Wegdan Bani-Issa’s research while affiliated with University of Sharjah and other places
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Ramadan is a month-long religious festival and observed globally by Muslims, characterised by intermittent fasting, prayer, reflection and a focus on community. Fasting is one of the five pillars of Islam and has well documented positive impacts on physical health. An article by Bandarian et al., (2021) highlighted the research gaps in Ramadan fasting studies relating to health and disease. The article called for more research studies on different health and disease conditions other than nutrition and metabolic disorders. The authors on this correspondence article continue this call and respectfully articulate the wider societal impact and benefits of Ramadan through its positive impact, through embracing multicultural, multinational and multifaith communities within the United Arab Emirates.
Background Nurses and healthcare professionals employed in correctional and forensic mental health settings encounter unique challenges in the care of their patients due to custodial and restrictive environments. Regions within the Middle East, such as the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have recently experienced exponential economic and healthcare infrastructure development. Mental health has been prioritized for development by recent legislation and practice that incorporate the development of specialist forensic psychiatry services that mediate the need for specialized nurses and allied healthcare staff. Traditionally, forensic care has been provided by general services. The need to progress specialist forensic services with a focus on multidisciplinary staff that seeks to develop safer communities, enhance care, and support the criminal justice system. Methods This review article aims to provide a foundation for the nuances of forensic staff through social constructionism. We adopted the framework of Arksey and O'Malley (2005). The use of a scoping review provides a better understanding of the compatibility, content, and outcomes to position the reader to the theoretical construct that society can be seen as existing in both objective and subjective reality. Discussion This paper argues for the preparedness of thought understood through social constructionism and demonstrates that it is envisaged that any frequently repeated action becomes cast into a pattern that can be reproduced without much effort. The interconnectedness between the themes of addiction, deviance, and crime allows for a holistic overview and improved understanding for care providers and this was achieved through bio-psychosocial model. Conclusion Through the emergence of these complex forms of knowledge, deviance within the lives of patients can be better understood by the emerging professions employed in the emerging forensic healthcare services within the Middle East. These individuals are carefully and dutifully navigating the cultural complexities of mental illness, addictions, and associated deviant behavior. Introduction The relationship between mental health and crime has been prioritized by the WHO (2020) as a necessity to safeguard the mental health of offenders. As a theoretical and conceptual starting point, Crotty's (1998) research stipulates that the experience of society as a subjective reality is achieved through a primary and secondary process of socialization. By adopting this approach, this study explores addiction and deviance as encountered by patients needing forensic mental health care within the Middle East region. Burr (2003) stipulated that an individual's identity stems not from inside the person but from the social realm in which they inhabit. In this method, the study will seek to extend the findings of Berger and Luckmann's (1991) work on socialization in that the processes are enacted upon patients through significant others such as nurses who mediate the objective reality of society, rendering it meaningful; in this way, it is internalized by the individuals (patients). Atkinson (1998) advocates that understanding an individual's life story can create meaning, which is crucially important for generic healthcare staff who may work in forensic settings within the region. The nation is multicultural, and has a diverse range of languages. Burr (2003) highlighted that language can hold inherent challenges for social constructionism in the accurate transmission of an individual's thoughts and feelings, but its strength lies in the interpretation of thought in constructing concepts. This paper will demonstrate the importance of developing knowledge about forensic staff, and pertinent issues and concepts that can preempt the development needs of this service within the Middle Eastern region. The authors attempted to provide a means by which knowledge can be explored and realized by nurses and healthcare staff by structuring the way the world is experienced by patients they encounter within forensic settings and how they may then reflect on deviance and addiction. The study extrapolates the ethos of the biopsychosocial model (Engel, 1977) to explore the phenomena of addictions, substance misuse issues, deviance, and criminality in order to create a holistic understanding. In contrast to the medical model, the bio-psychosocial model of health care (Engel, 1977) focuses on the patients as 'experts' of their own conditions and in the management of their lifestyles (Carel, 2008). This is particularly important for nurses in forensic settings in the Middle East, who, because of cultural and religious backgrounds, may have little or no understanding of the nuanced lived experiences of patients with criminality and substance misuse needs. Furthermore, it is important to formulate a plan of care for these individuals to support their rehabilitation, recovery, and custodial discharge.
Despite the growing interest in social prescribing the diversification of health and social care strategies to support the well-being of patients has remained entrenched with a focus on the hospital setting within the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates has commenced progressing community mental health care to lead changes in how care and treatment are delivered within the United Arab Emirates.
The authors adopted the use of the framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005) to provide a systematic approach to searching the literature and creating a comprehensive foundation to guide the review. This scoping review provides a better understanding of the compatibility, content and outcomes of a selection of health models whilst also allowing further clarification before empirical studies. The scoping review findings will inform the proposed use of social prescribing as an actionable approach to create a focus on the need to include and empower the social determinants of mental health. This article proposes an evidence-based health strategy that supports and enhances recent additions to national legislation on the inclusion of the Mental Health Law within the United Arab Emirates to meditate and prevent inequities in addressing the mental health needs of citizens and residents within the nation’s diverse communities.
