DESIGN: A cross-sectional study performed using an anonymous online questionnaire distributed through social media, email and the Department of Social Welfare.
SETTING: Malaysian families were invited to answer the questionnaires. The sampling was performed between 12 May 2020 and 9 June 2020.
INTERVENTION: The psychological impact was assessed using the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) and Children's Revised Impact of Event Scale (CRIES). The mental health status was assessed using the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) 21.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: (1) Psychological impact on Malaysian families. (2) Prevalence of mental health status of Malaysian families during COVID-19 pandemic.
RESULT: A total of 409 Malaysian families have responded (409 parents and 348 children), 154 respondents (38%) reported high psychological impact (score 14) for psychological construct and 189 respondents (46%) reported high psychological impact (score 6) for behavioural construct. A significantly higher proportion of respondents with not permanent employment status of the family lead reported high psychological impact. The prevalence of anxiety reported from family respondents was 23%. Forty-five children answered the DASS-21 questionnaire; 28.5% reported anxiety, 31.4% reported depression and 13.3% reported stress. The job security status of the family lead was found to be the predictive factor for the mean total IES-R score (psychological construct) and ethnicity for mean total CRIES-8 and CRIES-13.
CONCLUSION: Rates of depression and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic were high. Findings suggest that urgent measures to ensure job security among Malaysian families are important to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on psychosocial and mental health outcomes.
METHODS: A cross-sectional observational study was conducted using an online questionnaire. Community pharmacists in Malaysia were invited to participate in the study via emails. The questionnaire was structured based on the Malaysian Community Pharmacy Benchmarking Guidelines, the five practice principles of pharmaceutical care by the American Pharmacists Association and other studies. The online questionnaire was opened for 6 months, from April to September 2018. A reminder to participate was sent via email to the community pharmacists every fortnight.
RESULTS: A total of 420 community pharmacists responded to the online questionnaire. Besides essential services such as treatment for minor illness, medicine dispensing and counselling, most of the respondents were providing health screening and monitoring (99.5%), selection and recommendation of health supplements (90.5%), patient medication review (68.8%), weight management (52.4%) and counselling on smoking cessation (51.0%). More than half (53.3%) of the respondents reported that they were providing pharmaceutical care services to patients with chronic diseases. Based on the practice principles of pharmaceutical care, the respondents were involved in patients' data collection (23.3%), medical information evaluation (18.6%), formulating a drug therapy plan (9.3%), implementing a drug therapy plan (4.5%), and monitoring and modifying the plan (18.3%). Lack of separation between prescribing and dispensing was perceived as the main barrier to the implementation of pharmaceutical care services by a majority of the respondents (84.0%).
CONCLUSIONS: The present study found that pharmaceutical care services provided by community pharmacists in Malaysia were inadequate compared to international practice principles. Areas that need improvement included collaboration with patients' other health care providers; more proactive management of patient's medicine regimen; having proper patient monitoring and follow-up mechanisms, and documentation.
METHODS: A multi-stage sampling design was adopted for the study and data collection took place in three phases in 2010, 2011, and 2012 in the Northern region of Malaysia. Face-to-face interviews involved respondents answering both 13 TTO and 15 VAS valuation tasks were carried out. Both additive and multiplicative model specifications were explored using the valuation data. Model performance was evaluated using out-of-sample predictive accuracy by applying the cross-validation technique. The distribution of the model values was also graphically compared on Bland-Altman plots and kernel density distribution curves.
RESULTS: Data from 630 and 611 respondents were included for analyses using TTO and VAS models, respectively. In terms of main-effects specifications, cross-validation results revealed a slight superiority of multiplicative models over its additive counterpart in modelling TTO values. However, both main-effects models had roughly equal predictive accuracy for VAS models. The non-linear multiplicative model with I32 term, MULT7_TTO, performed best for TTO models; while, the linear additive model with N3 term, ADD11_VAS, outperformed the other VAS models. Multiplicative modelling neither altered the dimensional rankings of importance nor did it change the distribution of values of the health states.
CONCLUSION: Using EQ-5D-3L valuation data, multiplicative modelling was shown to improve out-of-sample predictive accuracy of TTO models but not of VAS models.
OBJECTIVE: To quantify the relationship between social jetlag and CRF, independent of other sleep characteristics.
METHODS: This cross-sectional sample includes 276 New Zealand adolescents (14-18 years, 52.5% female). CRF (VO2max) was estimated from a 20-m multi-stage shuttle run. Average sleep duration, sleep disturbances, social jetlag, physical activity, and the number of bedroom screens were estimated from validated self-report surveys. Social jetlag is the difference in hours between the midpoint of sleep during weekdays (school) and weekend days (free). Combined and sex-stratified linear regression assessed the association between sleep outcomes and CRF, controlling for relevant covariates.
RESULTS: Males slept 17.6 min less, had less sleep disturbances, and a 25.1-min greater social jetlag than their female peers (all p
Objective: This study aimed to develop and validate the questionnaire on end-of-life care knowledge, perceptions, and preferences among hemodialysis (HD) patients.
Subject and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among 92 HD patients from 14 centers. It involved four phases including (i) developing the questionnaire and pretesting, (ii) improving and editing and redistribution to respondents for the pilot study, (iii) factor analysis (FA), and (iv) internal consistency reliability testing.
Results: The result of FA with varimax rotation performed identified three domains for the 41 items, with 10-20 items in each domain. All the 41 analyzed items had a good factor loading of more than 0.4 with the lowest value of 0.421 and were nicely fit into three respective domains: knowledge, perceptions, and preferences. Internal consistency reliability analysis Cronbach's α values were between 0.5 and 0.7 for all domains, higher than the level set for this study (0.5).
Conclusion: The questionnaire was successfully validated and considered a useful tool in describing ESRD patients' end-of-life care knowledge, perceptions, and preferences.
RESULTS: Of the 141 participants, most were mothers (90.8%) and had a full-time job (55.3%). Most of them had adequate medication-related knowledge (71.6%) and an appropriate administration practice (83.0%). The majority of them (83.0%) also rated themselves as adherent to medication administration. The participants with a child above 5 years of age (91.2%) were found to have a better practice than those with younger children (75.3%) in medication administration (p = 0.012). However, those with a child taking two (adjusted OR: 12.53) or three (adjusted OR: 8.29) medications, getting their refills from private health institutions apart from this hospital (adjusted OR = 7.06) and having multiple illnesses (adjusted OR = 21.25) were more likely to be not adherent to medication administration.
CONCLUSION: Caregivers of chronically ill children in Malaysia generally have sufficient knowledge and an appropriate practice of medication administration at home. Yet, strategies to improve the adherence to medication administration, particularly in those who care for children with complicated health conditions, are warranted.