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Biomedical subjects

Y Quintana

Publications and source records attributed to Y Quintana.

5 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Effective hand hygiene education with the use of flipcharts in a hospital in El Salvador.

In developing countries, continuing education for healthcare staff may be limited by staff shortages and lack of sophisticated means of delivery. These limitations have implications for compliance with an important infection control practice, namely good hand hygiene. A comparison was made between the efficacy of two educational tools commonly used in healthcare and practical sanitation settings in developing countries, i.e. videotapes and flipcharts, in delivering hand hygiene education to 67 nurses in a paediatric hospital in El Salvador. Efficacy was measured on the basis of scores obtained in pre- and post-training tests consisting of 10 multiple-choice questions. Half of the nurses received video-based instruction and half received instruction via flipcharts. Both methods of instruction increased participants' knowledge of good hand hygiene, and the extent of knowledge acquisition by the two methods was similar. Feedback obtained from flipchart users six months after training indicated that most of the respondents used the flipchart to teach hand hygiene to patients' families (62.5%), patients (50%) and healthcare workers (43.8%). Flipchart users ranked flipcharts as their favourite educational tool. Flipcharts offer an economical, easy-to-use, non-technological yet effective alternative to videotapes for delivering education in developing countries. Although the use of flipcharts requires a skilled and well-trained instructor, flipcharts could be used more widely to deliver education in resource-poor settings.

Audiovisual Aids↗
PubMed2001

Evidence-based preventive practice guidelines. Qualitative study of useful resources on the Internet.

OBJECTIVE: To explore family physicians' perspectives on how best to provide evidence-based preventive clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) to physicians on the Internet. DESIGN: Focus groups. SETTING: A large, urban centre and a rural community hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Thirty-four of more than 150 family physicians who subscribed to an e-mail discussion group. METHOD: Qualitative survey of four focus groups, analysis of transcripts and researchers' notes. MAIN FINDINGS: Four themes characterized participants' preferences for disseminating preventive CPGs on the Internet: content expectations; quick, easy access to information; trustworthiness of information; and implications for clinical practice. CONCLUSION: Physicians want quick, easy access to trustworthy information. A website for preventive CPGs with these characteristics would be a useful resource.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Preventive health information on the Internet. Qualitative study of consumers' perspectives.

OBJECTIVE: To explore how best to make high-quality preventive health information available to consumers on the Internet. DESIGN: Focus groups. SETTING: Three urban workplaces and one local hospital with patients from a rural family medical practice. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-two men and 17 women patients. METHOD: Qualitative survey of four focus groups, analysis of transcripts and researchers' notes. MAIN FINDINGS: Five themes characterized participants' perceptions of a consumer website of evidence-based preventive guidelines: content expectations, website design, trustworthiness of content, marketing, and the implications of consumer health information on the Internet. CONCLUSION: Consumers want preventive health information both for taking care of themselves and for participating in a more informed way in their health care when they see a physician. Findings of this study reveal some ways in which consumers' use of Internet health information can affect physicians' and other health professionals' work.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Intelligent medical information filtering.

This paper describes an intelligent information filtering system to assist users to be notified of updates to new and relevant medical information. Among the major problems users face is the large volume of medical information that is generated each day, and the need to filter and retrieve relevant information. The Internet has dramatically increased the amount of electronically accessible medical information and reduced the cost and time needed to publish. The opportunity of the Internet for the medical profession and consumers is to have more information to make decisions and this could potentially lead to better medical decisions and outcomes. However, without the assistance from professional medical librarians, retrieving new and relevant information from databases and the Internet remains a challenge. Many physicians do not have access to the services of a medical librarian. Most physicians indicate on surveys that they do not prefer to retrieve the literature themselves, or visit libraries because of the lack of recent materials, poor organisation and indexing of materials, lack of appropriate and available material, and lack of time. The information filtering system described in this paper records the online web browsing behaviour of each user and creates a user profile of the index terms found on the web pages visited by the user. A relevance-ranking algorithm then matches the user profiles to the index terms of new health care web pages that are added each day. The system creates customised summaries of new information for each user. A user can then connect to the web site to read the new information. Relevance feedback buttons on each page ask the user to rate the usefulness of the page to their immediate information needs. Errors in relevance ranking are reduced in this system by having both the user profile and medical information represented in the same representation language using a controlled vocabulary. This system also updates the user profiles, automatically relieving this burden from the user, but also allowing the user to explicitly state preferences. An initial evaluation of this system was done with health consumers using a web site on consumer health. It was found that users often modified their criteria for what they considered relevant not only between browsing sessions but also during a session. A user's criteria for what is relevant is constantly changing as they interact with the information. New revised metrics of recall and precision are needed to account for the partially relevant judgements and the dynamically changing criteria of users. Future research, development, and evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems will need to take into account the users' dynamically changing criteria of relevance.

Artificial Intelligence↗