Asia-Pacific Journal of Health Management (ACHSM)
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Do Socio-Demographic and Corona Reassurance-Seeking Behaviour Predict Corona Anxiety? - A study among Indian population.
No full textIntroduction: The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe anxiety and affected mental and psychological health of the people. Virus related anxiety is thought to be affected by several socio-demographic factors, individual’s risk-perception, and personality.
Objective: The objective of the study was to investigate the predictors of corona virus-related general anxiety and death anxiety during the COVID-19 outbreak in India. More specifically, the study examined the COVID-19 related reassurance-seeking behaviours, neuroticism, health anxiety, and risk perception among the adult population.
Design: A survey methodology was adopted to collect data from the general adult population (N=550) in India between October 29th to November 10th, 2020. Data analysis was carried out using multiple regression analysis in SPSS to examine the significant predictors of general anxiety and death anxiety of the participants. The analysis used the incremental validity of Corona reassurance-seeking behaviours in the multiple regression model.
Setting: The study was conducted among the Indian general population.
Findings: Major significant predictors of general anxiety related pandemic included demographic factors like being female, being young, and less educated. Simultaneously, we observed common predictors of virus-related general anxiety and death anxiety, Corona reassurance-seeking behaviours, health anxiety, and neuroticism. The participant's risk perception predicted the participant's death anxiety but not the general anxiety during the pandemic.
Discussion: The present study's findings will help the policymakers handle pandemic related stress in a better manner
A Study to Assess the Barriers And Facilitators of Blood Donation Among University Students Of South India
No full textIntroduction: Donated blood is very crucial and life-saving for those who require large volumes of blood in any medical emergency. Many blood donation camps are routinely organized to fill this void of demand and supply. In a university campus associated with a hospital, it is important that student volunteers should contribute towards the increase in demand for blood during times of crisis. This makes it imperative to understand their perception of this noble cause.
Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted among 354 volunteers of a university campus using convenience sampling. The primary outcome was to assess the factors that influence voluntary blood donation among the volunteers. The adjusted association was performed using logistic regression. R Console was used for statistical analysis. Odds ratios and p-value < 0.05 with 95% confidence intervals were calculated to determine the level of significance.
Results: A total of 354 responses were received and analysed. Among these, 38.98%, (n=138) participants had donated blood at least once. Factors that were significantly associated with blood donation were gender, being a member of an NGO, frequency of volunteering activities, fear of needles, and belief that they would acquire the disease during blood donation.
Conclusion: The majority of the participants had good knowledge of blood donation, but their attitude and practice did not fall along the same lines. The study also highlighted that attitude towards donating blood is high among the participants who are associated with the NGOs or participate in voluntary activities. Voluntary work induces a ‘sense of giving something to the society which appears to be facilitating factor and an effective measure to encourage blood donation among youth
A Study of Future Opportunities and Challenges in Digital Healthcare Sector: Cyber security vs. crimes in digital healthcare sector
No full textObjective: The current study is to understand the opportunities for and challenges faced by digital healthcare sector. The aim of the study is to suggest measures for securing data and information collected by the sector plus have safer online transactions.
Design and Setting: The secondary data was collected from reliable sources. The primary data was collected online. The quantitative and qualitative analysis was done on data. The data was statistically analysed for this research article.
Results: Even though healthcare sector has spent on digital health and cybersecurity but still the number of cybercrime cases have increased. An attempt is made to understand the factors that can influence the number of cybercrime cases.
