No abstract

Background: It has been well documented that interdisciplinary, comprehensive pain education can foster positive pain beliefs among medical students, in addition to improving students' abilities to diagnose and treat pain. Though some work has been done to quantify the number of hours of pain education students receive, the content itself has received little attention. Aims: This study seeks to identify what medical students learn about chronic pain throughout an undergraduate medical degree program in Ontario. Methods: Three undergraduate medical schools in Ontario were selected on the basis of variety in curricular structure and instructional methods. Written documents comprising the formal curriculum were analyzed through qualitative and quantitative content analysis. These findings were compared with promising practices from the pain education literature. Results: The three curricula studied here dedicate the bulk of pain education to three topics: pain mechanisms, pain management, and opioids and addiction. The curricula vary considerably in organization of content and hours of pain training. All three curricula were found to contain negative pain beliefs that characterize pain patients as difficult, overwhelming, and unrewarding to work with. Two of the medical schools studied here do not have a pain curriculum. Conclusions: The results of this study indicate a need for medical schools to develop comprehensive, interdisciplinary pain curricula. Though increasing the number of hours of pain training is crucial, equally imperative is a consideration of what, and how, students learn about pain. RÉSUMÉ Contexte: Il est bien documenté que l'enseignement interdisciplinaire et global de la douleur en médecine peut favoriser une modification positive à l'égard des croyances positives chez les étudiants en médecine, en plus d'augmenter leur capacité à diagnostiquer et à traiter la douleur. Bien que certains travaux aient été menés pour quantifier le nombre d'heures prodiguées en éducation sur la douleur le contenu des cursus a reçu peu d'attention. But: Cette étude cherche à déterminer ce que les étudiants en médecine dans la province de l'Ontario apprennent au sujet de la douleur chronique tout au long de leurs études. Méthodes: Trois curriculums de médecine de premier cycle de l'Ontario ont été choisies de manière à refléter la diversité des structures et des méthodes d'enseignements. Les documents écrits comprenant le programmeplan cours officiel ont été scutés par une analyse de contenu qualitative et quantitative. Les observations ont été comparées à des pratiques prometteuses décrites dans la littérature sur l'éducation médicale de la douleur. Résultats: Les trois curriculums étudiés consacrent la majeure partie de l'éducation à la douleur à trois sujets: les mécanismes de la douleur; la gestion de la douleur; et les opioïdes et la dépendance. Le contenu des curriculum varient considérablement en ce qui concerne le cursus de formation et le nombre d'heures qui y sont consacrées. Les trois curriculums contenaie...

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, a variety of digital technologies have been leveraged for public health surveillance worldwide. However, concerns remain around the rapid development and deployment of digital technologies, how these technologies have been used, and their efficacy in supporting public health goals. Following the five-stage scoping review framework, we conducted a scoping review of the peer-reviewed and grey literature to identify the types and nature of digital technologies used for surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic and the success of these measures. We conducted a search of the peer-reviewed and grey literature published between 1 December 2019 and 31 December 2020 to provide a snapshot of questions, concerns, discussions, and findings emerging at this pivotal time. A total of 147 peer-reviewed and 79 grey literature publications reporting on digital technology use for surveillance across 90 countries and regions were retained for analysis. The most frequently used technologies included mobile phone devices and applications, location tracking technologies, drones, temperature scanning technologies, and wearable devices. The utility of digital technologies for public health surveillance was impacted by factors including uptake of digital technologies across targeted populations, technological capacity and errors, scope, validity and accuracy of data, guiding legal frameworks, and infrastructure to support technology use. Our findings raise important questions around the value of digital surveillance for public health and how to ensure successful use of technologies while mitigating potential harms not only in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also during other infectious disease outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics.

IntroductionInfectious diseases pose a risk to public health, requiring efficient strategies for disease prevention. Digital health surveillance technologies provide new opportunities to enhance disease prevention, detection, tracking, reporting and analysis. However, in addition to concerns regarding the effectiveness of these technologies in meeting public health goals, there are also concerns regarding the ethics, legality, safety and sustainability of digital surveillance technologies. This scoping review examines the literature on digital surveillance for public health purposes during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify health-related applications of digital surveillance technologies, and to highlight discussions of the implications of these technologies.Methods and analysisThe scoping review will be guided by the framework proposed by Arksey and O’Malley and the guidelines outlined by Colquhoun et al and Levac et al. We will search Medline (Ovid), PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL (EBSCOhost), ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar and IEEE Explore for relevant studies published between December 2019 and December 2020. The review will also include grey literature. Data will be managed and analysed through an extraction table and thematic analysis.Ethics and disseminationFindings will be disseminated through traditional academic channels, as well as social media channels and research briefs and infographics. We will target our dissemination to provincial and federal public health organisations, as well as technology companies and community-based organisations managing the public response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

No abstract