BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE: Working long shifts are associated with fatigue, medical errors and poor outcomes of care. However, there is a lack of guide that can provide policy-makers the optimal duty length in the Malaysian hospitals. The study aims to investigate the impact of nursing duty hours’ length on the quality and safety of care delivered in the “Medical-Surgical Wards” in Malaysia.METHOD: Cross-sectional study was carried out on 12 private hospitals. Data was collected, through questionnaires, from 652 nurses (61.8 % response rate). Stratified random sampling was used in the study. Regression analyses were conducted to explore the impact of the nursing duty hours’ length on the care quality and safety.FINDINGS: The length of nurses’ duty hours is not significantly affecting care quality (F = 1.27 and P value = 0.28) and patient safety (F = 1.81 and P value = 0.13), at p<0.05 significance level.CONCLUSION: Nurse working in hospitals with 10-hours night shift had perceived poor quality (B=-0.11, t=-1.64, p=0.10); and unsafe care (B=-0.17, t=-2.40, p=0.02). Policy makers in Malaysian hospitals can benefit from the study by restructuring duty hours’ length in their hospital.

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE: Healthy work environment is required to provide high quality teaching. Few studies regarding occupational stress and burnout in Indian schools have been conducted. The study aims to determine and compare the occupational stress level and professional burnout in teachers working in private and government schools. 120 private school teachers and 120 government school teachers recruited for this study.METHODS: Chi square test, Student independent t test and ANOVA used for data analysis have been used.RESULTS: Stress level and burnout level are varies significantly between male and female Indian school. (Chi square value 26.27 and p Value 0.001 in male and chi square value 38.06 and p value 0.001 in female). Government schools (Least Likely 5±0.0, More Likely 10.82±1.99, Most Prone Stress 16.15 ±1.84 have significant difference among them) have higher stress level than Private schools (Least Likely 4.00±1.41, More Likely 9.86±2.29, Most Prone Stress 15.66±1.34 have significant difference among them). Governmental schools having more stress (14.33±3.24) compare to Private schools (13.34±3.51), (t=2.26, p =0.023). Similarly the burnout also having the more in government schools (59.43±11.78) compare to private schools (48.61±11.94), (t=7.07, p=0.001).CONCLUSIONS: The government teachers have more occupational stress compared to the private school teachers in India. Leaders and decision makers required to make early identification and counseling about different factors that influence stress level in private and Government school teachers.

Biomedical and Pharmacology Journal (BPJ) is an international, open access, peer reviewed, quarterly research journal.

The Pareto-Positive Stable (PPS) distribution is introduced as a new model for describing city size data of a region in a country. The PPS distribution provides a flexible model for fitting the entire range of a set of city size data and the classical Pareto and Zipf distributions are included as a particular case.