Despite the growing interest in social prescribing the diversification of health and social care strategies to support the well-being of patients has remained entrenched with a focus on the hospital setting within the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates has commenced progressing community mental health care to lead changes in how care and treatment are delivered within the United Arab Emirates. The authors adopted the use of the framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005) to provide a systematic approach to searching the literature and creating a comprehensive foundation to guide the review. This scoping review provides a better understanding of the compatibility, content and outcomes of a selection of health models. The scoping review findings will inform the proposed use of social prescribing as an actionable approach to create a focus on the need to include and empower the social determinants of mental health. This article proposes an evidence-based health strategy that supports and enhances recent additions to national legislation on the inclusion of the Mental Health Law within the United Arab Emirates to meditate and prevent inequities in addressing the mental health needs of citizens and residents within the nation’s diverse communities.
Background
Limited research has addressed breastfeeding practices and challenges faced by mothers during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in the United Arab Emirates. The recommendation on whether to continue or initiate breastfeeding among mothers with suspected or confirmed COVID-19 was contradictory. This study aimed to explore breastfeeding practices and challenges faced by mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Methods
In this online, cross-sectional study, 249 mothers who delivered during the COVID-19 pandemic were recruited. The questionnaire included sociodemographic and anthropometric questions related to delivery experience and infant health, attitudes toward breastfeeding practices, breastfeeding knowledge, behaviors during COVID-19, and concerns and challenges related to COVID-19.
Results
Most participants (90.8%) breastfed their infants, of whom only 28.5% exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months. Among mothers who were infected with COVID-19, approximately 90.7% were not given precautionary instructions by the health-care professionals during breastfeeding, 67.6% had breastfed their infants, 27% were isolated from their infants, and 50% were not able to visit their infants during infection. Moreover, exclusive breastfeeding was inversely associated with infant separation by more than six-fold higher ( B = −1.89; odds ratio = 6.6, 95% confidence interval: 2.90–16.26; P <0.001).
Conclusion
Building a supportive environment for mothers can have a positive impact on their well-being and strengthen mother-infant bonding during the pandemic.
Despite the growing interest in social prescribing the diversification of health and social care strategies to support the well-being of patients has remained entrenched with a focus on the hospital setting within the Middle East. The United Arab Emirates has commenced progressing community mental health care to lead changes in how care and treatment are delivered within the United Arab Emirates.
The authors adopted the use of the framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005) to provide a systematic approach to searching the literature and creating a comprehensive foundation to guide the review. This scoping review provides a better understanding of the compatibility, content and outcomes of a selection of health models. The scoping review findings will inform the proposed use of social prescribing as an actionable approach to create a focus on the need to include and empower the social determinants of mental health. This article proposes an evidence-based health strategy that supports and enhances recent additions to national legislation on the inclusion of the Mental Health Law within the United Arab Emirates to meditate and prevent inequities in addressing the mental health needs of citizens and residents within the nation’s diverse communities.
Background: The intensive care unit (ICU) is a busy and complex workplace, and several work-related and personal factors are known to make ICU nurses more vulnerable to moral distress than other healthcare professionals. It is crucial to identify these factors to guide future studies and preventive strategies. This scoping review explores such factors to present current knowledge on the factors that trigger moral distress and to guide future research by reviewing studies to explore and summarize factors that trigger moral distress in ICU nurses.
Methods: The PubMed, EBSCO, and CINAHL Plus databases were searched to identify potentially relevant studies published between 2011 to 2022. Inclusion criteria: peer-reviewed studies published in English that provided results regarding factors causes or correlated to moral distress in ICU nurses. After removing 618 duplicates, 316 papers were excluded after title and abstract screening, leaving 71 articles for full-text screening. A further 54 articles were excluded as their outcomes did not include factors that caused moral distress, or were not specific to ICU nurses, so 17 studies were eventually analysed using qualitative content analysis through an inductive approach. The findings of the articles were extracted and coded independently by two authors, and data were grouped and categorized.
Results: The content categories of factors contributing to ICU nurses' moral distress were organized into themes and subthemes. Four major themes were identified: Powerlessness, end-of-life care, ineffective teamwork, and personal characteristics of ICU nurses.
Conclusions: This review highlights the factors that contribute to moral distress in critical care nurses, which are mainly attributable to the organizational climate and the nature of the ICU clinical environment. Descriptive and intervention studies (experimental or action research) must investigate causality between identified variables to inform management strategies to improve support for ICU nurses’ coping relative to moral distress.
