A Shipping Container-Based Sterile Processing Unit for Low Resources Settings.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Boubour J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4805258 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Competitiveness of seaports is a matter of interest not only to the economists, but also businesses, governments and international organizations. This data article provides quantitative data from the survey research on factors of competitiveness of container ports as perceived by shipping lines. The data was collected from around the world using an online questionnaire distributed through LinkedIn. The spatial dispersion of respondents corresponds approximately to the structure of global maritime container trade. The data provides full responses from 120 respondents. Each respondent assessed the importance of 20 predefined competitiveness factors on a scale of 1 (least important) to 10 (most important). For each respondent two additional characteristics are known, the location (continent) and the size of the company for which he/she works, measured by the number of employees. The data were used for a research article to determine the ranking of competitiveness factors for container ports entitled "Key factors of container port competitiveness: A global shipping lines perspective" [1]. The data can be used for another research to uncover relationships between factors of competitiveness (through e.g. factor analysis, cluster analysis), both for the whole world and for groups by continents or the size of the company.
| S-EPMC7118293 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundAustralia's response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic relies on widespread availability of rapid, accurate testing and reporting of results to facilitate contact tracing. The extensive geographical area of Australia presents a logistical challenge, with many of the population located distant from a laboratory capable of robust severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) detection. A strategy to address this is the deployment of a mobile facility utilizing novel diagnostic platforms. This study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of a fully contained transportable SARS-CoV-2 testing laboratory using a range of rapid point-of-care tests.MethodA 20 ft (6.1 m) shipping container was refurbished (GeneWorks, Adelaide, South Australia) with climate controls, laboratory benches, hand-wash station and a class II biosafety cabinet. Portable marquees situated adjacent to the container served as stations for registration, sample acquisition and personal protective equipment for staff. Specimens were collected and tested on-site utilizing either the Abbott ID NOW or Abbott Panbio rapid tests. SARS-CoV-2 positive results from the rapid platforms or any participants reporting symptoms consistent with COVID-19 were tested on-site by GeneXpert Xpress RT-PCR. All samples were tested in parallel with a standard-of-care RT-PCR test (Panther Fusion SARS-CoV-2 assay) performed at the public health reference laboratory. In-laboratory environmental conditions and data management-related factors were also recorded.ResultsOver a 3 week period, 415 participants were recruited for point-of-care SARS-CoV-2 testing. From time of enrolment, the median result turnaround time was 26 min for the Abbott ID NOW, 32 min for the Abbott Panbio and 75 min for the Xpert Xpress. The environmental conditions of the refurbished shipping container were found to be suitable for all platforms tested, although humidity may have produced condensation within the container. Available software enabled turnaround times to be recorded, although technical malfunction resulted in incomplete data capture.ConclusionTransportable container laboratories can enable rapid COVID-19 results at the point of care and may be useful during outbreak settings, particularly in environments that are physically distant from centralized laboratories. They may also be appropriate in resource-limited settings. The results of this pilot study confirm feasibility, although larger trials to validate individual rapid point-of-care testing platforms in this environment are required.
| S-EPMC9260087 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundWorldwide disparities in surgical capacity are a significant contributor to health inequalities. Safe surgery and infection prevention and control depend on effective sterile processing (SP) of surgical instruments; however, little is known about SP in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where surgical site infection is a major cause of postoperative morbidity and mortality.AimTo appraise and synthesise available evidence on SP in LMICs.MethodsAn integrative review of research literature was conducted on SP in LMICs published between 2010 and 2020. Studies were appraised and synthesised to identify challenges and opportunities in practice and research.ResultsEighteen papers met the inclusion criteria for qualitative analysis. Challenges to advancing SP include limited available evidence, resource constraints and policy-practice gaps. Opportunities for advancing SP include tailored education and mentoring initiatives, emerging partnerships and networks that advance implementation guidelines and promote best practices, identifying innovative approaches to resource constraints, and designing and executing quality assurance and surveillance programmes.DiscussionResearch investigating safe surgery, including SP, in LMICs is increasing. Further research and evidence are needed to confirm the generalisability of study findings and effectiveness of strategies to improve SP practice in LMICs. This review will help researchers and stakeholders identify opportunities to contribute. The burdens of unsafe surgery transcend geopolitical borders, and the global surgery and research communities are called upon to negotiate historical and present-day inequities to achieve safe surgery for all.
