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The purpose of this paper, a point prevalence study, is to quantify the incidence of isolation and identify the type of communicable diseases in isolation. The paper evaluates isolation precaution communication, availability of personal protective equipment (PPE) as well as other equipment necessary for maintaining isolation precautions.

A standardised audit tool was developed in accordance with the National Standards for the Prevention and Control of Healthcare Associated Infections (May 2009). Data were collected from 14 March 2017 to 16 March 2017, through observation of occupied isolation rooms in an academic hospital in Dublin, Ireland. The data were subsequently used for additional analysis and discussion.

In total, 14 per cent (125/869) of the total inpatient population was isolated at the time of the study. The most common isolation precaution was contact precautions (96.0 per cent). In all, 88 per cent of known contact precautions were due to multi-drug resistant organisms. Furthermore, 96 per cent of patients requiring isolation were isolated, 92.0 per cent of rooms had signage, 90.8 per cent had appropriate signs and 93.0 per cent of rooms had PPE available. Finally, 31 per cent of rooms had patient-dedicated and single-use equipment and 2.4 per cent had alcohol wipes available.

The audit tool can be used to identify key areas of noncompliance associated with isolation and inform continuous improvement and education.

Currently, the rate of isolation is unknown in Ireland and standard guidelines are not established for the evaluation of isolation rooms. This audit tool can be used as an assessment for isolation room compliance.

As a key component of the American health care system, the physician office could be the front line in a bioterrorist attack. Nationally and locally, the primary focus on this subject appears to be from a hospital preparedness and public health agency perspective, with little attention devoted to primary physician providers in their own offices, and those specialists to whom patients may be referred. While unrelated to bioterrorism, the recent SARS outbreak also brings to the forefront the need for physicians offices to be able to clinically, operationally, and managerially respond to illnesses that mirror the symptoms of known illnesses, but may be more virulent new organisms or hybrids of existing organisms. If the face of bioterrorism is subtle and slow in its presentation, physicians, in their own offices, could be the first providers of care. Will they be prepared, or will they be among the first fatalities in a bioterrorist attack?

The largest ever outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD), which began in December 2013, profoundly impacted not only the West African countries of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, and to a lesser extent Nigeria, but also the rest of the world because some patients needed to be managed in high-resource countries. As of March 29, 2016, there were 28,616 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of EVD reported in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone during the outbreak, with 11,310 deaths (case fatality rate of 39.5%). An unprecedented number of healthcare workers and professionals, including physicians, nurses, logistic and administrative personnel, housekeepers, epidemiologists, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, and ethics experts in many countries, were directly or indirectly involved in the care of EVD patients.

The provision of medical care to critically ill EVD patients would have been challenging in any setting but was especially so in the remote and resource-limited areas where patients were stricken by EVD. Limited health personnel, medical supplies, and equipment, along with inadequate knowledge and skills for minimizing the risks of transmission to healthcare workers, could have led to the de-prioritization of patient care. However, ethical considerations demanded aggressive patient care (intensive care, dialysis, central vascular catheter indwelling, etc.) to produce positive outcomes without increasing the risks to healthcare workers and caregivers.

A major ethical consideration was that healthcare workers have a double obligation: while providing the best medical care to improve EVD patient survival, with symptom relief and palliation as required, they must also protect themselves and minimize further transmission to others, including their colleagues. During the 2014–2015 EVD epidemic, another ethical and clinical problem arose in relation to the management of healthcare workers deployed in Africa who acquired EVD while caring for infected patients. As of June 24, 2015, a total of 65 individuals had been evacuated or repatriated worldwide from the EVD-affected countries, of whom 38 individuals were evacuated or repatriated to Europe. The need for evacuation and repatriation, together with associated ethical issues, is discussed in this chapter.

Personal Protective Equipment plays an inevitable part in the current scenario of pandemics in the world. A novel coronavirus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Corona Virus-2 (SARS-Cov 2), began as an outbreak of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late December 2019, and quickly spread worldwide. It quickly escalated into an international public health crisis. This opened up the high demand for the innovation and research of new materials in the Personal Protective Equipment industry.

PubMed, Embase and Google Scholar were searched for relevant literature regarding personal protective equipment and the information was organized in a systematic way.

