Australian universities are challenged to provide training programs in the use of learning management systems (LMS) that assist staff both understand the software environment and use it effectively in their teaching practice. In this paper, we describe the development of an integrated professional development program designed for staff who want to use WebCT in their teaching. The program was pa...

INTRODUCTION According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations, medical staff are obliged to decontaminate the skin of the hands before every single patient contact. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study was performed by quasi-observation among the group of 188 medical staff (nurses and physicians) working in three selec...

Aggressive behaviour by psychiatric patients is a serious issue in clinical practice, and adequate management of such behaviour is required, with careful evaluation of the factors causing the aggression. To examine the characteristics of aggressive incidents by ward type, a cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted for 6 months between April 2012 and June 2013 using the Staff Observation ...

BACKGROUND Lack of adherence to antiretroviral medications is one of the key challenges for paediatric HIV care and treatment programmes. There are few hands-on opportunities for healthcare workers to gain awareness of the psychosocial and logistic challenges that caregivers face when administering daily antiretroviral therapy to children. This article describes an educational activity that all...

Fifteen hundred coronary angiograms have been performed by the staff of Harefield Hospital since 1970. Only 2 deaths have occurred in the last 1000 consecutive cases though there were 5 in the first 500 cases. This drop in the mortality is ascribed to careful attention to detail and better training of the operators. It is concluded that the Fudkin's method of coronary angiography in trained han...

Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) carriage in the hands among 109 nursing staffs of Teaching Hospital, Jaffna, Sri Lanka was screened. Of those screened, 43 (39.44%) strains of S. aureus were isolated and among that one third were MRSA. Antibiotic resistant pattern of MRSA strains were found to be highly variable. Resistance to ampicillin, cefuroxime, ciprofloxacin, netilmicin ...

Plasmid profiling was used to determine the variability of normal flora isolates of Staphylococcus epidermidis in order to evaluate the usefulness of plasmid profiling for identifying pathogens. Fifteen hospital staff members and patients repeatedly had cultures taken from the hands and nares, and multiple isolates were examined for plasmid profiles. S epidermidis isolated from the nares of 15 ...

Hand washing remains an important preventative method for making the transmission of nosocomial infections redundant. Despite awareness by health workers of the practices required and of the legislation governing hand washing, the study reported here found that compliance to these procedures was quite poor. The results of two surveys distributed to health workers and direct observation by clini...

The purpose of this study was to test the utility of the 10% rule in hand rehabilitation. The 10% rule states that the dominant hand possesses a 10% greater grip strength than the nondominant hand. This rule has been used for many years to assist therapists in setting strength goals for patients with injured hands. The sample for this study consisted of 310 male and female students, faculty, an...