| S-EPMC7841710 | biostudies-literature
Project description:We report a shipping container that enables a disruptive logistics for cytogenetic biodosimetry for radiation countermeasures through pre-processing cell culture during transportation. The container showed precise temperature control (< 0.01 °C) with uniform sample temperature (< 0.1 °C) to meet the biodosimetry assay requirements. Using an existing insulated shipping box and long shelf life alkaline batteries makes it ideal for national stockpile. Dose curve of cytogenetic biodosimetry assay using the shipping container showed clear dose response and high linear correlation with the control dose curve using a laboratory incubator (Pearson's correlation coefficient: 0.992). The container's ability of pre-processing biological samples during transportation could have a significant impact on radiation countermeasure, as well as potential impacts in other applications such as biobanking, novel molecular or cell-based assays or therapies.
| S-EPMC8129553 | biostudies-literature
Project description:MOTIVATION:Computational biologists face many challenges related to data size, and they need to manage complicated analyses often including multiple stages and multiple tools, all of which must be deployed to modern infrastructures. To address these challenges and maintain reproducibility of results, researchers need (i) a reliable way to run processing stages in any computational environment, (ii) a well-defined way to orchestrate those processing stages and (iii) a data management layer that tracks data as it moves through the processing pipeline. RESULTS:Pachyderm is an open-source workflow system and data management framework that fulfils these needs by creating a data pipelining and data versioning layer on top of projects from the container ecosystem, having Kubernetes as the backbone for container orchestration. We adapted Pachyderm and demonstrated its attractive properties in bioinformatics. A Helm Chart was created so that researchers can use Pachyderm in multiple scenarios. The Pachyderm File System was extended to support block storage. A wrapper for initiating Pachyderm on cloud-agnostic virtual infrastructures was created. The benefits of Pachyderm are illustrated via a large metabolomics workflow, demonstrating that Pachyderm enables efficient and sustainable data science workflows while maintaining reproducibility and scalability. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION:Pachyderm is available from https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm. The Pachyderm Helm Chart is available from https://github.com/kubernetes/charts/tree/master/stable/pachyderm. Pachyderm is available out-of-the-box from the PhenoMeNal VRE (https://github.com/phnmnl/KubeNow-plugin) and general Kubernetes environments instantiated via KubeNow. The code of the workflow used for the analysis is available on GitHub (https://github.com/pharmbio/LC-MS-Pachyderm). SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
| S-EPMC6394392 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundFew studies have explored the work of sterile processing departments (SPD) from a systems perspective. Effective decontamination is critical for removing organic matter and reducing microbial levels from used surgical instruments prior to disinfection or sterilisation and is delivered through a combination of human work and supporting technologies and processes.ObjectiveIn this paper we report the results of a work systems analysis that sought to identify the complex multilevel interdependencies that create performance variation in decontamination and identify potential improvement interventions.MethodsThe research was conducted at a 700-bed academic hospital with two reprocessing facilities decontaminating approximately 23 000 units each month. Mixed methods, including 56 hours of observations of work as done, formal and informal interviews with relevant stakeholders and analysis of data collected about the system, were used to iteratively develop a process map, task analysis, abstraction hierarchy and a variance matrix.ResultsWe identified 21 different performance shaping factors, 30 potential failures, 16 types of process variance, and 10 outcome variances in decontamination. Approximately 2% of trays were returned to decontamination from assembly, while decontamination problems were found in about 1% of surgical cases. Staff knowledge, production pressures, instrument design, tray composition and workstation design contributed to outcomes such as reduced throughput, tray defects, staff injuries, increased inventory and equipment costs, and patient injuries.ConclusionsEnsuring patients and technicians' safety and efficient SPD operation requires improved design of instruments and the decontamination area, skilled staff, proper equipment maintenance and effective coordination of reprocessing tasks.
| S-EPMC7752140 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundSterile processing practices in low-resource countries contribute to greater post-operative infection rates compared to high-resource countries. Provision of a sterile processing training program in Tanzania and Ethiopia demonstrated statistically significant improvements in sterile processing practice, a key requisite for safe surgical care.AimTo determine if a sterile processing program in a South East Asia country would result in improved conditions and practice in urban and rural healthcare facilities.MethodsIn 2019, a mixed-methods study was conducted with two cohorts in Cambodia, involving a total of eight healthcare facilities and 43 healthcare workers. Quantitative data were collected using a sterile processing assessment tool and a multiple-choice test pre- and post-training. Qualitative data in the form of interviews were obtained several months post-training.FindingsTest results showed statistically significant and sustained effect of training over a four-six month period, as well as a large positive effect on SP knowledge in both cohorts. Analysis of hospital assessment data revealed an aggregate improvement of 36% in sterile processing benchmarks. While all participants reported increased knowledge and confidence (quantitative), rural participants conveyed a lack of support (qualitative) to implement practice changes.ConclusionThe training course produced improvements in both rural and urban facilities. Findings highlight the importance of informing administrators of the rationale for needed improvements, ensuring funding is available to implement recommendations, and for governments to hold administrators accountable for improvements aligning with universally recommended sterile processing standards.
