International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

BACKGROUND: Simulation-based education has emerged as an effective approach in nursing education worldwide. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a surgical nursing education program based on a simulation using standardized patients and mobile applications among nursing students. METHODS: A mixed-methods design with a quasi-experimental longitudinal approach and focus group interviews was employed. The data were collected from 130 third-year nursing students at three different time points who were equally divided into experimental and control groups...

Research has shown that physical activity has a range of benefits for people living with Parkinson's (PLwP), improving muscle strength, balance, flexibility, and walking, as well as non-motor symptoms such as mood. Parkinson's Beats is a form of cardio-drumming, specifically adapted for PLwP, and requires no previous experience nor skills. Nineteen PLwP (aged between 55 and 80) took part in the regular Parkinson's Beats sessions in-person or online. Focus group discussions took place after twelve weeks to understand the impacts of Parkinson's Beats...

Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA) is a rare form of young-onset dementia that causes early visuospatial and visuoperceptual deficits. The symptom profile of Posterior Cortical Atrophy leads to very specific care needs for those affected, who often rely on informal caregivers (including friends and family). Rare dementia support groups can be useful for both patients and their caregivers to assist with knowledge sharing, psychoeducation, and the provision of psychosocial support. Despite this, few such support groups exist...

During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, immigrants were among the most socially vulnerable in Western countries. The Chinese diaspora in Canada were one such group due to the widespread cultural stigma surrounding their purported greater susceptibility to transmit and become infected by COVID-19. This paper aims to understand the social vulnerability of the Chinese diaspora in the Greater Toronto Area, Canada, during the first wave of COVID-19 from an explanation of their risk perception and threat appraisal of risk communication...

Within the field of research on the promotion of teachers' social and emotional competence, the present paper illustrates preliminary evidence of the efficacy of a new training program named "ME4YOU" aimed at supporting teachers' self-reflexive competences to deal with the emotional and relational dimensions of teaching, with constant and continuous attention towards underlining the close connection between the way teachers perform as professionals at work and the way they function as individuals in their personal life...

Rapid urbanisation exacerbates health and wellbeing disparities in vulnerable contexts and underscores the imperative need to develop innovative and participatory co-creation approaches to understand and address the specificities of these contexts. This paper presents a method to develop an assessment framework that integrates top-down dimensions with bottom-up perspectives to monitor the impact of inclusive health and wellbeing interventions tailored to the neighbourhood's needs in Las Palmeras, a vulnerable neighbourhood in Cordoba (Spain)...

The negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health has been widely demonstrated; however, few studies have investigated the psychological processes involved in this impact, including core beliefs violation, meaning-making disruption, interpersonal support, or one's relational functioning. This study explored the mental health of 215 Italian adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war. By administering a set of questionnaires, several cognitive and emotional variables were investigated, including core belief violation, meaning attribution to the pandemic and war, attachment, and emotion regulation, social media addiction, and relationships with significant others and teachers...

The Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21) has been used in various countries to assess the mental states of individuals. The objectives of this study were to validate the DASS-21 for use in Guam, an island that endures a high burden of mental health challenges, such as suicide, and examine the predictive impact of selected health indicators on DASS-21 variables. Three years of data (2017-2019) were pooled from the Pacific Islands Cohort of College Students (PICCS) study conducted annually at the University of Guam...

BACKGROUND: Access to appropriate healthcare is essential for children's healthy development. This is lacking in rural and remote areas, impacting health outcomes. Despite efforts to improve access for these communities, to date, no review has systematically mapped the literature on allied health models of care for children with developmental needs. This scoping review seeks to address this knowledge gap. METHODS: Adhering to the PRISMA-ScR and Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines, a systematic search was conducted...

Social-emotional learning (SEL) is a rapidly growing field of research that has garnered significant attention in recent years. Each facet of SEL research in fields such as education, mental health, and developmental research has used specific methodologies and terms in their narrow research focus. In education specifically, where the most SEL research has been produced, many frameworks have implementation requirements. The lack of a framework focused on overarching themes without implementation requirements prevents the fields from coming together to compile and compare research and progress to create parent-, adult-, or mental health-specific SEL programs...

