Navigating Uncertainty with Compassion: Healthcare Assistants' Reflections on Balancing COVID-19 and Routine Care through Adversity.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic created unprecedented challenges for healthcare systems around the world. Healthcare assistants played a vital role in the provision of frontline patient care during this crisis. Despite their important contribution, there exists limited research that specifically examines the healthcare assistant's experiences and perspectives of care provision during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explored healthcare assistants' caring experiences and perspectives on resilience and self-efficacy during the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong. A qualitative descriptive study with semi-structured interviews was conducted with 25 healthcare assistants from public hospitals. Interview recordings were analyzed using thematic analysis. Five main themes emerged from the data: frontline reinforcement: supporting HCAs through resourcing and education amidst the COVID-19 crisis, confronting uncertainty: building personal fortitude in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, fostering collective resilience through shared support, self-efficacy as a catalyst for adaptive growth, and paving the way for transformation. These findings advocate for the resilience and self-efficacy of healthcare assistants; this may potentially strengthen healthcare system preparedness for navigating unpredictable challenges in the future.

Health promotion and research in the Chinese community in Montreal: A model of culturally appropriate health care.

In the past three decades, rapidly changing demographic characteristics have been witnessed in western society. Concurrently, numerous culture-related studies have attested to the disparity in health services among different ethnic groups. Reports have shown contributing factors that can render main stream services inaccessible to immigrants include cultural and language barriers, adaptation difficulties, racial discrimination and lack of culturally appropriate psychosocial services. Inadequate training of health professionals regarding cross-cultural issues may hinder patient compliance and therapeutic alliances. In a paediatric practice in Montreal, prevalent health problems among Chinese families were identified to be related to cultural beliefs and psychosocial factors. These included a low breastfeeding rate (8%) among Chinese newborns, prevalent iron deficiency anemia (12%), nursing caries, social isolation, delayed diagnosis of developmental delay, learning disabilities and psychosocial problems. The participation in community research and advocacy, the development of health promotional projects with an interdisciplinary approach and the preparation of Chinese health information such as perinatal programs, infant nutrition, dental hygiene and immunization, were described. Subsequent studies in this population illustrated an increased breastfeeding rate (48%), decreased incidence of iron deficiency (2.8%) and improved self-health maintenance practices. More culturally appropriate allied health services, including the Multiculturalism Department in the Montreal Children's Hospital, have subsequently been developed for the community.In summary, identifying prevalent health problems of ethnic propensity may be the initiatives needed to develop research and health promotional projects for a target population. Comprehensive health care to different ethnic groups requires health professionals to incorporate cross-cultural issues in their services.

Collision avoidance timing analysis of DSRC-based vehicles.

Dedicated short-range communication (DSRC) has been used in prototyped vehicles to test vehicle-to-vehicle communication for collision avoidance. However, there is little study on how collision avoidance software should behave to best mitigate accident collisions. In this paper, we analyse the timing of events and how they influence software-based collision avoidance strategies. We have found that the warning strategies for collision avoidance are constrained by the timing of events such as DSRC communication latency, detection range, road condition, driver reaction and deceleration rate. With these events, we define two collision avoidance timings: critical time to avoid collision and preferred time to avoid collision, and they dictate the design of software-based collision avoidance systems.

Effect of surfactant concentration on transdermal lidocaine delivery with linker microemulsions.

A limited number of studies have been conducted to investigate the effect of surfactant concentration on microemulsion-mediated transdermal transport. Some studies suggest that increasing surfactant concentration reduces the partition of the active in the skin, and the overall transport. Other studies suggest that increasing surfactant concentration improves mass transport across membranes by increasing the number of "carriers" available for transport. To decouple these partition and mass transport effects, a three-compartment (donor, skin, receiver) mass balance model was introduced. The model has three permeation parameters, the skin-donor partition coefficient (K(sd)), the donor-skin mass transfer coefficient (k(ds)) and the skin-receiver mass transfer coefficient (k(sr)), also known as skin permeability. The model was used to fit the permeation profile of lidocaine formulated in oil-in-water (Type I) and water-in-oil (Type II) lecithin-linker microemulsions. The results show that surfactant concentration has a relatively minor effect on the mass transfer coefficients, suggesting that permeation enhancement via disruption of the structure of the skin is not a relevant mechanism in these lecithin-linker microemulsions. The most significant effect was the increase in the concentration of lidocaine in the skin with increasing surfactant concentration. For Type I systems such increase in lidocaine concentration in the skin was linked to the increase in lidocaine solubilization in the microemulsion with increasing surfactant concentration. For Type II systems, the increase in lidocaine concentration in the skin was linked to the increase in skin-donor partition. A surfactant-mediated absorption/permeation mechanism was proposed to explain the increase in lidocaine concentration in skin with increasing surfactant concentration. The penetration profiles of hydrophobic and amphiphilic fluorescence probes are consistent with the proposed mechanism.