METHODS: The Preventing Infections in Neonates (PIN) collaborative aimed to reach a 50% decrease in neonatal HA-BSI rates for a 27-bed Level IV neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Using quality improvement (QI) methodologies, a multidisciplinary cross-cultural collaborative implemented phased and bundled interventions from July 2017 to September 2019. Descriptive statistics and statistical process control charts were used to analyze infection rates.
RESULTS: There were 916 admissions, 19,812 patient-days, and 4264 central line days in the NICU during the project period. Monthly baseline preintervention HA-BSI median rate was 3.95/1000 patient-days and decreased to 1.73/1000 patient-days (56% change) during the bundled interventions. Quarterly HA-BSI rates also decreased from the preintervention median of 4.5/1000 patient-days to 3.3/1000 patient-days during the intervention period (IRR 0.73; 95%CI 0.39, 1.36). Staff were highly compliant with hand hygiene and environmental cleaning. Through project efforts, compliance with bundle elements increased from 25% at baseline to a peak of 97% for central line (CL) insertion checklists and from 13% to a peak of 56% for CL maintenance checklists.
CONCLUSIONS: Unit-based bundled interventions can reduce neonatal HA-BSI in limited resource settings. Future studies can assess similar practices in other units and the impact of the pandemic on interventions to reduce HA-BSIs.
OBJECTIVE: The present study aims to adapt and empirically validate the ten-items group-level safety climate scale with the purpose of replacing negatively worded items with positively worded ones after a thorough validation process. The present study is one of the first to propose an empirically validated group-level safety climate scale that uses positive items to measure the safety climate construct.
METHODS: Study 1 was conducted using a sample of 135 participants. Study 2 used a time-lagged approach to validate the scale, with a sample of 173 production workers from six oil and gas organizations in Malaysia. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) method was used to test the hypothesized relationships.
RESULTS: In Study 1, the results of the exploratory factor analysis showed good reliability for the revised scale. In Study 2, the results of the PLS-SEM analysis demonstrated a positive relationship between safety climate and safety behaviors, thereby validating the revised and translated scale of safety climate.
CONCLUSION: The revised safety climate scale will not only improve data quality, but it will also increase response rates. Additionally, the revised scale will assist managers in understanding the true perceptions of safety climate in their organization, regardless of the cultural context in which the scale is used.
SUBJECTS: The recruitment of innate and adaptive immune cells in PD initiates the acute and following chronic inflammatory processes. The inflamed tissues, on the other hand, can be restored if the anti-inflammatory lineages are predominantly established in the periodontal tissues. Therefore, we aimed to review the published literature to provide an overview of the existing knowledge about the role of immune cells in PD, as well as their possible therapeutic applications.
RESULTS: Experimental studies showed that drugs/systems that negatively regulate inflammatory cells in the body, as well as interventions aimed at increasing the number of anti-inflammatory cells such as Tregs and Bregs, can both help in the healing process of PD.
CONCLUSION: Targeting immune cells or their positive/negative manipulations has been demonstrated to be an effective therapeutic method. However, to use this sort of immunotherapy in humans, further pre-clinical investigations, as well as randomized clinical trials, are required.