Violence against paramedics is widely recognized as a serious, but underreported, problem. While injurious physical attacks on paramedics are generally reported, non-physical violence is less likely to be documented. Verbal abuse can be very distressing, particularly if the harassment targets personal or cultural identities, such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. Leveraging a novel, point-of-event reporting process, our objective was to estimate the prevalence of harassment on identity grounds against paramedics in a single paramedic service in Ontario, Canada, and assess its potentially differential impact on emotional distress...

Children with mental illness commonly live with caregivers who suffer from mental illness. Integrated mental-health-treatment approaches can provide more convenient and comprehensive care for families. This case report describes family-based treatment (FBT) for one parent/child dyad. The parent was a 37-year-old female with a history of anxiety and major depressive disorder and concern for symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The child was an 8-year-old female with generalized anxiety disorder and concern for ADHD and behavioral problems...

Academic medical institutions seek to recruit and retain a diverse workforce to foster equitable, supportive environments in which early-stage investigators, especially those who are underrepresented in medicine, can thrive. Intersectionality is a critical theoretical framework rooted in Black feminist activism and scholarship that elucidates how power and privilege are differentially structured for groups at different intersectional sociodemographic positions. As a dynamic method of analyzing multiple axes of power and inequality, intersectionality has the potential to offer a critical lens through which to view the mentor-mentee relationship...

The aim of this study was to investigate the trend in the prevalence of overweight and obese adults in São Paulo, Brazil, between 2006 and 2019 across chronic diseases and the domains of physical activity. A descriptive retrospective study was carried out on the trend in the prevalence of 26.612 overweight and obese adults (10.150 men and 16.462 women). All data analyzed were based on information from the national system for monitoring risk factors called Protective and Risk Factors for Chronic Diseases by Telephone Survey-VIGITEL...

INTRODUCTION: Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) can be caused by a number of microorganisms that vary greatly in size, life cycle, clinical manifestations, and sensitivity to available treatments. Transmission of STIs can occur during unprotected (or condomless) sexual contact and through the exchange of body fluids during any type of activity. The prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases remains high in the world, despite diagnostic and therapeutic improvements for these infectious diseases that rapidly eliminate the contagiousness of patients...

The prevalence of cardiovascular risk factors (CVRFs) in the older adults population and their specific impact on their cognitive profiles still requires further research. For this purpose, a cross-sectional study was carried out to describe the presence of CVRFs and their association with cognitive performance in a sample of older adults (65-85 years old) with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Participants ( n = 185) were divided into three groups concerning their cardiovascular risk level determined by the presence of different CVRFs, including Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), dyslipidemia, hypertension, and obesity...

Standardized suicide mortality rates per 100,000 population (SMRs) in Japan consistently decreased from 2009-2019, but these decreasing trends were reversed to increase in 2020. To clarify the mechanisms of recent increasing suicide in Japan, temporal fluctuations of SMRs disaggregated by sex and employment status (employed and unemployed individuals) and labor indices such as working hours, wages, and regular employment opportunity index (REO) from January 2012 to June 2023 were analyzed using interrupted time-series analysis...

Loneliness, depression, and cognitive decline are pressing concerns among older adults. This study examines the association between leisure travel participation and these health outcomes in older adults, aiming to provide further evidence of the benefits of leisure travel. Using nationally representative historical data from the 2006 household survey of the Health and Retirement Study, this study conducted a series of regression analyses to investigate the relationship between traveling and the three health outcomes, adjusting for age, sex, race, marital status, education, total wealth, annual income, and difficulty with daily activities...

The SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic prompted governments, institutions, and researchers to investigate its impact, developing strategies based on general indicators to make the most precise predictions possible. Approaches based on epidemiological models were used but the outcomes demonstrated forecasting with uncertainty due to insufficient or missing data. Besides the lack of data, machine-learning models including random forest, support vector regression, LSTM, Auto-encoders, and traditional time-series models such as Prophet and ARIMA were employed in the task, achieving remarkable results with limited effectiveness...

BACKGROUND: American Indian and Alaska Native people (AI/AN) bear a disproportionate burden of diabetes. Growing evidence shows significant associations between several acute diabetes complications and dementia among diabetes patients. However, little is known about these relationships among AI/AN adults. Here, we aim to investigate these associations among AI/AN adults. METHODS: This cross-sectional study extracted data from the Indian Health Service's (IHS) National Data Warehouse and related administrative databases...