Health status and social support in Chinese people with CHD should be routinely assessed and, where feasible, addressed through appropriate individually tailored interventions.
Aims
To evaluate preliminary effects of a newly developed STOMA psychosocial intervention programme that was delivered via a multi‐modal and multi‐dimensional approach on the improvement of outcomes of colorectal cancer patients with stoma.
Background
With a distorted body image and the loss of an essential body function, stoma patients face difficulties in everyday life in terms of physical, psychological, and social aspects. Few studies have explored effects of psychosocial interventions on improving stoma‐related health outcomes.
Design
This was a two‐group pre‐test‐post‐test pilot randomized controlled trial.
Methods
Fifty‐three participants were recruited from July 2015–November 2016 in a tertiary public hospital in Singapore. They were randomized into either intervention group (N = 29) or control group (N = 24). Stoma care self‐efficacy, acceptance of stoma, stoma proficiency, length of hospital stay, anxiety and depression and quality of life were measured. IBM SPSS 24.0 was used to analyse the data.
Results
There was an improvement in acceptance of stoma in the intervention group (p < 0.05). Significant effects on stoma care self‐efficacy, stoma proficiency, length of hospital stay, anxiety and depression level and quality of life were not shown.
Conclusion
This study developed a feasible and applicable psychosocial intervention programme and generated preliminary evidence in the positive outcomes of colorectal cancer patients with stoma. Future studies can explore technology‐based interventions to provide a more sustainable support for patients with stoma.
Apps that enable contact-tracing are instrumental in mitigating the transmission of COVID-19, but there have been concerns among users about the data collected by these apps and their management. Contact tracing is of paramount importance when dealing with a pandemic, as it allows for rapid identification of cases based on the information collected from infected individuals about other individuals they may have had recent contact with. Advances in digital technology have enabled devices such as mobile phones to be used in the contract-tracing process. However, there is a potential risk of users’ personal information and sensitive data being stolen should hackers be in the near vicinity of these devices. Thus, there is a need to develop privacy-preserving apps. Meanwhile, privacy policies that outline the risk associated with the use of contact-tracing apps are needed, in formats that are easily readable and comprehensible by the public. To our knowledge, no previous study has examined the readability of privacy policies of contact-tracings apps. Therefore, we performed a readability analysis to evaluate the comprehensibility of privacy policies of 7 contact-tracing apps currently in use. The contents of the privacy policies of these apps were assessed for readability using Readability Test Tool, a free web-based reliability calculator, which computes scores based on a number of statistics (ie, word count and the number of complex words) and indices (ie, Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Reading Grade Level, Gunning Fog Index, and Simplified Measure of Gobbledygook index). Our analysis revealed that explanations used in the privacy policies of these apps require a reading grade between 7 and 14, which is considerably higher than the reading ability of the average individual. We believe that improving the readability of privacy policies of apps could be potentially reassuring for users and may help facilitate the increased use of such apps.
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