Conclusion: The healthcare sector has opportunities in the digital healthcare field in the current pandemic situation. At the same time, it has challenges to reduce the cybercrime cases as hackers are stealing confidential data and to take stringent measures to reduce the same
COVID-19 Lockdown Landslides: The negative impact of subsequent lockdowns on loneliness, wellbeing, and mental health of Australians
No full textObjective. We previously reported on loneliness, depression, anxiety and stress of Australians living alone during the first COVID-19-related government enforced lockdown in Australia. At this time, those living alone were experiencing relatively low levels of emotional distress. Since then, one state, Victoria, underwent a second extended lockdown period and until now, it was unclear what impact this sequential lockdown might have had on the mental health and wellbeing of Victorian citizens. The current study aimed to add to the emerging literature on the lockdown experience in Australia by directly comparing the levels of anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, and wellbeing between Victorians in the second extended lockdown and Australians in the first lockdown.
Design. Data from our original study of 384 Australians was compared with cross-sectional surveys of 340 Victorians during the second lockdown period.
Setting. An online survey was administered with people residing in Victoria self-selecting to complete the study.
Outcome Measures. Participants were asked to complete the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS-21), WHO-5 Wellbeing Scale, and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness Scale. They were also invited to offer their insights into how the second extended lockdown experience had differed from the first.
Results. Independent samples t-tests revealed that Australians were significantly more depressed, anxious, stressed, and lonely, and experienced reduced psychological wellbeing in the second lockdown compared to the first however overall, the levels indicated mild psychological distress. Qualitative insights revealed impact on mental health and a feeling of increased restrictions during lockdown two.
Conclusions. Participants demonstrated adaptation to the lockdowns, providing support for the measures the Australian government have adopted to physically protect Australians from COVID-19. Management of the negative psychological impact through attention to wellbeing practices is however recommended in light of the increase in mental health concerns and likely further lockdown periods
Distress and Quality of Life among Type II Diabetic Patients: Role of physical activity
No full textThis study measures the distress and Quality of Life (QoL) among people with type II diabetics in relation to physical exercise. The study was conducted using diabetic participants chosen from various hospitals, aerobic centres, playgrounds and gyms in the city of Hyderabad in India. The participants were divided into two groups – group 1 comprising people who did not adopt physical activity as part of their diabetes management strategy and group 2 comprising people who engaged in physical activity. A quasi-experimental study was performed on both groups employing purposive and snowball sampling methods. Pearson r showed that distress is negatively correlated with QoL among type II diabetics in both groups. Independent t-test indicated that participants in group 2 showed better QoL and lower levels of distress compared to their counterparts in group 1
Vietnam’s Healthcare System Decentralization: how well does it respond to global health crises such as covid-19 pandemic?
No full textThis article discussed Vietnam’s ongoing efforts to decentralize the health system and its fitness to respond to global health crises as presented through the Covid-19 pandemic. We used a general review and expert’s perspective to explore the topic. We found that the healthcare system in Vietnam continued to decentralize from a pyramid to a wheel model. This system shifts away from a stratified technical hierarchy of higher- and lower-level health units (pyramid model) to a system in which quality healthcare is equally expected among all health units (wheel model). This decentralization has delivered more quality healthcare facilities, greater freedom for patients to choose services at any level, a more competitive environment among hospitals to improve quality, and reductions in excess capacity burden at higher levels. It has also enabled the transformation from a patient-based traditional healthcare model into a patient-centered care system. However, this decentralization takes time and requires long-term political, financial commitment, and a working partnership among key stakeholders. This perspective provides Vietnam’s experience of the decentralization of the healthcare system that may be considered as a useful example for other countries to strategically think of and to shape their future system within their own socio-political context
Dashboard Visualisation for Healthcare Performance Management: Balanced scorecard method
No full textObjective: The increase in demand for hospitalisation in an environment of financial stress has hastened the quest for more efficient healthcare delivery systems. In the past performance management methodologies in the healthcare sector have been predominantly static resulting in a lack of consistency, comparability and timeliness. To mitigate these shortcomings this research work has attempted to create a conceptual framework in the digital dashboard format.
Setting: Of the frameworks presently used, the Balanced Scorecard(BSC) is very popular, primarily because the BSC is a management system (not just a measurement system) that helps an organization highlight its vision and translate them into action.
