Context: Despite the existence of diverse integrated surgical safety measures pre-, intra-, and post-operatively globally, preventable adverse medical errors still occur to the patients in the operating rooms and has been regarded as the major cause of temporary or permanent disability and death among the victims. Aim: The purpose of this paper is to explore sentinel events in the operating rooms Materials and Methods: A comprehensive literature search was conducted across the electronic databases PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Conchrane and Google Scholar to source numerous articles on the subject matter. The articles search was between 2005 and 2026. Terms were combined using Boolean operators such as “Sentinel” AND “events,” “operating room” AND “surgical team members”. Results: Various forms of sentinel events occur in the operating room but the common ones are fall, wrong-site surgery, retained surgical items, and operating room fire. Factors responsible for these events in the operating rooms are organizational factors such as limited policies, lack of perioperative protocols, and staff shortage Effective communication between the patient and surgical team members are crucial preventive measures against sentinel events in the operating rooms. Conclusion: It is pertinent for surgical-team to be knowledgeable about patient safety. Also, standard practice protocol should be entrenched to limit sentinel events in the operating rooms.
Context: Economic policy transitions can produce unintended public-health consequences when implementation outpaces social, financial and technological readiness. Undergraduates, just like others citizens of the country had their share of “shock” and challenges. They adopted several coping mechanisms just not to allow the new cashless policy disrupt their learning processes. Objective: This study assessed the self-reported health effects of cashless economic policy among undergraduate students of the University of Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria. Methods and materials: A descriptive cross-sectional study design was adopted. Multistage sampling was used to select 427 consenting participants for the study. Semi-structured self-administered pretested questionnaire were used for data collection. Results: The respondents had a mean age of 22.46 ± 3.88 years; Most, (73.5%) of the respondents were aged 20–29 years, and 57.8% were males. Although knowledge of cashless economic policy was generally high, with 68.4% of the respondents reporting good knowledge, self-reported health effects were common. Psychological stress was the most frequently reported effect (69.7%), followed by headache (63.0%), anxiety (43.3%), sleeplessness (36.1%) and depression-related symptoms (35.3%). Among the 236 students who reported health effects, 46.1% described them as mild, 39.9% as moderate and 14.0% as severe. Most students did nothing to manage these effects (67.8%), while 22.4% used drugs obtained from pharmacists or chemists. Conclusion: The findings show that cashless policy transitions may create measurable stress-related and somatic burdens among students when payment infrastructure, liquidity access and support services are inadequate. There should be health-sensitive implementation of financial digitization policies by the Federal Government of Nigeria.
Context: Breast cancer is a major global health problem, and early identification of individuals requiring further clinical assessment remains important. Anthropometric and physiological measurements are inexpensive and readily obtainable, but their ability to distinguish malignant from benign breast conditions is uncertain. Objective: This pilot study evaluated the exploratory classification performance of anthropometric and physiological variables in distinguishing breast-cancer status using logistic regression. Materials and Methods: A hospital-based observational pilot study was conducted at the University of Benin Teaching Hospital. Data from 20 participants were analysed. The recorded variables were age, weight, height, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and body-surface temperature. Missing values were replaced using column means, and the predictors were standardized before model fitting. The dataset was divided into training and testing subsets using an 80:20 split. Classification performance was assessed using accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, confusion-matrix analysis, and the area under the receiver-operating-characteristic curve. Results: The test set contained four participants. The logistic-regression model achieved an accuracy of 75.0%. For the benign class, precision was 1.00, recall was 0.50, and the F1 score was 0.67. For the malignant class, precision was 0.67, recall was 1.00, and the F1 score was 0.80. The ROC-AUC was 0.50, indicating no demonstrated discrimination beyond chance in this test set. Because the model was evaluated on only four participants, these performance estimates are highly unstable and should not be interpreted as definitive. Conclusion: In this small pilot dataset, age, weight, height, blood pressure, and body-surface temperature alone did not demonstrate adequate discriminatory performance for breast-cancer classification. Larger, independently validated datasets incorporating clinical, imaging, pathological, and possibly molecular variables are required before such a model can be considered for clinical risk stratification.
Accuracy of blood pressure measurement is critical to management of hypertension and stratification of patients. We observed marked variations in blood pressure readings obtained by the nurses and those obtained by the physicians at the time of the consultation. Objective: To assess inter-observer reproducibility of blood pressure measurements in the clinics by nurses and physicians. Method: This was a cross-sectional study. Blood pressure recordings of patients attending the cardiology clinics were obtained using validated electronic devices by the nurses and again by the attending physicians during consultation. The results obtained were analysed and coefficient of variation (COV) in percentage, inter-class correlation coefficient with 95% confidence interval (ICC), Bland-Altman limits of agreement of 95% and prevalence-adjusted and bias-adjusted kappa (PABAK) were used to determine inter-observer variability of the blood pressure measurements. Results: Majority of the participants were aged between 51-70 years (44.2%) and females (53.8%). The mean systolic BP obtained by the nurses was 131.86±23.20 and 126.70±21.94 for those by the physicians while diastolic were 78.40±14.48 and 75.97±12.67 for the nurses and physicians respectively with overall significant p values. When subjected to test of COV (SBP 16.40, DBP 15.83), Bland Altman analysis (SBP 5.16, DBP 2.43) and PABAK (SBP 0.031, DBP 0.040), there was poor reproducibility of BP measurements by nurses and physicians. Conclusion: There was poor reproducibility of blood pressure measurements taken by nurses and physicians in this study. Adherence to standardized guidelines for blood pressure measurement may improve blood pressure reproducibility among health care workers.
Background: Tetanus is a vaccine-preventable acute disease that is caused by Clostridium tetani, and it has remained a major cause of morbidity and mortality in children under the age of 5 years in developing countries. This study aimed to evaluate the level of knowledge and uptake of tetanus toxoid (TT) vaccine among mothers in Esan Central L.G.A. Materials and Methods: This community-based cross-sectional study was conducted in the Esan Central Local Government Area of Edo State. Data were collected from 226 pregnant women attending antenatal clinics, using an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Ethical approval was obtained from the Research and Ethics Committee of Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital, Irrua. Analysis was conducted in IBM SPSS version 21, and results were presented as frequencies and proportions in tables and charts. Results: All the respondents were aware of tetanus, and 203 (90%) were aware of tetanus toxoid vaccines. 88 (38.9%) of the respondents had good knowledge of tetanus toxoid immunization, 95 (42.0%) had fair knowledge, and 43 (19.0%) had poor knowledge. Knowledge of tetanus toxoid was significantly associated with maternal age (p=0.0001), educational status (p=0.001), and occupation (p=0.001), with older and more educated women having better knowledge. One hundred and ninety-nine (88.1%) respondents had a positive perception towards TT immunization. Respondents’ perceptions were significantly associated with educational status (p=0.027) and occupation (p=0.001). One hundred and twenty-five (55.3%) had taken TT vaccine. Vaccine uptake was significantly associated with educational status (p=0.001) and occupation (p=0.001). Conclusion: Respondents’ educational status and occupation were significantly associated with knowledge of TT, perceptions of the vaccine, and vaccine uptake. Common hindrances to vaccine uptake included negative attitudes among some health workers, poor service quality, cancellations of scheduled services, and perceived vaccine side effects. Health workers should receive training and retraining, and health education should continue at all levels of health care. This should also be carried out in schools at all levels in the State.
