Celebrating diversity at the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine

This is the last issue of 2023, which became exceptional for me because I dared to take up a challenge of serving as an Editor-in-Chief for this unique, independent, international journal and work with Axana Scherbeijn at IOS Press trying to closely follow all advice and spiritual support from the legendary heroes of the journal, all of whom I was privileged to know personally: Ralph Edwards, Chris van Boxtel and Graham Dukes. They all supported me with my first experiences writing editorials. This is the first one I’m writing with Axana.

With seven articles from all over the globe we celebrate in this issue the richness of diversity of our authorship, the thematic coverage and research methodology, alongside with, as we very much hope, the diversity of our readership.

The themes range from the recent COVID-19 pandemic, medical occupational health and modern digitalisation of health and peoples’ life as a whole to the ever pertinent and demanding problems of inappropriate medicine use by physicians and nurses with a focus on specific pharmacological groups and dosage forms.

The methodological approaches include prospective and retrospective studies, specifics of questionnaire development and prescription data reviews, a systematic review with meta-analysis and a brief report.

The COVID-19 pandemic theme is explored by the authors of the University of Babylon, Iraq, in their survey of 400 pharmacists on the erosive effects of the pandemic on dispensing of medicines.

The author team from Moulay Ismail University, Morocco presents their study of mercurial poisoning risk from dental amalgam use in a population of Moroccan dentists using a latent class regression approach. The paper presents the authors’ initial step towards the development of a diagnosis model that predicts clinical profiles according to occupational mercury exposure.

A real-world evidence study of the authors from the Technological University of Pereira-Audifarma S.A. and the Autonomous University Foundation of the Americas, Colombia, revealed the high proportion (66.3%) of inappropriately prescribed transdermal patches from a total of 415 reviewed prescriptions in Colombia. With this work the authors raise awareness of their policy-makers of the urgency in improving training of physicians and creating prescription quality verification systems.

From the systematic review of 38 studies involving 60,878 participants, delivered by the author team from the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER), India, we learn about the risk factor profiles in patients with resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infection. The meta-analysis of 6394 cases of resistance and 54,484 controls identified the most significant risk factors to be the exposure to carbapenem, amikacin and mechanical ventilation.

The authors from the University of Gezira, Sudan, in their cross-sectional, prospective study, analysed the errors made by nurses, both in preparation and in administration of intravenous medicines to critically ill patients. The authors advocate for better nurse education and emphasize the importance of further studies exploring errors associated with the work of nurses of varying levels of experience.

From the IPB University, Indonesia we learn about perceived benefits and social influences of digital health services in Indonesia amongst 364 respondents representing a diverse population by age and gender, education, employment status, etc. in the era of the internet-triggered behavioural changes.

The authors from the Arabian Gulf University, the Kingdom of Bahrain, in a retrospective observational study explore the problems of the use of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medicines in renal transplant patients and caution us about acute kidney injuries in this population.

The beauty of the diversity of the global coverage and the diversity of topics is complimented by the unanimous key message from the authors of all included papers in this issue – the need of more research and united efforts for better and safer use of modern health technologies for better health of all.