There are no adequate number of studies taken up in the field of use of textiles in medical applications especially with PPEs.

This structured review will generate a sense of the significance of using PPE for controlling pandemics and also awaken need for additional research and innovations in this area.

The authorities of the management should take timely intervention in choosing the right material for their PPE in their hospitals. Hence health care professionals teams have an inevitable role in preventing the adverse environmental impact due to the inadvertent disposal of PPEs.

There is a lack of systematic way of disposing contaminated single-use face masks in a safe, environmentally acceptable manner. The dumping of single-use PPE in domestic garbage has had an adverse effect on the environment. Mismanaged plastic waste endangers the health of ecosystems by polluting marine and terrestrial environments, posing a significant risk of ingestion or injury to animals and contaminating habitats.

This review article provides an in-depth review of the use of different materials in PPE and challenges regarding its long-term use and implications on the environment.

This study discusses that the necessary criteria and the solution approach taken to resolve the main spatial infection problems with a burn center design should be evaluated holistically to achieve spatial infection control in a burn center. The burn center design plays an important role in protecting severely burned patients from infection because the microbial flora of the hospital can affect the infection risk. In hospitals, sterilization and disinfection are the basic components of infection prevention; however, the prevention and control of infection for burn patients also requires the design of burn centers that adhere to a specific set of criteria that considers spatial infection control in addition to appropriate burn treatment methods and treatments. In this study, a burn facility converted from a burn unit into a burn center is introduced and the necessary design inputs for the transformation are discussed because there is no holistic study in the literature that delas with all the spaces that should be in a burn center and relations between spaces. This study aims to define the functional relations between each of the units and the spaces that change according to different sterilization demands in the burn center for ensuring spatial infection control. Furthermore, it aims to propose a method for ensuring continuity in the control of spatial infections.

The burn care and health facilities guidelines are examined within the framework of spatial standards, together with a comprehensive literature review. The design method was based on the spread of microorganisms and the effect of human movement on space and spatial transitions in the burn center, according to all relevant literature reviews. To determine the extent to which the differences in treatment protocols of burn care guidelines were reflected in the space, interviews were conducted with burn facility officials. The plan–do–check–act (PDCA) method is also modeled to ensure the continuity of infection control in the burn center.

The burn center design findings are classified under three main headings, namely, location of the burn center in the hospital, spatial organization and physical features of the burn center and the air flowing system. The importance of the interactions among the criteria for spatial infection control has been revealed. Due to the physical space characteristics and air flow characteristics that change according to human movement and the way microorganisms spread, it has been seen that designing the air flow and architectural aspects together has an effective role in providing spatial infection control. Accordingly, a functional relation scheme for the center has been suggested. It is also proposed as a model to ensure the continuity of infection control in the burn center.

This research presents spatial measures for infection control in burn centers for practitioners in health-care settings such as designers, engineers, doctors and nurses. The PDCA method also leads to continuity of infection control for hospital management.

This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to focus on developing the criteria for spatial infection control in burn center. Moreover, the aim is to create a function chart that encompasses the relationships between the units within the burn center design so that infection control can be coordinated spatially.

Signs saturate and surround society. This article illuminates the significant roles played by documentation within the context of the coronavirus pandemic. It centres, what it terms as, “COVID-19 signage” as essential extensions of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) into society. It posits that this signage helps materialize, mediate and articulate the pandemic from an unseen phenomenon into tangible objects with which people see and interact.

This article presents a documentary typology of COVID-19 signage to provide a conceptual framework in which to situate, approach and analyse this diverse documentation and its implications for social life and traffic. Further, this article offers a case study of Malta's COVID-19 signage that helped materialize, mediate and articulate the pandemic across the European island nation during its national lockdown in the first half of 2020. This case study helps contextualize these signs and serves as a dual contemporary and historical overview of their creation, implementation and use.

The coronavirus pandemic cannot be seen with the naked eye. It is, in many respects, an abstraction. Documents enable the virus to be seen and the pandemic to be an experienced reality. Specifically, COVID-19 signage materializes the disease and pandemic into tangible items that individuals interact with and see on a daily basis as they navigate society. From personal to environmental to community signs, these documents have come to mediate social life and articulate COVID-19 during this extraordinary health crisis. A material basis of a shared “pandemic social culture” is consequently established by and through this signage and its ubiquity.

