Introduction: Cervical cancer ranks as the second most frequent cancer among women in Malaysia. Although a cervical screening program has been introduced since 1960s and is provided free of charge in all government health facilities, the coverage and adherence rate to recommendation among Malaysian women remains low.
Objectives: To determine the proportion of non-adherence to Pap smear screening guidelines and its associated factors among women attending a health clinic in Malaysia.
Method: A cross sectional study involving 316 women aged 20 to 65 years who had undergone a Pap smear. Universal sampling method was applied to select participants among women who attended the selected health clinic from January 2013 to May 2013. A self-administered questionnaire was used to obtain the socio-demographic characteristics, socio-health data and perceptions about cervical cancer and Pap smear screening. The data was analysed using descriptive statistics and multiple logistic regression.
Result: The proportion of non-adherence to Pap smear screening was 90.5%. Age, marital status, duration of marriage, education level, employment, household income and number of children were not significantly associated with non-adherence. Perceived severity, perceived susceptibility, perceived benefit, perceived barrier and cues to action did not show significant association with non-adherence to Pap smear screening.
Conclusion: Non-adherence to Pap smear screening was high among Malaysian women. Measures should be taken to increase Pap smear screening coverage in our country. Other factors beyond Health Belief Model that influence Pap smear screening practice among Malaysian women should be explored.
In recent years, it is evident that there is a surge in photovoltaic (PV) systems installations on buildings. It is concerning that PV system related fire incidents have been reported throughout the years. Like any other electrical power system, PV systems pose fire and electrical hazards when at fault. As a consequence, PV fires compromised the safety of emergency responders. Therefore, the objective of this review is to evaluate the elements of firefighters' safety practices and subsequently collate the best safety practices for local fire rescue and firefighters in the event of PV fires. Out of 264 documents, only 20 publications were identified as 'closely related' and were systematically reviewed to evaluate firefighter safety practices from a scholarly perspective. Only 3% of the 20 publications reviewed, discussed the safety practices during PV fires. Thirteen safety practice key points were extracted from the reviewed documents, with nine critical findings highlighted as the hallmark of safety practices during PV fire for firefighters. The lack of academic journals discussing the fire safety aspects proves that there is a low interest in this field which is in dire need of further study and exploration to adhere with the PV population in ensuring a reliable emergency operation to minimize losses or injuries due to accidents.
During the initial phase of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, there was a critical need to create a valid and reliable screening and surveillance for university staff and students. Consequently, 11 medical experts participated in this cross-sectional study to judge three risk categories of either low, medium, or high, for all 1536 possible combinations of 11 key COVID-19 predictors. The independent experts' judgement on each combination was recorded via a novel dashboard-based rating method which presented combinations of these predictors in a dynamic display within Microsoft Excel. The validated instrument also incorporated an innovative algorithm-derived deduction for efficient rating tasks. The results of the study revealed an ordinal-weighted agreement coefficient of 0.81 (0.79 to 0.82, p-value < 0.001) that reached a substantial class of inferential benchmarking. Meanwhile, on average, the novel algorithm eliminated 76.0% of rating tasks by deducing risk categories based on experts' ratings for prior combinations. As a result, this study reported a valid, complete, practical, and efficient method for COVID-19 health screening via a reliable combinatorial-based experts' judgement. The new method to risk assessment may also prove applicable for wider fields of practice whenever a high-stakes decision-making relies on experts' agreement on combinations of important criteria.