Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Life After The Pandemic: Use Of An Educational Coping Strategy Tool Kit For Healthcare Professionals, Christine Thorpe-Gilpin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Research has proven that acute care healthcare professionals (i.e., nurses, certified nursing assistants, and respiratory therapists have been experiencing ongoing challenges and ineffective coping mechanisms. The Toolkit for Emotional Coping for Healthcare Staff (TECHS) educational toolkit has introduced practical coping skills that could benefit healthcare workers. Using the TECHS has effectively inspired the development and usage of practical coping skills among healthcare workers. There were three tools included in the TECHS educational material to understand and manage adversity, which can be repeated for new or recurring stressful situations in a personal or team-based approach. These tools were based on cognitive-behavioral …

"Shut Down And Closed Off": A Routine Activity Approach To Investigating The Relationship Between Covid-19 School Closures And Child Sexual Abuse Report Characteristics In Georgia, Spencer E. Riner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 created a public health crisis that led to an unprecedented number of school closures. A major concern raised by child advocates, law enforcement, and social service providers was the possible increase in undetected child abuse and maltreatment. Undergirding this concern was the belief that this mitigation effort might place child abuse victims and offenders within proximity for extended periods of time. While this was a significant concern, it has rarely been analyzed empirically. To address this gap in the literature, this thesis investigates how school closures impacted the characteristics of child sexual abuse (CSA) reports …

Older Women’S Stories Of Covid-19 Loss: Communicated Narrative Sense-Making Through Photography, Anne Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The diverse array of challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic make it difficult to assess the full impact of this global health crisis. More than 300,000 older Americans died, leaving a nation of grieving survivors in their absence. This profound loss of life will undoubtedly inform the field’s understanding of grief and grieving for many years to come. Pre-pandemic, older women in the United States understood grief to be part of their life stage; COVID-19 amplified the grief experience through both cumulative losses and the isolation particular to the novel coronavirus response. However, few qualitative studies explore older women’s grief, …

Examining The Nexus Of Housing Instability And Neighborhood Within New York City (Nyc), Benjamin Boateng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Housing instability within the New York City (NYC) area significantly affects the community's well-being. As a robust and growing city, many families in the low-income bracket face the challenge of spending a significant portion of their monthly income toward housing costs (rent, utilities, insurance). With families spending 50% (extreme housing burden) and more of their monthly income to stay in their housing units, various disparities have presented themselves within the housing context.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, families within NYC have struggled to maintain their housing stock. Policy and community-based actions are needed to reduce the burden …

Assessment Of Veteran Satisfaction With Telehealth Services During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Rhonda Kay Howard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

With the advent of the COVID-19 public health emergency in the United States, many U.S. veterans were unable to maintain their usual office visits due to safe access concerns. Patients were strongly encouraged to maintain their healthcare needs at home by utilizing online technology resources like telehealth services with their healthcare providers. Providing excellent healthcare services for veterans during COVID-19 became a challenge for primary care providers at many veteran healthcare organizations. Since little was known about the satisfaction of veteran clients with healthcare management using virtual care during the pandemic, this formative program evaluation was designed to survey …

Understanding Public Emergency Preparedness Before And During The Coronavirus Outbreak: Implications For Effective Public Health And Risk Communication., Raphael Adjetey Fumey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a dramatic loss of human lives globally and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, the world of work, and our food systems. The social and economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is devastating, putting several millions of people at risk of falling into extreme poverty, with over 500 million people being undernourished. It is evident from the data on COVID-19 cases, deaths, and hospitalizations that the United States is the worse hit country, which can be attributed to the lack of preparedness at the individual, environmental, and government levels. This study applied …

A Virtual Camp For Adolescents With Developmental Disabilities During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Changes In Physical Activity, Function, And Psychosocial Health, Sarah Creveling

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Adolescents with developmental disabilities (DD) have low levels of physical activity (PA), are more likely to be overweight or obese, and are at an increased risk of developing secondary conditions compared to their typically developing peers. Participation in PA has been linked to a myriad of benefits including improvements in psychosocial health, decreased risk of developing secondary conditions, and opportunities for socialization. Summer camps provide opportunities for adolescents with DD to participate in meaningful activities while being physically active during the summer months when school is out and there is a change in routines, skill and learning loss is a …

