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The progress of genetic medicine has given rise to recent changes in the field of health care, such as expected benefits and potential risks for patients and their relatives. Individual genetic information can unlock many secrets within the genetic family and, sometimes the community to which he or she belongs. Therefore, the traditional duty of confidentiality owed by a health care professional to a patient has been challenged by the more serious discussions based on new genetics. Clinical geneticists providing genetic services must be aware of such complicated situations and whenever possible offer support to the patient (client) and their family members. Excluding eugenics and nonscientific perspectives, the Japanese government renamed and reworked “The Eugenic Protection Act” into the “Maternal Heath Protection Act” in 1996. From 1995 to 2003, the Japanese Society of Human Genetics (JSHG) revised guidelines for genetic testing three times. This process attempted to clarify indications for genetic testing, to focus on protection of individual genetic privacy and to deepen respect for familial relationships and responsibilities. The survey involving 221 JSHG approved clinical geneticist (response rate 54%) revealed that during last 5 years the number trying to do “non-directive” rather than “directive” counseling increased significantly. Although there is still in confusion on certain issues, such as data disclosure to relatives, the global bioethical view of new genetics is gaining Japanese geneticists’ acceptance.

This research proposes a framework to guide the development and analysis of digital interventions, namely, through mobile applications, regarding labor and birth. By complying with current scientific evidence, this paper aims to contribute to the safeness and completeness of perinatal health education targeting expectant parents.

A content analysis was conducted on a document containing World Health Organization guidelines for intra-partum, considering the following categories: timeframe, care options, category of recommendation, to create a data set clearly distinguishing between recommendations and non-recommendations. Context-specific and research-context recommendations, details from dosages, measurements and timings, infant care and non-immediate postpartum topics were considered out of the scope of this study.

The results were summarized in a table, ready to be used as a data set, including the following 16 care options ranging from health, well-being and/or rights: respect, communication, companionship, pregnant person’s monitoring, status, fetal monitoring, pain relief, pain management, amenities, labor delay prevention, progress, freedom of choice, facilitation of birth, prevention of postpartum hemorrhage, umbilical cord care and recovery. These were distributed across six timeframes: always, admission, first, second and third stage of labor and immediate postpartum. In addition, recommendations and non-recommendations are displayed in different columns.

This transdisciplinary research intends to contribute to: future research on perinatal education; the creation of digital interventions, namely, m-health ones, targeting expectant parents by providing a framework of content coverage; the endorsement of the rights to Information and to decision-making. Ultimately, when put into practice, the framework can impact self-care through access to perinatal education.

The lack of food-based dietary guidelines for managing cancer among hospitalized patients has led to an increasing economic burden on the government and families in low- and middle-economy countries. There have been increasing medical costs due to delayed recovery, readmission and mortality. The purpose of this study is to contribute in reducing these effects by developing context-specific food-based dietary guidelines to assist health-care professionals and caregivers in planning diets for cancer patients.

For seven days, the dietary intakes of 100 cancer patients in the hospital were recorded using weighed food records. Data on the costs of commonly consumed foods during hospitalization were obtained from hospital requisition books as well as nearby markets and shops. The information gathered was used to create optimal food-based dietary guidelines for cancer patients.

Most patients did not meet the recommended food group and micronutrient intake according to their weighed food records. Sugar intake from processed foods was (51 ± 19.8 g), (13% ± 2%), and calories (2585 ± 544 g) exceeded recommendations. Optimized models generated three menus that met the World Cancer Research Fund 2018 cancer prevention recommendation at a minimum cost of 2,700 Tanzanian Shillings (TSH), 3500TSH, and 4550TSH per day. The optimal dietary pattern includes nutrient-dense foods from all food groups in recommended portions and within calorie limits.

Findings show that optimal dietary guidelines that are context-specific for managing cancer in hospitalized patients can be formulated using culturally acceptable food ingredients at minimum cost.

Questionnaire studies of knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) are effective research in the field of health, which have many shortcomings. The purpose of this research is to propose an automatic questionnaire-free method based on deep learning techniques to address the shortcomings of common methods. Next, the aim of this research is to use the proposed method with public comments on Twitter to get the gaps in KAP of people regarding COVID-19.

In this paper, two models are proposed to achieve the mentioned purposes, the first one for attitude and the other for people’s knowledge and practice. First, the authors collect some tweets from Twitter and label them. After that, the authors preprocess the collected textual data. Then, the text representation vector for each tweet is extracted using BERT-BiGRU or XLNet-GRU. Finally, for the knowledge and practice problem, a multi-label classifier with 16 classes representing health guidelines is proposed. Also, for the attitude problem, a multi-class classifier with three classes (positive, negative and neutral) is proposed.

Labeling quality has a direct relationship with the performance of the final model, the authors calculated the inter-rater reliability using the Krippendorf alpha coefficient, which shows the reliability of the assessment in both problems. In the problem of knowledge and practice, 87% and in the problem of people’s attitude, 95% agreement was reached. The high agreement obtained indicates the reliability of the dataset and warrants the assessment. The proposed models in both problems were evaluated with some metrics, which shows that both proposed models perform better than the common methods. Our analyses for KAP are more efficient than questionnaire methods. Our method has solved many shortcomings of questionnaires, the most important of which is increasing the speed of evaluation, increasing the studied population and receiving reliable opinions to get accurate results.

Our research is based on social network datasets. This data cannot provide the possibility to discover the public information of users definitively. Addressing this limitation can have a lot of complexity and little certainty, so in this research, the authors presented our final analysis independent of the public information of users.

