No abstract

More than 50% patients with JIA have joint deformities. Joint deformities are more likely to be seen in children with long-standing disease, those with polyarthritis JIA and seropositive patients.

.Purpose. To describe the structure, staffing resources, equipment, academic activities, and characteristics of pediatric population of pediatric intensive care units across the country. Material & Method. This was a prospective, descriptive, and observational survey of pediatric intensive care units from January to December 2009 across Pakistan. A questionnaire survey was emailed to director of each unit. Results. 16 PICUs were participated in this survey (100% response rate). A total of units with 155 beds were identified (1.1 bed /500,000 children). Regarding the categories, 12 (75%) were medical, 3 (19%) were pure cardiac intensive care units, and one unit (6%) was combined multidisciplinary cardiothoracic unit. 13 (81%) units were in public sector as compared to 3 (19%) were in private sector. The mean unit size was 9.7 (range 4-28) beds. Twelve (75%) units were located in three large cities. Only 3 (19%) units have trained intensivist. 37% (6/16) had nurse to patient ratio of 1 : 1-1 : 2 while others had ratios of 1 : 3-1 : 5 with all nurses specialized trained for pediatric intensive care units with bachelor degree or diploma in nursing. Only 50% had capacity for invasive monitoring. Conclusion. We found inadequacies in several aspects of PICUs in Pakistan including fewer PICUs, inadequate PICU beds, and lack of trained personal to look after critically ill pediatric population.

No abstract

Objectives: To assess the improvement in the knowledge of hand hygiene in Pediatric residents and nurses after theoretical and hands-on educational intervention Methods: This study was a questionnaire‑based cross‑sectional survey carried out in the department of Pediatrics, King Edward Medical University/ Mayo hospital Lahore in two weeks period. Total 41 Pediatrics residents and nurses, participated in the study. Initially a pretest questionnaire was given to each participant, followed by an educational intervention: a day’s worth of didactic lectures and practical training of practices for infection control. After two weeks, an identical post-test questionnaire was sent to the participants via email. Data were statistically analyzed through SPSS 22. Z test was applied to see the normality of data while paired t test was applied to compare the pretest score with posttest score. Results: Of 41 participants who attended the workshop, 34 participants responded to post‑test giving an overall response rate of 83%. Out of 34, there were 27(80%) doctors and 7(20%) nurses, who participated in workshop. Each item of the questionnaire was analyzed, showing that pretest score for questions related to indication for hand washing, minimum timings required for hand rub, and spread of infection from unclean hands was quite low, as compared to post-test score, indicating statistically significant increment (p value 0.000, 0.001and 0.046 respectively). Mean pre-test score for doctors was 3.22 while for nurses, it was 3.14, whereas post-test score was 4.51 and 4.00 for doctors and nurses respectively. Overall, there was statistically significant increase in knowledge after educational intervention. Conclusion: There is statistically significant impact of educational intervention on improving the knowledge of Pediatric residents and nurses with respect to hand hygiene practices. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.35.3.388 How to cite this:Afzal MF, Hamid MH, Parveen A, Hanif A. Educational intervention to improve the knowledge of hand hygiene in pediatric residents and nurses. Pak J Med Sci. 2019;35(3):---------. doi: https://doi.org/10.12669/pjms.35.3.388 This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.