Service-Learning, Movies, and Infectious Diseases: Implementation of an Active Educational Program in Microbiology as a Tool for Engagement in Social Justice.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Linares M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8276174 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundSocial media can be used to engage consumers in hospital service design and quality improvement (QI) activities, however its uptake may be limited by a lack of guidance to support implementation. This article presents the perceived barriers and enablers in using social media for consumer engagement derived from an interview study with public hospital stakeholders.MethodsSemi-structured interviews with 26 Australian hospital service providers and consumer representatives. Data were analysed using a deductive content analysis method.ResultsData were collected between October 2019 and April 2020. Facebook was the platform most commonly used for consumer engagement activities. Barriers and enablers to social media-based consumer engagement were identified. The barrier themes were (1) fears and concerns; (2) lack of skills and resources for social media engagement; (3) lack of organisational processes and support; and (4) problems with social media platforms and the changing social media landscape. The enabler themes were: (1) hospitals facilitating access and use; (2) making discussions safe; (3) cultivating a social media community; and (4) building on success.ConclusionUsing social media to facilitate consumer engagement in hospital service design and QI activities is feasible and acceptable to service providers and consumers. Hospitals and their executives can create a supportive environment for social media-based engagement activities through developing clear governance systems and providing training and support to all users. Consumers need to be involved in co-designing social media-based activities and determining which forms of engagement are accessible and acceptable. For some consumers and service providers, barriers such as a lack of resources and distrust of social media companies might mean that social media-based engagement will be less acceptable for them. Because of this it is important that hospitals provide complementary methods of engagement (eg, face-to-face) alongside social media-based methods.
| S-EPMC9808274 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionEngaging service users or consumers in quality improvement or implementing a new service is important across settings and may reduce health inequities. Implementation strategies leveraging consumer engagement are neither commonly used nor robustly operationalized in implementation science. Implementers (e.g., middle managers, facilitators) want to involve consumers in implementation activities, but do not always feel confident in how to proceed. We developed a compendium of tools called Consumer Voice to guide others how to engage consumers in design/delivery of implementation strategies. Although generalizable to other settings, we developed Consumer Voice within the context of implementing suicide prevention treatments in healthcare to reach rural U.S. military veterans, as there are suicide inequities for people in rural areas.MethodsWe developed Consumer Voice using a multistep process and human-centered design methods. In between steps, a design team met to generate insights from data, and decide which prototypes to create/refine. In preliminary work, we conducted a scan of examples in healthcare of patient engagement in implementation activities and interviewed two implementation experts about preferred learning styles. In Step 1, we interviewed 26 participants with experience in community engagement, implementation, or lived experience as a rural U.S. veteran with suicidal thoughts/behavior. In Step 2, 11 implementers beta tested prototypes then share feedback in focus groups. In Step 3, we reconvened participants from prior steps to review tools and, using nominal group technique, prioritized remaining recommendations.ResultsConsumer Voice is online, modular, and nonlinear for self-guided learning tailored to beginner, intermediate, or advanced experience with consumer engagement. Tools consist of slides, audiovisual content with written text, and templates. Findings indicated there is not one "right" way to engage consumers in implementation activities, rather that implementers wanted tools showcasing core principles for consumer engagement and practical ideas.DiscussionConsumer Voice can be used by implementers to reflect and decide on how to apply consumer engagement implementation strategies to improve equitable dissemination and uptake of evidence-based practices. Most insights generated by user data were explicitly to build trust between consumers and professionals representing institutions, which may be one component to reducing healthcare inequities.
