Helping the civil and professional community

• The Door-to-door initiative: Driving paid caregivers to help frail older adults. In the State of Israel 220,000 older people with functional disabilities rely on paid caregivers assistance on daily basis within the coverage of the “Nursing Law”. In most cases, these are caregivers who come to help the elderly perform the most basic tasks: getting out of bed and getting dressed, taking a shower, organizing food, arranging and taking medications, etc. Many older people have no alternative to rely on should this type of care be made unavailable to them. During the COVID-19 public transportation was reduced to 25% and for many caregivers it becomes impossible to continue to provide care. To prevent this potential harm to older adults due to lack of care Prof. Anna Zisberg along with the association Matav began a campaign to recruit volunteers who drive the caregivers to the elderly’s homes. 20 volunteers of them 10 are UOH students faculty organized a WhatsApp group together with Matav organization and provided daily driving services to caregivers across the city of Haifa. Similar initiatives followed across the country.

• Prof. Yori Gidron developed and administered a brief 15-min workshop of stress management, whose components are fully evidence-based, for medical staff at emergency rooms and infectious disease units – Rambam and Ziv hospitals. More than ten workshops have been delivered already by him.
• Students from the Cheryl Spencer Department of Nursing “grow” a team of volunteers, providing emergency assistance to the elderly, into an army of over 1,000. Tamar Nagler, a third-year nursing student, together with third-year student Liat Epstein from the Department of Occupational Therapy Department, launched a grassroots initiative to provide assistance to senior citizens in Haifa and surrounding region. The community outreach project has grown into a large-scale operation involving over a thousand volunteers. According to Nagler, the project draws inspiration from the ‘Activist Old Age’ course, led by Dr. Maayan Agmon. The project is operating in cooperation with the Dean of Students Office and the Welfare Department of the Haifa Municipality.

Research

• Prof. Efrat Dagan, Prof. Michal Paul (Head, Institute for Infectious Diseases, Rambam Health Care Campus) Prof. Anat Drach-Zahavy and Yael Dishon-Benattar. This research team is just about to conduct a research assessing the association between resilience, vocational values, and nurses’ well-being and professional performance during the COVID-19 outbreak. The anonymous, on-line survey will be conducted among nurses of all ranks and positions in Israel and will be circulated through social media. We believe that understanding the association between personal resilience and professional values, and the well-being and professional performance of nurses, in the presence of a newly emerging, stressful situation, may contribute to development of supportive interventions to promote nurses’ ability to cope with the current and similar, dynamic situations in the future.
• Prof. Dorit Pud, Prof. Efrat Dagan, Prof. Efrat Shadmi and Prof. Anna Zisberg submitted a research proposal to the Ministry of Science and Technology and to the Israel National Institute for Health Research and Policy whose aim is to Explore the trajectories of physical and psychological symptoms experienced by isolated adults with and without diagnosis of COVID-19. The research will be a Web technology-Based longitudinal study.
• Prof. Daniel Sperling is completing a survey of 4^th year nursing students who are in their internship and hospital nurses throughout the country examining the ethical dilemmas, challenges and opportunities related to provision of care at the Covid-19 outbreak. He is also involved in a research project that explores the attitudes of care teams, hospital administrations, and ethics committee members regarding ethics guidelines “for the Prioritization of Severely Ill Patients During the Corona Epidemic” and their implications on quality of health service. In addition, he plans investigating the concept of patient dignity and its application to care of institutionalized dementia patients during the Covid-19 crisis. 
• Prof. Yori Gidron has been involved in three research projects. The first studies the effects of “psychological inoculation” (a cognitive method) on anxiety and adherence to Ministry of Health recommendations during the Coronavirus epidemic. Two other planned projects examine the effects of emotional regulation on mental health outcomes in quarantined people during the Coronavirus epidemic and the effects of vagal nerve activation on prognosis of patients with mild Coronavirus infections.
• Prof. Tamar Shochat. Staying at home to avoid exposure to Coronavirus changes our daily routines, but also affects nighttime sleep schedules. While some enjoy longer and better sleep, others sleep poorly due to fears and anxieties related to the crisis. Researchers from the University of Haifa and the Technion are assessing sleep patterns of stay-at-home children and adults by collecting data from electronic sleep diaries. This project, directed by Prof. Tamar Shochat is an initiative of the Research Excellence Center: Taking Citizen Science to School (TCSS), supported by the Israel Science Foundation and the Ministry of Education. 
• Prof. Anna Zisberg and Prof. Efrat Shadmi are conducting a study investigating the personal, clinical and organizational related needs of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have partnered with a tertiary general hospital and a geriatric center to perform an ongoing assessment of nurses’ needs and are generating reports for the medical centers’ managers to facilitate planning of how to address identified needs. Already more than 300 nurses have completed the survey and a second wave of data collection is planned.