... Muitos pacientes continuam relatando dor não aliviada durante a hospitalização pós-operatória e expressam insatisfação com a qualidade geral do tratamento da dor. Esse manejo subótimo ocorre em diferentes tipos de cirurgias e reflete os desafios contínuos no tratamento eficaz da dor pósoperatória (KHALIL et al., 2025). ...
... Salutogenic factors and processes promote work-related health and contribute to and maintain the health and well-functioning of the individual, in an organization or in a society [8], whereas the pathogenic perspective focuses on understanding the origins of health risks and treating disease [9]. Previous research [10,11] has shown that a sense of coherence can maintain or improve an individual's health when faced with adversity. In nursing, having a sense of coherence has been shown to be a strengthening resource for work-related well-being when facing challenging work situations [12]. ...
... Nurses in the two subscales of sleep disturbances, with 92.70%, and sleep efficiency, with a frequency of 90.98%, had sleep problems. Similar findings in multiple studies in other countries also revealed a high frequency of sleep disturbances among nurses, such as Saudi Arabia (25), China (12), United Arab Emirates (26), and Korea (27). Also, Haseli et al. compared the sleep quality of nurses and midwives in Iran. ...
... These are the key elements of empowerment (George et al. 2023). Empowerment can likely reduce time pressure, as it can effectively increase nurses' positive emotions (Cougot et al. 2024), compassion (Ahmed et al. 2022), and work engagement (Alluhaybi et al. 2023), while reducing turnover intention (Ahmed et al. 2022;Hamid et al. 2024). Additionally, empowerment may enhance nurses' confidence (Luo et al. 2024), so it can positively contribute to patient outcomes, for example, quality of care (Cougot et al. 2024). ...
... Zaid et al. [16] showed that perceived organizational support can stimulate nurses' work enthusiasm, enhance their sense of belonging to the organization, make them feel the care and help from the organization, actively return work to the organization, improve nurses' professional identity, provide patients with better nursing services, and improve patient satisfaction. In addition, the study of Dan et al. [17] shows that perceived organizational support is conducive to building a good nurse-patient relationship and medical care relationship, creating a warm department atmosphere, making nurses feel safe and trusted, alleviating job burnout [18], improving their enthusiasm for work, and enhancing their willingness to learn narrative nursing [19]. However, it is still being determined whether nurses' perceived organizational support contributes to improving nurses' medical narrative ability. ...
... Therefore, stress Oweidat et al. BMC Nursing (2025) 24:167 management and crises courses should be integrated with the nursing curricula of undergraduate students to help them in dealing with such crises [38,39]. ...
... Various coping strategies often result in different effects on managing stress (Rodrigues et al., 2023), with problem-focused coping being an adaptive coping strategy while avoidant coping being considered a maladaptive coping strategy and can result in worse mental health (Holahan et al., 2005;Nagane et al., 2023). However, results on the effects of emotion-focused coping are inconsistent, with some showing beneficial effects and others demonstrating unfavorable effects on reducing stress (Bani-Issa et al., 2022;Ding et al., 2021). In addition, effects of coping strategies on managing stress vary according to the stressors being experienced. ...
... The prevalence of non-compliance with the recommended daily hours according to international guidelines ranged from 10.7% to 79.7%. 26,50 On the other hand, four studies assessed sleep quality, and the rating of poor sleep quality ranged from 15.2% to 74.3%, 29,82 whereas eight studies assessed sleep disturbances or sleep-related difficulties/problems, ranging from 11.8% to 90%. 35,83 The quantitative synthesis included 12 studies (n = 9370) that used a valid measurement tool to provide data on non-compliance with the recommended daily hours of sleep ( Figure 2D). ...
... A convenience sample of 457 women was recruited from the maternity wards of ten hospitals in the four Emirates between February 2018 and July 2019. Detailed descriptions of the study and the recruitment methods were previously published [28]. Inclusion criteria comprised literate Emirati and expatriate women in the immediate postpartum period aged 18 to 45 years at the time of initial contact, and who had just delivered a healthy, singleton baby. ...
... Several studies have examined the link between stress, salivary cortisol, and resilience.Špiljak et al. (2024) [18] found that dental students with high stress had elevated cortisol, which decreased with progressive muscle relaxation. Bani-Issa et al. (2020)[19] reported impaired cortisol levels in female healthcare professionals, linked to poor sleep and long shifts.Borghi et al. (2021) observed increased cortisol during exams in pharmacy students but noted adaptive regulation over time[20].Ng et al. (2004) showed that higher stress and cortisol before exams led to lower academic performance[21].Butzer et al. (2016) found that school-based yoga reduced cortisol, especially in younger students. In comparison, our study confirmed that resilience training significantly lowered salivary cortisol and perceived stress in Indian school students, reinforcing the role of structured interventions in stress reduction[22].Limitations and future directions:Despite the robust findings, the small sample size and short follow-up period are limitations that restrict generalizability. ...