| S-EPMC10407803 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background: An on call infectious diseases (ID) pharmacist may be used as a resource for physicians, pharmacists, and other health care providers to help answer questions regarding anti-infective agents. Objective: To assess type, requestor, resources dedicated, and temporal trends of questions received through an ID pharmacist on call pager program. A secondary objective was to gather insight as to how this information was utilized to inform educational initiatives. Methods: This was a retrospective study of questions received by the ID pharmacist on call via pager at a large academic medical center. Question data were documented in a central database and analyzed to assess temporal trends and question type, and qualitatively analyzed to determine areas for targeted educational efforts. Results: The ID pharmacist on call recorded 545 questions during the 1-year study period; questions were composed of various antimicrobial agent-related queries, including antibiotic spectrum and selection (n = 251, 46.1%), dosing of antimicrobials (n = 195, 35.8%), and drug monitoring (n = 26, 4.8%). Targeted educational initiatives secondary to questions received included pharmacist education regarding the use of polymyxin antibiotics and antibiotic dosing protocol updates. Conclusions: An ID pharmacist on call pager program was utilized to inquire about antibiotic spectrum and selection for the majority of questions. Records of questions received may be utilized to direct educational efforts and create or revise targeted resources for pharmacists and other clinicians.
| S-EPMC5998531 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Service learning is defined as a strategy in which students apply what they have learned in the classroom to a community service project. Many educators would agree that students often learn best through teaching others. This premise was the motivation for a new service-learning project in which undergraduate microbiology students developed and taught hands-on microbiology lessons to local elementary school children. The lessons included teaching basic information about microbes, disease transmission, antibiotics, vaccines, and methods of disease prevention. This service-learning project benefitted the college students by enforcing their knowledge of microbiology and provided them an opportunity to reach out to children within their community. This project also benefitted the local schools by teaching the younger students about microbes, infections, and handwashing. In this paper, I discuss the development and implementation of this new microbiology service-learning project, as well as the observed impact it had on everyone involved.
| S-EPMC4798824 | biostudies-literature
Project description:While the COVID-19 pandemic has caused major educational disruptions, it has also catalyzed innovation in service-learning as a real-time response to pandemic-related problems. The limited number of qualified providers was primed to restrict SARS-CoV-2 vaccination efforts. Thus, New York State temporarily allowed healthcare professional trainees to vaccinate, enabling medical students to support an overwhelmed healthcare system and contribute to the public health crisis. Here, we describe a service-learning vaccination program directed towards underserved communities. A faculty-led curriculum prepared medical students to communicate with patients about COVID-19 vaccines and to administer intramuscular injections. Qualified students were deployed to public vaccination clinics located in under-served neighborhoods in collaboration with an established community partner. Throughout the program, 128 students worked at 103 local events, helping to administer 26,889 vaccine doses. Analysis of a retrospective survey administered to participants revealed the program taught fundamental clinical skills and was a transformative service-learning experience. As new virus variants emerge and nations battle recurrent waves of infection, the need for effective vaccination plans continues to grow. The program described here offers a novel framework that academic medical centers could adapt to increase vaccine access in their local community and provide students with a uniquely meaningful educational experience.
| S-EPMC9324302 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC9113730 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionTrafficked youth experience complex health issues such as substance abuse, severe physical trauma, and sexual health problems, with many entering trafficking between 15 and 17 years old. There is increasing awareness of the need to educate pediatric health care providers on identifying and aiding trafficked children; however, critical gaps in the literature exist regarding educational sessions specific to the human trafficking of pediatric patients. Our objective was to implement and evaluate a survivor-informed educational session for pediatric resident physicians to improve identification of and assistance to trafficked youth in the clinical setting.MethodsWe designed an educational session on human trafficking, which included a 60-minute interactive didactic presentation and distribution of a point-of-care reference tool, in collaboration with a survivor of human trafficking, for 59 pediatric trainees in 2019. We utilized pre/post knowledge assessments. Data analysis included descriptive statistics and Fisher exact analysis.ResultsOf 99 total eligible residents, 59 (59%) participated. Statistically significant increases in correct identification of hypothetical trafficked youth and next steps for intervention were observed. Over 80% of participants reported comfort with defining, recognizing, referring to, and understanding health consequences of human trafficking on the postassessment, compared to 25% on the preassessment (p < .001).DiscussionOur educational session resulted in statistically significant increased comfort in identification of human trafficking victims and can be replicated at other institutions. The point-of-care reference tool-which can be adapted for use in different settings-can guide pediatric residents in managing suspected trafficked youth in the clinical setting.
