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There are declines in the levels of awareness of hypertension and even lower levels of control. Research is required to reveal reasons behind these near to the ground levels of control and treatment, and especially awareness, in order to put in the picture policy for the improvement of quality of life of hypertensive patients in Egypt.

Hypertension (HTN) is a common health problem and a major cardiovascular risk factor. Accurate measurement of blood pressure (BP) is mandatory for proper diagnosis and follow-up. The aim of this study was to evaluate the accuracy of mercury sphygmomanometer BP-measuring devices in public hospitals in Cairo, Egypt. Fifty public hospitals were included, and 10% of all mercury sphygmomanometer devices in each hospital were tested. Assessment included physical condition (e.g., mercury status, lid of the device, state of the rubber tubes), leakage rate, and calibration accuracy (as compared with a reference device). Devices were approved as accurate when they could successfully pass all three assessment tests. The total number of sphygmomanometer devices was 465. The overall pass rate was 1.3% (six devices). Twenty-five (5.2%) devices passed all of the physical tests, 50 (10.8%) passed the leakage test, and 50 (16.5%) passed the calibration accuracy test. There were 162 (34.8%) devices that showed a high leakage rate (>80 mmHg) and thus were not tested for calibration accuracy. In conclusion, most of the mercury sphygmomanometer devices in hospitals are neglected and not checked regularly for any errors. A plan should be made to gradually replace those failed devices with new, validated, and well-calibrated devices, preferably devices that do not contain mercury.

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Background: Mobility patterns of healthcare workers (HCWs) (ie, the spatiotemporal distribution of patient rooms they visit) have a significant impact on the spread of healthcare acquired infections (HAIs). Objective: In this project, we used fine-grained data from a sensor deployment at the medical intensive care unit (MICU) in the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC) to study the mobility patterns of HCWs and their impact on HAI spread. Methods: We analyzed 10 days of data from a 20-bed MICU sensor deployment. For parameters t1 and t2, each pair of rooms i and j is assigned a weight W(i, j) representing the number of times an HCW spends at least t1 seconds in room i followed by at least t1 seconds in room j, within t2 seconds of each other. W(i, j) is a measure of HCW traffic going from room i to room j; we study the correlation between W(i, j) and the distance between rooms i and j. Additionally, we perform 2 disease-spread simulations: (1) a base simulation, obtained by replaying observed HCW mobility traces and (2) a perturbed simulation, which is the same as the base simulation, except that we replace each HCW who visits a room by a random available HCW. Thus, the perturbed simulation removes correlations in the observed HCW mobility traces. Results: We computed W(i, j) for all room pairs i, j for parameters t1 = 30 seconds and t2 = 1,800 and 3,600 seconds. For nurses, there was a strong negative correlation of between pairwise room distance and the weights W(i, j) (−0.768 for t2 = 1,800; −0.711 for t2 = 3,600), The more distant 2 rooms were, the less they shared nurse traffic. This was not true for physicians (correlation = −0.027 for t2 = 1,800; −0.014 for t2 = 3,600). Figure 1 shows a weight versus distance scatter plot for nurses for t1 = 30 and t2 = 1,800. This spatial correlation has positive implications for disease spread; the base simulation, which preserves these spatial correlations, has between 12% and 55% fewer mean infected patients (>100 replicates) for different simulation parameters compared to the perturbed simulation. Conclusions: Our results, based on fine-grained data, show a “naturally emerging” cohorting behavior of nurses, where nurses are more likely to visit rooms close to each other within a 30–60 minute time window, than rooms further away. Through simulations, this behavior provides substantial protection against disease spread.Funding: NoneDisclosures: None