Relevant community agencies should proactively develop a strategy to enable the identification and management of suicide contagion. Guidelines to assist communities in managing clusters should be updated to reflect the widespread use of communication technologies in modern society.
In a cluster randomized trial, Patricia Priest and colleagues find that providing hand sanitizer along with hand hygiene education in primary school classrooms, compared with hand hygiene alone, does not reduce school absences.
Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary
There has been little useful research in recent years into those who perpetrate domestic violence.
Domestic violence is always anchored in a social context in which the aspirations of men and women are dealt with unequally. The majority of perpetrators of domestic violence are men.
Perpetrators are often young, troubled, unemployed, and of low self‐esteem; they have often experienced abuse (of various types) themselves. However, these factors do not justify their abusive behaviour.
General practitioners and other health workers have a responsibility to broach the subject of domestic violence with both perpetrators and victims. They are in a key position to break the silence that allows it to continue.
Programs for stopping domestic violence can be effective for those who are motivated to change their behaviour and see the programs through to completion.
BackgroundNew Zealand has relatively high rates of morbidity and mortality from infectious disease compared with other OECD countries, with infectious disease being more prevalent in children compared with others in the population. Consequences of infectious disease in children may have significant economic and social impact beyond the direct effects of the disease on the health of the child; including absence from school, transmission of infectious disease to other pupils, staff, and family members, and time off work for parents/guardians. Reduction of the transmission of infectious disease between children at schools could be an effective way of reducing the community incidence of infectious disease. Alcohol based no-rinse hand sanitisers provide an alternative hand cleaning technology, for which there is some evidence that they may be effective in achieving this. However, very few studies have investigated the effectiveness of hand sanitisers, and importantly, the potential wider economic implications of this intervention have not been established.AimsThe primary objective of this trial is to establish if the provision of hand sanitisers in primary schools in the South Island of New Zealand, in addition to an education session on hand hygiene, reduces the incidence rate of absence episodes due to illness in children. In addition, the trial will establish the cost-effectiveness and conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the intervention in this setting.Methods/DesignA cluster randomised controlled trial will be undertaken to establish the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of hand sanitisers. Sixty-eight primary schools will be recruited from three regions in the South Island of New Zealand. The schools will be randomised, within region, to receive hand sanitisers and an education session on hand hygiene, or an education session on hand hygiene alone. Fifty pupils from each school in years 1 to 6 (generally aged from 5 to 11 years) will be randomly selected for detailed follow-up about their illness absences, providing a total of 3400 pupils. In addition, absence information will be collected on all children from the school rolls. Investigators not involved in the running of the trial, outcome assessors, and the statistician will be blinded to the group allocation until the analysis is completed.Trial registrationACTRN12609000478213
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