| S-EPMC8435556 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Micro-organisms play a central role in every ecosystem and in the global biomass cycle. They are strongly involved in many fields of human interest, from medicine to the food industry and waste control. Nevertheless, most micro-organisms remain almost unknown, and nearly 99% of them have not yet been successfully cultured in vitro. Therefore, new approaches and new tools must be developed in order to understand the collective behaviour of microbial communities in any natural or artificial setting. In particular, theoretical and practical methodologies to deal with such systems at a mesoscopic level of description (covering the range from 100 to 10(8) cells) are required. Individual-based modelling (IBM) has become a widely used tool for describing complex systems made up of autonomous entities, such as ecosystems and social networks. Individual-based models (IBMs) provide some advantages over the traditional whole-population models: (a) they are bottom-up approaches, so they describe the behaviour of a system as a whole by establishing procedural rules for the individuals and for their interactions, and thus allow more realistic assumptions for the model of the individuals than population models do; (b) they permit the introduction of randomness and individual variability, so they can reproduce the diversity found in real systems; and (c) they can account for individual adaptive behaviour to their environmental conditions, so the evolution of the whole system arises from the dynamics that govern individuals in their pursuit of optimal fitness. However, they also present some drawbacks: they lack the clarity of continuous models and may easily become rambling, which makes them difficult to analyse and communicate. All in all, IBMs supply a holistic description of microbial systems and their emerging properties. They are specifically appropriate to deal with microbial communities in non-steady states, and spatially explicit IBMs are particularly appropriate to study laboratory and natural microbiological systems with spatial heterogeneity. In this paper, we review IBM methodology applied to microbiology. We also present some results obtained from the application of Individual Discrete Simulations, an IBM of ours, to the study of bacterial communities, yeast cultures and Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes in vitro cultures of Plasmodium falciparum-infected erythrocytes.
| S-EPMC2577750 | biostudies-other
Project description:BackgroundInnovative models of family engagement and support are needed in the intensive care unit (ICU) during times of restricted visitation such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Limited understanding of the factors affecting the uptake and outcomes of different family support models hinders the implementation of best practices. We aimed to conduct a rapid pre-implementation evaluation of stakeholder-perceived facilitators and barriers to design implementation strategies to support a novel program using medical students to facilitate family-centered care in the ICU.MethodsWe conducted a 2-step process. In step 1, we gathered contextual data via interview-style open-ended questions sent to clinicians and navigator stakeholders via email. We used electronic data collection due to the physical distancing requirements, the need to prioritize brief data collection for respondent burden, and the need for rapid knowledge gain. A codebook based on the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), an integrated framework from the field of implementation science, was used to analyze the findings. In step 2, a pilot of the intervention was implemented with 3 navigators over 2 weeks. Implementation strategies were developed to target barriers identified by the pre-implementation evaluation.ResultsFourteen (70%) of the identified stakeholders responded to the survey. Ten constructs encompassing all five CFIR domains were present in responses as implementation influencers, with the Intervention domain most frequently represented. Through these results and operational feedback from navigators during the pilot period, stakeholders selected multiple implementation strategies: audit and provide feedback, develop educational materials, conduct ongoing training, promote adaptability, assess and redesign workflow, identify and prepare champions, and engage community resources.ConclusionsWe demonstrated how a conceptually based pre-implementation program evaluation can be used to rapidly inform optimal implementation strategies. We report key factors to inform design and implementation strategies for a novel ICU family engagement navigator program that may be useful to others wishing to adopt similar programs.
| S-EPMC7724442 | biostudies-literature
Project description:New educational resources are being implemented as an initiative to foster learning. In order to contribute to the toolkit of innovative educational resources, we developed a microbiology comic book. The aim of this comic is to provide educators with a fun, accessible, and rigorous way to generate awareness of the invisible world that surrounds us and that inhabits us. Bacteria have a reputation as harmful and disgusting entities. Mass media, with advertisements of disinfectants, soaps, and house cleaning products, are sending a distorted message about microbes. We must debunk these misconceptions and emphasize the importance of microorganisms, and particularly bacteria, in the environment and our lives. Education is the means to this end, and therefore this comic is intended to help educators teach microbiology in an attractive, accurate, and straightforward way. Here, we present this educational tool and give some tips on the different themes that can be addressed in the classroom using this resource.
| S-EPMC6508913 | biostudies-literature