| S-EPMC8336156 | biostudies-literature
Project description:High-end graphics processing units (GPUs), such as NVIDIA Tesla/Fermi/Kepler series cards with thousands of cores per chip, are widely applied to high-performance computing fields in a decade. These desktop GPU cards should be installed in personal computers/servers with desktop CPUs, and the cost and power consumption of constructing a GPU cluster platform are very high. In recent years, NVIDIA releases an embedded board, called Jetson Tegra K1 (TK1), which contains 4 ARM Cortex-A15 CPUs and 192 Compute Unified Device Architecture cores (belong to Kepler GPUs). Jetson Tegra K1 has several advantages, such as the low cost, low power consumption, and high applicability, and it has been applied into several specific applications. In our previous work, a bioinformatics platform with a single TK1 (STK platform) was constructed, and this previous work is also used to prove that the Web and mobile services can be implemented in the STK platform with a good cost-performance ratio by comparing a STK platform with the desktop CPU and GPU. In this work, an embedded-based GPU cluster platform will be constructed with multiple TK1s (MTK platform). Complex system installation and setup are necessary procedures at first. Then, 2 job assignment modes are designed for the MTK platform to provide services for users. Finally, ClustalW v2.0.11 and ClustalWtk will be ported to the MTK platform. The experimental results showed that the speedup ratios achieved 5.5 and 4.8 times for ClustalW v2.0.11 and ClustalWtk, respectively, by comparing 6 TK1s with a single TK1. The MTK platform is proven to be useful for multiple sequence alignments.
| S-EPMC5555494 | biostudies-other
Project description:The purpose of the study was to develop and validate the CFD model for predicting temperature profile and determine the slowest heating zone (SHZ) during the thermal processing of Fesenjan stew. The temperature profile was recorded experimentally at a point where it was predicted to be the SHZ. The results showed that the SHZ was located at the geometric center of the containers, and the temperature reached 120.3 °C. The average temperatures of experiment versus predicted temperatures at the same positions, no significant difference were observed (p < .01). The RMSE calculation showed good agreement between simulation and experimental data (RMSE = 1.36). The container geometrical center F0 was measured 17.68 min and indicated that an additional process was applied. An 11.5 min reduction in holding time was estimated to optimize the process since the F0 of some meat and sauce-based food is about 6-7.65 min.
| S-EPMC7866580 | biostudies-literature
Project description:PURPOSE:Modern strategies for the screening and diagnosis of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) rely on universal Oral Glucose Tolerance Test (OGTT). However, they are unsustainable in low-income countries. In this study, we aimed at assessing the feasibility of a simplified diagnostic policy. METHODS:The study took place in an urban referral hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone. During an 11-month period, pregnant women were offered capillary blood test for glucose assessment. They could be screened at any time during pregnancy. GDM was diagnosed if fasting glucose was???92 mg/dl or if the OGTT was positive. The latter was prescribed only to women presenting after 24 weeks' gestation with at least one risk factor for GDM and fasting capillary glucose between 85 and 91 mg/dl. A definitive diagnosis required confirmation to this aim, women with values above the thresholds were invited to refer the next working day for repeating the test after fasting overnight. RESULTS:Overall, 7827 women were referred for screening, of whom 6872 (87%) underwent at least one capillary glucose assessment. However, 895 of those who had a positive test did not return for confirmation. Overall, a definite assessment could be done in 5799 subjects corresponding to 76% (95% CI 75-77%) of those eligible. GDM was diagnosed in 128 women (1.9%, 95% CI 1.6-2.2%). Based on an expected confirmation rate of 22% (calculated from those who referred for confirmation) in the 895 women who did not come back, one could infer that GDM would have been diagnosed in additional 197 women, raising the prevalence to 4.7% (95% CI 4.2-5.3%). CONCLUSION:Three quarters of subjects could be assessed with our approach. Data also suggest that GDM is not rare even if identification of affected cases remains challenging.
| S-EPMC7525284 | biostudies-literature