No abstract

Background The impact of school closures/reopening on transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the wider community remains contested. Methods Outbreak data from Colorado, USA (2020), alongside data on implemented public health measures were analyzed. Results There were three waves (n = 3169 outbreaks; 61 650 individuals). The first was led by healthcare settings, the second leisure/entertainment and the third workplaces followed by other settings where the trajectory was equally distributed amongst essential workplaces, non-essential workplaces, schools and non-essential healthcare. Non-acute healthcare, essential and non-essential workplace experienced more outbreaks compared to education, entertainment, large-group-living and social gatherings. Schools experienced 11% of identified outbreaks, yet involved just 4% of total cases. Conversely, adult-education outbreaks (2%) had disproportionately more cases (9%). Conclusion Our findings suggest schools were not the key driver of the latest wave in infections. School re-opening coinciding with returning to work may have accounted for the parallel rise in outbreaks in those settings suggesting contact-points outside school being more likely to seed in-school outbreaks than contact points within school as the wave of outbreaks in all other settings occurred either prior to or simultaneously with the schools wave. School re-opening is a priority but requires mitigation measures to do so safely including staggering opening of different settings whilst maintaining low levels of community transmission.

Burnout in health care has received considerable attention; widespread efforts to implement burnout reduction initiatives are underway. Healthcare providers with marginalized identities may be especially at risk. Health service psychologists are often key members of interprofessional teams and may be asked to intervene with colleagues exhibiting signs of burnout. Consequently, psychologists in these settings can then find themselves in professional quandaries. In the absence of clear guidelines, psychologists are learning to enhance their scope of practice and navigate ethical guidelines while supporting colleagues and simultaneously satisfying organizational priorities. In this paper we (a) provide an overview of burnout and its scope, (b) discuss ethical challenges health service psychologists face in addressing provider burnout, and (c) present three models to employ in healthcare provider burnout and well-being.

Increasingly, the curricula of many clinical programs have been re-structured to an integrated model where foundational sciences such as physiology, pathophysiology and pharmacology are taught side-by-side with clinical reasoning. Case-studies are an excellent pedagogical strategy for enhancing such integration, especially if such cases are authentic - that is, they include a broad range of information that could influence the individualization and optimization of patient care. However, authentic cases may be too advanced and thereby dissuade preclinical students. We offered an optional semester-long authentic pharmacotherapy case study to undergraduate students in an introductory pharmacology class in a liberal arts college in Midwest USA and sought to know what may motivate students to complete this challenging task. Method: Connection with, and relevance of the case study were assessed with an anonymous survey. Open-ended questions were analyzed qualitatively. Exploratory factor analysis and nonmetric multidimensional scaling were employed to investigate underlying commonalities and patterns in the motivations for participating and relating to the case study. Findings: Students were motivated more by the perceived relevance and transferability of knowledge acquired to their future career than their current clinical technician jobs or their personal lives. Conclusions: Rather than cause an information overload and dissuade students, this complex pharmacotherapy case assignment harnessed preclinical students' experiences from cognate co-curricular activities, created numerous points of relevant engagement with instructional content and therefore motivated students to deeper learning.

No abstract