Building a safety culture for infection prevention and control adherence at Howard Springs: A workplace survey.

BACKGROUND: Building a safety culture is essential to facilitate infection prevention and control (IPC) adherence in workplaces. We aimed to explore perceptions, barriers and facilitators to IPC procedures by the Australian Medical Assistance Team (AUSMAT) at Howard Springs International Quarantine Facility (HSIQF). METHODS: We performed a descriptive analysis of a cross-sectional survey administered to the AUSMAT employed at HSQIF from October 2020 to April 2021. We described motivation, training and compliance to IPC adherence and Likert scales described the level of agreement to the success of IPC procedures across the domains of communication, risk, trust, safety and environment, from the individual, team and organisational perspective. RESULTS: There were 101 participants (response rate 59%, 101/170) and 70% (71/101) were clinical. There was strong agreement to the success of IPC procedures, with a median 4 (agree) or 5 (strongly agree) across each domain and perspective of the 67 Likert items. Clinical staff reported slightly higher agreement than non-clinical staff across Likert items. To improve IPC compliance, most reported that daily training should be provided (77/97, 79%) and daily training was very or extremely effective (91/97, 93%). Participants were motivated by protecting self, friends, family and the community rather than workplace pressures. Barriers to IPC compliance were the ambient environment and fatigue. CONCLUSIONS: A safety culture was successfully built at HSQIF to optimise IPC adherence whilst managing multiple hazards including prevention of COVID-19 transmission. Strategies implemented by AUSMAT at the quarantine facility may inform the development of safety culture in other settings.

Regional scale patterns of fine root lifespan and turnover under current and future climate.

Fine root dynamics control a dominant flux of carbon from plants and into soils and mediate potential uptake and cycling of nutrients and water in terrestrial ecosystems. Understanding of these patterns is needed to accurately describe critical processes like productivity and carbon storage from ecosystem to global scales. However, limited observations of root dynamics make it difficult to define and predict patterns of root dynamics across broad spatial scales. Here, we combine species-specific estimates of fine root dynamics with a model that predicts current distribution and future suitable habitat of temperate tree species across the eastern United States (US). Estimates of fine root lifespan and turnover are based on empirical observations and relationships with fine root and whole-plant traits and apply explicitly to the fine root pool that is relatively short-lived and most active in nutrient and water uptake. Results from the combined model identified patterns of faster root turnover rates in the North Central US and slower turnover rates in the Southeastern US. Portions of Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania were also predicted to experience >10% increases in root turnover rates given potential shifts in tree species composition under future climate scenarios while root turnover rates in other portions of the eastern US were predicted to decrease. Despite potential regional changes, the average estimates of root lifespan and turnover for the entire study area remained relatively stable between the current and future climate scenarios. Our combined model provides the first empirically based, spatially explicit, and spatially extensive estimates of fine root lifespan and turnover and is a potentially powerful tool allowing researchers to identify reasonable approximations of forest fine root turnover in areas where no direct observations are available. Future efforts should focus on reducing uncertainty in estimates of root dynamics by better understanding how climate and soil factors drive variability in root dynamics of different species.