Combining recurrent neural networks with methods based on the attention mechanism improves the performance of the model and solves the need for large training data. Also, using these methods is effective in the process of improving the implementation of KAP research and eliminating its shortcomings. These results can be used in other text processing tasks and cause their improvement. The results of the analysis on the attitude, practice and knowledge of people regarding the health guidelines lead to the effective planning and implementation of health decisions and interventions and required training by health institutions. The results of this research show the effective relationship between attitude, practice and knowledge. People are better at following health guidelines than being aware of COVID-19. Despite many tensions during the epidemic, most people still discuss the issue with a positive attitude.

To the best of our knowledge, so far, no text processing-based method has been proposed to perform KAP research. Also, our method benefits from the most valuable data of today’s era (i.e. social networks), which is the expression of people’s experiences, facts and free opinions. Therefore, our final analysis provides more realistic results.

Developments at all levels between project and policy have a potential impact on human health. Health‐impact assessment (HIA) is a discipline that seeks to assess these impacts to safeguard and enhance human health. There is a growing consensus about the scope, methodology and context for HIA but there are also many unresolved issues. This paper reviews the main trends as they vary between the healthy public policy, environmental assessment and environmental epidemiology communities; and between retrospective and prospective, developed and developing economies and urban/industrial versus rural settings. There are unresolved issues associated with the nature of evidence, the link with economic appraisal, and with the core biophysical and social health determinants. The nature of the evidence used is examined and some resolutions are proposed. The growing number of guidelines testify to a demand by development agencies for HIA, but increased consensus is required to ensure that quality assessments are delivered.

The purpose of this explorative research is to analyse the resilience of the United Kingdom's (UK) healthcare supply chains from a customer’s perspective in the light of the coronavirus pandemic.

Using the capabilities of preparedness, robustness, recovery and adaptability as the foundational percept for supply chain resilience, 22 healthcare professionals in 17 of the UK's National Health Scheme (NHS) Trusts were interviewed to explore their personal and organisational approaches adopted relative to the provision of eye protection, gloves, gowns, aprons, masks and respirators. The Dynamic Capabilities View is mapped to the resilience capabilities and used to analyse the data from a transformational supply chain research perspective.

The supply chains were largely unprepared, which was not particularly surprising even though the availability of gloves was significantly better compared to the other personal protective equipment (PPE). Techniques adopted to ensure robustness and recovery revealed the use of unsanctioned methods such as extended use of PPE beyond recommended use, redefinition of guidelines, protocols and procedures by infection control and the use of expired PPE – all of which compromised customer well-being.

As the paper views resilience through the lens of customers, it does not provide the perspectives of the supply chain practitioners as to the reasons for the findings and the challenges within these supply chains.

The compromise of the well-being of healthcare workers due to the vulnerabilities of healthcare supply chains is highlighted to managers and prescriptions for post-disruption adaptability are made.

This paper introduces transformative research to supply chain resilience research by uniquely looking at resilience from the customers' well-being perspective.

The implementation of mobile health (mHealth) in developing countries seems to be stuck in a pattern of successive pilot studies that struggle for mainstream implementation. This study addresses the research question: what existing health-related structures, properties and practices are presented by rural areas of developing countries that might inhibit the implementation of mHealth initiatives?

This study was conducted using a socio-material approach, based on an exploratory case study in West Africa. Interviews and participant observation were used to gather data. A thematic analysis identified important social and material agencies, practices and imbrications which may limit the effectiveness of mHealth apps in the region.

Findings show that, while urban healthcare is highly structured, best practice-led, rural healthcare relies on peer-based knowledge sharing, and community support. This has implications for the enacted materiality of mobile technologies. While urban actors see mHealth as a tool for automation and the enforcement of responsible healthcare best practice, rural actors see mHealth as a tool for greater interconnectivity and independent, decentralised care.

This study has two significant limitations. First, the study focussed on a region where technology-enabled guideline-driven treatment is the main mHealth concern. Second, consistent with the exploratory nature of this study, the qualitative methodology and the single-case design, the study makes no claim to statistical generalisability.

To the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to adopt a socio-material view that considers existing structures and practices that may influence the widespread adoption and assimilation of a new mHealth app. This helps identify contextual challenges that are limiting the potential of mHealth to improve outcomes in rural areas of developing countries.

The day-by-day escalating quantity of healthcare waste (HCW), has made waste handling and management a challenging issue for ensuring environmental quality. Developing nations like India face huge difficulties in handling healthcare solid wastes (HCSW) because of the extra population burden. Hence, the present study seeks to evaluate the role of various stakeholders, under the following four performance areas: “collection and segregation of HCSW,” “storage and transportation of HCSW,” “special measures for handling HCSW” and ‘awareness among the various stakeholders of handling and managing the HCSW.”

The study targets the primary data from 323 stakeholders across 35 hospitals in Himachal Pradesh, India, to assess the environmental awareness level among various stakeholders. Data were analyzed using preliminary descriptive statistics, and further statistical testing was done using one-way ANOVA in SPSS version 20.0.

Results highlight that most hospitals lack the following areas: segregation of HCSW, marking of zones and bags carrying infectious HCSWs, inadequate transportation facilities, bad handling and storage practices and recycling without chemical disinfection.

The study's findings will help the hospitals' administration and State Pollution Control Board to design training programs for all the stakeholders involved in managing HCSW. The proper recycling of the HCSW will reduce the adverse environmental impact and ensure the environmental quality within the hospitals and surroundings. The preparation of appropriate policy for the collection, storage and transportation of HCSW from the hospitals to the treatment centers will ensure the cleaner delivery of healthcare services to society.

The present study is the first of its kind, where the primary data were collected from the various stakeholders involved in the handling of HCSW at various healthcare establishments (HCEs) in Himachal Pradesh, India.