Design: The design adopted in this research work is primarily qualitative and exploratory. The methodology includes collating KPIs from published literature, crystallising them using the Delphi Method and applying the Likert-scale to prioritise them. To facilitate visualisation of the prioritised KPIs in the BSC format, the construction of a digital dashboard was envisaged.
Results: A dynamic dashboard was created in the BSC format with three Key Performance Indicators(KPI) for each of the four perspectives.
Financial: Return on assets, average daily collections and working capital ratio
Customer Perspective: Patient satisfaction, lost business – number of appointments not attended and percentage of patients Leaving Against Medical Advice(LAMA)
Internal Processes: Billing and collections/posting time, emergency patients triaged within 15 minutes of arrival and patient waiting time
Learning And Growth: Empowerment (decision-making & participation), employee satisfaction and strategic alliances/partnership
Providing A Technical Solution to Improve Nurses' Performance in Drug Delivery : A qualitative study
No full textBackground and Purpose: Providing services in the nursing profession is very wide. In the field of clinical services, one of the most important is to provide care related to medication, which in fact is one of the ways to assess the quality of nursing care, so this study aims to provide a solution. Technical measures were taken to improve the performance of nurses in the drug delivery process in hospitals affiliated to Zahedan University of Medical Sciences in Iran
Materials and Methods: This study was conducted with a qualitative approach and contractual content analysis method in 2017-18. Participants were 16 nurses and a physician working in different wards of the hospital who were included in the study by purposive sampling. The method of data collection was semi-structured interviews. All interviews were conducted and reviewed and analyzed by contractual content analysis.
Results: In the present study, "steps to prevent drug error" as the main category and "acting professionally" and "providing technical solutions" as two subcategories were extracted from the data.
Conclusion: The results showed that the use of nurses 'experience and knowledge as technical solutions to prevent drug errors can play an important role in improving nurses' performance and increasing patient safet
Linking Ethical Standards for Healthcare Professionals with Indian Cultural Values: Ethical standard-setting rooted in cultural values for healthcare professionals in India.
No full textEthical standards of healthcare sector are important to the lives of people because healthcare is a profession that impacts the lives of people, their families and society. Healthcare professionals are inevitably involved in ethical decision-making in their working lives and address a conflict regarding competing values such as personal, organizational, professional, and community values. India is a country in South Asia where people are diverse in ethnicity, religion, and culture. So, revealing commonly accepted ethical standards for resolving ethical conflicts for healthcare professionals becomes more relevant for India. However, the research on this issue is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to reveal the link between ethical standards for healthcare professionals in general and Indian cultural values such as Dharma, Nishkama Karma and Jnana.
This paper used a scoping review to screen the relevant articles which were selected from the Scopus and Google Scholar databases. The keywords used for searching the research articles were “ethical standard”, “ethics”, “healthcare ethics”, and “Indian cultural values”. Then, the constructs of healthcare ethics were identified and the relevant ethical standards for each construct were not only evaluated based on the two key theoretical viewpoints namely deontology and teleology, but also justified by Indian cultural values
Adoption of Online Resources to Improve the Marketing Performance of SMEs
No full textWith the increase in the pace of globalization, SMEs are facing stiff competition from multinational firms. The entrepreneurs owning SMEs have fewer funds, but they need to improve the output of their organizations. Technology adoption can help owners of SMEs to match up with the pace of multinational firms because it can increase their reach and improve overall performance. In this paper, the authors will discuss whether online resource adoption (social media, e-commerce, technology 4.0) will enhance the marketing standard of small and medium enterprises or not. SMEs can achieve economies of scale because of the prominent usage of technology. The findings of this paper will help owners/managers of Indian SMEs to understand the use of online resources in improving marketing within a limited budget. COVID-19 has also pushed all the organizations towards the usage of technology. Either big or small organizations, none of them can ignore the use of technical sources for marketing in this digital era