.

Methods: This multicenter cross-sectional study was carried out in Egypt in the years 2021-2022, where 300 HD patients from four HD centers were allocated into two groups: post-COVID and non-COVID. The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and the Kidney Disease QOL-36 questionnaire were used to assess anxiety, depression, and QOL of the included patients.

Education interventions and emergency nurses' clinical practice behaviours: A scoping review.

Background: Many education interventions in emergency nursing are aimed at changing nurse behaviours. This scoping review describes and synthesises the published research education interventions and emergency nurses' clinical practice behaviours.

Methods: Arksey and O'Malley's methodological framework guided this review, which is reported according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR).

Emergency nurses' perceptions of the utility, adaptability and feasibility of the emergency nursing framework HIRAID for practice change in US: An exploratory study.

Background: Patient assessment is a core component of nursing practice and underpins safe, high-quality patient care. HIRAID an evidence-informed emergency nursing framework, provides nurses with a structured approach to patient assessment and management post triage. In Australia, HIRAID resulted in significant improvements to nurse-led communication and reduced adverse patient events.

Socioeconomic disadvantage and engagement with digital contact tracing for COVID-19 in Western Sydney: A secondary analysis of surveillance data.

Objective: COVID-19 outcomes were highly inequitably distributed in Australia and worldwide. The digitalisation of public health interventions offers resource-efficiency and increased capacity for pandemic responses, but risks excluding the elderly and disadvantaged, reinforcing existing inequalities. Despite this, there has been little evaluation of the determinants of uptake of digital contact tracing.

Epidemiological Differences in Hajj-Acquired Airborne Infections in Pilgrims Arriving from Low and Middle-Income versus High-Income Countries: A Systematised Review.

This systematised review aims to compare the epidemiological patterns of Hajj-acquired airborne infections among pilgrims from low and middle-income countries (LMIC) versus those from high-income countries (HIC). A PubMed search was carried out for all published articles before February 2023, using a combination of MeSH terms and text words. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS) was used to assess data quality.

Hand hygiene knowledge and practices, and rates of respiratory tract infections between Hajj and Umrah pilgrims: a comparative study.

Background: Hajj and Umrah mass gatherings (MGs) in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia amplify the risk of viral respiratory tract infections (RTIs), but there is a lack of comparative data from these two MGs. This study aims to compare pilgrims' hand hygiene knowledge, practices, and rates of RTIs during the peak periods of Umrah and Hajj in 2021.

Materials And Methods: The datasets of this comparative study were obtained from two previously conducted studies that used similar study tools and identical syndromic definitions.

The Emergency nurse Protocols Initiating Care-Sydney Triage to Admission Risk Tool (EPIC-START) trial: protocol for a stepped wedge implementation trial.

Introduction: Emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a global problem and a threat to the quality and safety of emergency care. Providing timely and safe emergency care therein is challenging. To address this in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, the Emergency nurse Protocol Initiating Care-Sydney Triage to Admission Risk Tool (EPIC-START) was developed.

Design, synthesis, and biological evaluation with molecular dynamics study of novel pyrazolo[3,4-]pyrimidine derivatives as anti-cancer agents.

In continuation of our efforts to discover new structural chemotypes with significant chemotherapeutic activities, a novel series of pyrazolo[3,4-]pyrimidine-based compounds linked to a piperazine ring, bearing different aromatic moieties, through different linkages was designed and synthesized as FLT3 inhibitors. All of the newly synthesized compounds were evaluated for their cytotoxicity on 60-NCI cell lines. Compounds with the piperazine acetamide linkage XIIa-f & XVI exhibited a remarkable anticancer activity among all of the tested compounds, especially against non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma, leukemia and renal cancer models.

The relationship between hand hygiene and rates of acute respiratory infections among Umrah pilgrims: A pilot randomised controlled trial.

Background: There is a lack of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) investigating the role of hand hygiene in preventing and containing acute respiratory infections (ARIs) in mass gatherings. In this pilot RCT, we assessed the feasibility of establishing a large-scale trial to explore the relationship between practising hand hygiene and rates of ARI in Umrah pilgrimage amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: A parallel RCT was conducted in hotels in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, between April and July 2021.

Video based monitoring systems for hand hygiene compliance auditing: What do patients think?

Background: Compliance with hand hygiene by healthcare workers is a vital aspect of the quality and safety in healthcare. The current method of monitoring compliance, known as direct observation, has been questioned as have the various electronic measures proposed as alternatives. In our earlier work we established the capacity of video-based monitoring systems (VMS) to collect data with increased efficacy, efficiency and accuracy.

Implementation evaluation of an evidence-based emergency nursing framework (HIRAID): study protocol for a step-wedge randomised control trial.

Introduction: Poor patient assessment results in undetected clinical deterioration. Yet, there is no standardised assessment framework for >29 000 Australian emergency nurses. To reduce clinical variation and increase safety and quality of initial emergency nursing care, the evidence-based emergency nursing framework HIRAID (History, Identify Red flags, Assessment, Interventions, Diagnostics, communication and reassessment) was developed and piloted.

The broad antibacterial activity of a small synthetic receptor for cellular phosphatidylglycerol lipids.

A small receptor molecule composed of a porphyrin core with tetrakis-ammonium glycine pickets (liptin 3e) appears to target anionic phosphatidylglycerol (PG) lipid head groups through multifunctional binding-pocket complementarity. Although a major component of bacterial cell membranes, PG is not widely found in animal cells, making PG potentially selective for bacterial targeting. Growth of microbial isolates was monitored in liquid cultures treated with liptin 3e by dilution plate counts and turbidity.

Managing COVID-19 in an Australian designated isolation facility: Implications for current and future healthcare crises based on in-depth interviews.

Health care workers' (HCWs) lived experiences and perceptions of the pandemic can prove to be a valuable resource in the face of a seemingly persistent Novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)-to inform ongoing efforts, as well as identify components essential to a crisis preparedness plan and the issues pertinent to supporting relevant, immediate change. We employed a phenomenological approach and, using purposive sampling, conducted 39 semi-structured interviews with senior healthcare professionals who were employed at a designated COVID-19 facility in New South Wales (NSW), Australia during the height of the pandemic in 2020. Participants comprised administrators, heads of department and senior clinicians.