School Nursing Practice And Experiences During School Closures, Susie E. Birden Brown

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This evidence-based quality improvement project was to evaluate public school nurses’ relationships and reaction to their new work environment during the closure of schools in Northern California resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. This project addressed the change in school nursing, especially the nurses’ working environment. A stress management program was offered to the school nurses as an intervention to give them information on perceived stress. The stress management program included mindfulness and stress-relieving techniques over a 1-month period. The research methodology used in the project was a pre- and postintervention using the Perceived Stress Scale-10 (PSS) to measure if the …

The Association Between Depression And Anxiety With Covid-19 Outcomes., Erica Miller

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous studies have shown that mental disorders affect COVID-19 mortality. This study investigated the effect of depression and/or anxiety on COVID-19 outcomes. Depression/anxiety was defined by actively taking medication and/or diagnosis. The outcomes were ICU admission; ventilation; mortality; and time to mortality. Of 698 hospitalized patients, there were 204 (29%) defined to have either depression or anxiety. There were 109 deaths, and of those, 52 (48%) were diagnosed with depression/anxiety. Multivariable logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models were used to examine associations. ICU admission and ventilation were not significantly associated with depression/anxiety. Depression/anxiety was associated with mortality (OR: 1.84, …

Technological Change And The Practice Of Healthcare Communication: Implications For Patient-Centered Care, From A Communication Ethics Perspective, Emmalee Torisk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Written in a historical moment marked in many ways by the COVID-19 pandemic and the changes it has wrought, including the increased availability and use of telehealth services, this project attempts to consider the implications of the continued integration of technology into health care, centering on the following essential question: How do technological changes affect the contemporary practice of healthcare communication, particularly that which occurs between the patient—the consumer of health care—and their provider? This dissertation thus considers the ways in which such linkages of technology and health care seem to fit into a larger shift within health care …

Predicting Covid-19 Behavior: Is It All Due To Political Orientation?, Caleb Potts

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

Adherence to COVID-19 preventing measures is becoming increasingly important as governments across the world realize COVID-19 is not an acute, but a chronic problem. There is, however, disagreement over to what extent COVID-19 is a problem. In the United States, the division appears to be primarily along party lines (Democrat and Republican[1]), though even within parties there is division. This division might be explained by differences in: the behavioral immune system and trust in government. Additional factors to examine include: personality, fear of COVID-19, and religious beliefs. The present study used previously validated self-report measures to assess …

The Association Of Demographic Characteristics And Social Vulnerability With Covid-19 Outcomes, Gloria D. Boone

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Association of Demographic Characteristics and Social Vulnerability With COVID-19 Outcomes

by

Gloria Boone

(Under the Direction of Gulzar Shah)

ABSTRACT

This research explored 102 Illinois counties' COVID-19 data to determine whether demographic characteristics and social vulnerability are associated with increased vulnerability to COVID-19 infections and deaths. COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting vulnerable groups and has been deadlier for African American and Hispanic people. The findings of this research will contribute to the knowledge base regarding social vulnerability and assist public health officials in targeting resources and designing interventions. This study used a retrospective cross-sectional design to assess demographic characteristics of …

Thinking Ethically About Hiv Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis: Retention In Care And Sexually Transmitted Infection Testing In A Southeastern United States Local Health Department In The Time Of Covid-19, Ellie Purdy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Local Health Departments (LHDs) are critical providers of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention efforts. HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) is an evolving public health initiative and practitioners should consider PrEP interventions in context of ethical decision-making and a broad STI prevention strategy as global incidence of bacterial STIs remains high and those at-risk for HIV are generally at-risk for other STIs. An evaluation of the Thinking Ethically framework and LHD PrEP services was performed to fill a gap in the literature and support program decision-making. A retrospective review of PrEP user medical records from a LHD …

United States Nursing Homes And Health Equity During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Carla Cooper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affected older populations, with nursing homes impacted early on by the disease. The contribution of race/ethnicity of nursing home residents and facility characteristics on COVID-19 were unknown. The Donabedian model framework was used to study the relationship between the racial/ethnic characteristics of nursing home residents and COVID-19 outcomes and to examine if this relationship was moderated by the racial/ethnic composition of the county of nursing home location.

Method: Cross-sectional research design merging data from five publicly available sources. Laboratory confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths were compared by the racial composition of the county and nursing …