Nurses as agents for achieving environmentally sustainable health systems: A bibliometric analysis

AIM

To analyse the current scientific knowledge and research lines focused on environmentally sustainable health systems, including the role of nurses.

BACKGROUND

There seem to be differences between creating interventions focused on environmentally sustainable health systems, including nurses, and the scarcity of research on this topic, framed on the Sustainable Development Goals.

METHODS

A bibliometric analysis was carried out, via three databases (Web of Science, Scopus and Pubmed), and the guideline recommendations were followed to select bibliometric data.

RESULTS

The search resulted in 159 publications, significantly increasing the trends from 2017 to 2021 (p = .028). The most relevant countries in this area were the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden. Also, the top articles were from relevant journals, indexed in Journal Citation Report, and the first and the second quartiles linked to the nursing field and citations (p < .001).

CONCLUSION

Education is key to achieving environmentally sustainable health systems via institutions and policies.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING MANAGEMENT

There is a lack of experimental data and policies on achieving or maintaining environmentally sustainable health care systems, indicating that nurses have an important role and should be consulted and included in decision-making policies regarding sustainability in the health care systems.

The international data governance landscape

As the adoption of digital health accelerates health research increasingly relies on large quantities of biomedical data. Research institutions scattered across a large number of jurisdictions collaborate in producing and analyzing biomedical big data. National data protection legislation, for its part, grows increasingly complex and localized. To respond to heterogeneous legal requirements arising in numerous jurisdictions, decentralized health consortia must develop scalable organizational and 6 technological arrangements that enable data flows across jurisdictional boundaries. In this article, proposals are made to enable health sector organisations to align established biomedical ethics process and data analysis practices to shifting data protection norms through both public law co-regulation, private law tools, and design-oriented approaches.

A decade of Ecuador´s efforts to raise its health research output: a bibliometric analysis

Background: Over the past decade, the political movement called ‘Revolución Ciudadana’ implemented a variety of policies and interventions (P&I) in Ecuador to improve higher education and strengthen local research capacity. We refer specifically to the ‘Mandato 14’ and the Higher Education Law (LOES, Spanish acronym) launched in 2008 and 2010, respectively.

Objective: To assess the impact of these P&I (Mandato 14/LOES) on the production of health sciences-related articles (HSRA), and the relationship of these HSRA with the country’s health priorities.

Methods: A Scopus search was performed to retrieve HSRA published from 1999 to 2017. Bivariate analysis was used to assess variation between the period I (1999–2008) and period II (2009–2017). Further, we examined the association between the top 10 causes of mortality and the total HSRA output.

Results: The final study sample consisted of 2784 articles. After 2008, Ecuadorian production of HSRA increased steadily from 671 to 2133 publications (p<.001). Overall (1999–2017), the most common study design was cross-sectional (32.3%), the primary research focus was in the clinical-surgical area (49.3%), and the academic institutions were the primary drivers of scientific production during period II (56.9% vs. 29.5%, p<.001). Further, we found a decrease in the production of randomized controlled trials (6.7% vs. 1.8%, p<.001). Only 9% of research production involved the primary causes of mortality, and the proportion has remained unchanged over time (8.2% vs. 9.3%, p>.05).

Conclusions: Ecuadorian HSRA output increased significantly after 2008. This larger volume of scientific output could be the result to the Mandato 14/LOES implemented in the last decade. However, a low percentage of HSRA are dedicated to addressing the country’s health priorities. Proper planning, execution and monitoring of national health research agendas would reduce the mismatch between health burden and the HSRA output in Ecuador and other low-and middle-income countries.

How We Do Harm: Do Copyrighted Scales Benefit Research in the Developing World?

One of the most difficult challenges in carrying out global health research in the developing world is the issue of copyright protection of questionnaires. The current reality is that research in the developing world is often hampered by inadequate or even non-existent budgetary support. From our point of view, an additional hindrance to carrying out research in developing countries is the insistence by holders of questionnaire copyrights that they are paid for the use of their testing instruments. One adverse consequence of demands for compensation by copyright holders may be that worthwhile research is impeded or even prevented. It is argued that the practice of charging non-funded research projects for the use of copyrighted questionnaires denies inclusion of data on world minorities, and thus prevents the potential benefits that such data could provide. In this commentary, we focus on copyrighted instruments and the restrictions that they often represent for researchers in the developing world. More broadly, we argue that to the extent that research in the developing world is impeded by demands for developed world levels of compensation for the use of proprietary tests, the development of vital health programs that are designed to serve these populations can be adversely affected. Several strategies for rectifying inequities posed by current copyright policies are suggested for the promotion of health research in the developing world.

Stop Aging Disease! ICAD 2014

On November 1-2, 2014, there took place in Beijing, China, the first International Conference on Aging and Disease (ICAD 2014) of the International Society on Aging and Disease (ISOAD). The conference participants presented a wide and exciting front of work dedicated to amelioration of aging-related conditions, ranging from regenerative medicine through developing geroprotective substances, elucidating a wide range of mechanisms of aging and aging-related diseases, from energy metabolism through genetics and immunomodulation to systems biology. The conference further emphasized the need to intensify and support research on aging and aging-related diseases to provide solutions for the urgent health challenges of the aging society.

Research for better health: the Panamanian priority-setting experience and the need for a new process

BACKGROUND

Panama is, economically, the fastest growing country in Central America and is making efforts to improve management mechanisms for research and innovation. However, due to contextual factors, the Panamanian Health Research System is not well developed and is poorly coordinated with the Health System. Likewise, despite recent efforts to define a National Health Research Agenda, implementing this agenda and aligning it with Panamanians' health needs remains difficult. This articles aims to review Panama's experience in health research priority setting by analyzing the fairness of previous prioritization processes in order to promote an agreed-upon national agenda aligned with public health needs.

METHODS

The three health research prioritization processes performed in Panama between 2006 and 2011 were analyzed based on the guidelines established by the four "Accountability for Reasonableness" principles, namely "relevance", "publicity", "revision", and "enforcement", which provide a framework for evaluating priority-setting fairness.

RESULTS

The three health research priority-setting events performed in Panama during the reference period demonstrated a heterogeneous pattern of decision-making strategies, stakeholder group composition, and prioritization outcomes. None of the three analyzed events featured an open discussion process with the scientific community, health care providers, or civil society in order to reach consensus.

CONCLUSIONS

This investigation makes evident the lack of a strategy to encourage open discussion by the multiple stakeholders and interest groups that should be involved during the priority-setting process. The analysis reveals the need for a new priority-setting exercise that validates the National Agenda, promotes its implementation by the National Secretariat for Science, Technology and Innovation in conjunction with the Ministry of Health, and empowers multiple stakeholders; such an exercise would, in turn, favor the implementation of the agenda.