Articles

<b>Background:</b> The COVID-19 pandemic posed significant psychological challenges to frontline healthcare workers (HCWs), including anxiety, stress, and emotional strain. <b>Aim</b>: This study investigates the psychological impact on HCWs during the pandemic and explores coping strategies employed to manage distress. <b>Methods</b>: An integrative review was conducted using 24 studies published between January and December 2020. These studies were analyzed to identify common psychological outcomes and coping mechanisms among HCWs. <b>Results</b>: Healthcare workers experienced significant psychological distress during the COVID-19 pandemic, including anxiety, stress, insomnia, and depression. Anxiety was the most commonly reported issue, particularly among women, younger healthcare workers, and frontline staff. Stress levels were heightened by high workloads, exposure to COVID-19 patients, and inadequate protective measures. Coping strategies and self-care behaviors, such as seeking social support and utilizing institutional resources, varied in effectiveness across populations. <b>Conclusion</b>: The findings highlight the urgent need for targeted mental health support and resilience programs for HCWs, ensuring they are better equipped to face future health crises.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on individuals worldwide, affecting not only their educational futures but also their mental health. This paper aims to explore college students' perceived barriers to accessing mental health services during the pandemic. The study finds that there is a significant difference between stigma-related and non-stigma-related barriers, with non-stigma items being rated higher on average. The most commonly reported non-stigma barriers include wanting to solve the problem independently, financial constraints, and the belief that the issue will resolve itself. Stigma-related barriers include feeling embarrassed or ashamed, concern about having a mental health problem on medical records, and fear of being seen as crazy or weak. This research sheds light on the challenges students face in seeking mental health care during the pandemic and highlights the need to address these barriers.

As COVID-19 pandemic spreads worldwide, universities and academic institutions were forced to shift their face-to-face education to online learning since spring 2020. This shift was termed “emergency remote education or learning”, caused many distractions to students, and posed many challenges for both assessment and examination systems and practices at our Zhejiang University-University of Edinburgh (ZJU-UoE) Biomedical Science Institute, like other educational institutions worldwide. This necessitated the development of alternative and effective approaches and procedures to teach students, and several changes and adaptions of assessments and examinations at ZJU-UoE institute. In this article, we described the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for student assessment systems and practices at ZJU-UoE Institute. The article is particularly reflecting on alternative approaches and strategies that we have developed at ZJU-UoE institute to change and adapt student assessments and examinations during COVID-19 pandemic. These changes involved developing general examination strategies and settings, including online (MCQ-type) test exam settings and online written exam settings, and developing effective procedure and policy to safeguard academic integrity during the COVID-19 pandemic that can help with facing various education and learning challenges in a time of crisis worldwide.

A survey on food choices with a randomized sample population of individuals using various social media in Nigeria was conducted during the COVID1-19 pandemic. The data generated was subjected to basic standard statistical analysis. The parameters indicated that 94% of the population is young adults, 58.9 % percent are city dwellers, 63.6% are students, 23.4 % are into business, 86.9% are graduates; 73.8% consume various diets, 23.4% are vegetarians and only 2.8% fed only on proteins, 30.8% of them go on two meals per day. The most choices on influence on food purchases decision are hunger (26.2%), mood (26.2%), past experience (45.8%), quality of the food products (66.7%), cost of the food products (50.5%) and government approval (28%). Also,other most preferred choices are for self-prepared food (40.21%), enhanced local diets (36 %), and a blend of foreign and local diets purchases (24%). Other highest choices include: easy preparation (37.4%), shelf life (29%); cute packaging (23.4%), swelling property preference (20.6%), minimal cooking time and energy preference (37.4%). The weighted sum, index and rank on factors influencing food choices showed that the influence of quality of food product ranked highest, followed by influence on cost. Also preference for enhanced local healthy diets to foreign ranked highest, minimal cooking time and energy costs ranked highest. These nutritional adaptations have implications to individuals, food scientists, manufacturers in the food industry, food regulatory agencies, government and other decision bodies.

It is known that seasonal influenza virus vaccination is important to be taken every year among healthcare workers (HCWs) to avoid transmission of influenza virus and its complications inside the workplace. The reason behind the importance of vaccination is that HCWs are at high risk to be infected with influenza virus. Among the studies addressing the rates of influenza vaccine status among HCWs, a study was conducted in three Middle East countries where the vaccination rates were 24.7%, 67.2%, and 46.4% in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Oman, respectively. Now, after the pandemic of COVID-19 there are beliefs that vaccination with influenza virus could decrease the deaths from COVID-19. A recent retrospective cohort study to detect the effect of seasonal influenza vaccine on the deaths among COVID-19 patients showed that the individuals who didn’t take the influenza vaccine in the last year before being infected with COVID-19 had a higher risk of being hospitalized when compared with patients who took the vaccine. In conclusion, seasonal influenza vaccine could have an important role in the prevention of COVID-19. Seasonal influenza vaccine coverage should be improved among HCWs. New tailored health education programs to improve the attitudes and beliefs of HCWs towards seasonal influenza vaccine during the era of COVID-19 are strongly and urgently needed.

Digital formative assessments have the features of digital learning environment and can be used by teachers to both empower students’ learning and adapt the next steps in the learning process of their students. They are effective tools that can help lecturers and tutors to both collect and analyze the required information and data for supporting the teaching and learning processes. Importantly, digital formative assessments have been particularly critical during the COVID-19 pandemic due to increased students’ learning outside traditional classrooms, limited face-to-face classes and other students’ learning and assessment difficulties at many educational institutions worldwide. In this article, we describe the essential features and importance of digital formative assessments and their recently developed communication methods. We also discuss the significance of digital formative assessments in measuring students’ learning and skills in times of global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.