This article can serve as a point of departure for analyses of other kinds of COVID-19 signage in various contexts. It can serve as an anchor or example for other investigations into what other signs were used, including why, when and how they were produced, designed, formatted, implemented, enforced, altered and/or removed. For instance, it could be used for comparative studies between different NPIs and their associated signage, or of the signage appearing between different cities or countries or even the differences in signage at various political and socio-temporal points of the pandemic.

It is dually hoped that this article's documentary typology, and historical snapshot, of COVID-19 signage could help inform how current and future NPIs into society are or can be used to mitigate the coronavirus or other potential health crises as well as serve as both a contemporary and historical snapshot of some of the immediate and early responses to the pandemic.

This documentary typology can be applied to approaches and analyses of other kinds of COVID-19 signage and related documentation. By serving as a conceptual framework in which situate, approach and analyse these documents, it is hoped that this article can help create a sense of clarity in reflections on sign-saturated environments as well as be practically employed for examining and understanding the effective implementation of NPIs in this pandemic and other health crises.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged leaders to alter the way they manage their organization's employees, such as requiring them to quarantine, self-isolate or practice social distancing so that they comply with government health directives. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the quarantine on the workplace.

Structured interviews containing open-ended questions were conducted with fifty Australian public sector executive managers to gauge the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on their organizations.

The study reveals the effects that the virus had on the organizations' teamwork as well as individuals' learning. It finds that organizations experienced both positive effects, such as increased creativity and initiative, and negative effects, such as reduced satisfaction with work teams, from the pandemic.

This study also adds to the still-developing body of knowledge regarding the effects of the virus on individuals' levels of work team satisfaction as well as a variety of other factors specific to public sector organizations

A sustainability reporting framework must demonstrate that resources are fairly bought and used to support diverse life on earth within habitable ranges. The purpose of this paper is to propose a principle-based sustainability reporting framework that measures, audits and reports based on sustainability outcomes and impacts as part of the corporate reporting framework.

This paper draws on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and targets for preparing a reporting framework. It uses Gaia Theory and the Theory of Distributive Justice constructs that align with sustainable development principles to delineate a reporting approach.

Frameworks that promote sustainability reporting have increasingly embraced UN SDGs but overly focus on performance promoting inter-firm comparisons. This framework introduces principle-based sustainability reporting where firms demonstrate their chosen contribution to sustainable development using 17 UN SDGs as goal posts.

This conceptual paper presents theoretical constructs that future research can empirically validate to enhance sustainability reporting.

This principle-based sustainability reporting framework is implementable for corporate reporting, where sustainability reporting integrates with the financial and economic intellectual capital reporting frameworks.

This framework highlights the importance of acquiring and using resources to distribute justice and fairness. It is a joint project between firms and stakeholders.

This framework promotes integrated thinking for firms to engage in principle-based sustainability reporting and provides a roadmap for sustainability reporting using the SDG Compass logic model.

Companies over the world faced several risks related to the COVID-19 crisis. However, when quoting those risks, it is common to mix up pandemic effects with general consequences of work at home or the use of electronic communication channels. At the same time, a lot of indirect effects of the crisis are not straightforward, and some consequences may only turn evident in the long term. This chapter collects different appearances and implications of the risk caused by the epidemic based on literature review, questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and expert panels with a particular emphasis on the findings from Hungary. The authors conclude that risk effects differ little across countries but rather widely across industries and individuals. The risk map presented clarifies critical connections and offers a structured overview for the first time in the literature. A better understanding of the risk effects may assist managers and regulators when another similar crisis would emerge in the future.

Describes the application of the tools and techniques of the system dynamics method to the complex problem of understanding the spread of the Ebola virus. The main deliverable of this research is a computer simulation model in the system dynamics tradition. The essence of system dynamics is to act as a framework for formalising mental models of a problem. In this respect, the system dynamics simulation model presented here is a theory describing the structure of, and interrelationships between, the factors which impact on an outbreak of the Ebola virus and the attempts to contain it. The model, comprising 57 interrelated variables, is structured to represent a group of rural villages served by one local hospital, remote from regional and national medical laboratories. Such a structure typifies the circumstances of recent Ebola outbreaks in central Africa.