Week 7 Creative Practice Post

  Needs Assessment and Resource Mapping

 

     This is the composition for week seven which I will later add to my big collage.  I find that using text with design helps me to retain material better.  Remembering back when I was a little girl we had a minister who did chalk talks for the congregation.  He actually drew from an easel as he delivered the sermon and the topic of the sermon always related to the subject matter of his drawing.  This man was a great influence to me; I actually used his technique in high school once but with song injected instead of talk. When teaching I have always believed that the student retains more if approached from many different areas that attract the senses in different ways of learning.  

      Collage is good especially for those individuals who may be timid about doing more direct hands on forms of art work.  The participant will simply tear the paper leaving a raw edge then gluing the picture to a heavier stock paper. I practiced this activity after clearance through the hospitals infection control nurse, but wanted to learned more about using magazines and if they could be a vehicle for cross-contamination of bacteria.

     This is what I found out in one study conducted in 2011 regarding the survival of bacterial pathogens on paper and bacterial retrieval from paper to hands.  The objective was to determine by laboratory investigation how long bacterial pathogens can survive on office paper and whether bacteria can be transferred from hands to paper and back to hands in a "worst-case scenario. "The four tested organisms showed differences in length of survival depending on environmental room conditions, but were stable on paper for up to 72 hours and still cultivable after seven days. Test organisms were transferred to paper, survived on it, and were re-transferred back to hands.(Institute for Hygiene and Environmental Medicine, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany. nhuebner@uni-greifswald.de, 2011)

     One important thing to note about this study is the volunteers transferred the bacteria with moistened fingertips. Well-kept books with dry pages are not usually a threat. There are some hospitals that participate in leading libraries and reading rooms. The materials are first examined for any previous exposure to moisture before acceptance.  

     When conditions are favorable paper can serve as a vehicle for cross-contamination of bacterial pathogens in medical settings. This is just reinforcement that current recommendations on hand hygiene needs to be meticulously followed. Even if you purchase a magazine off the stand you can’t know if you are the first to open it. After reading this study my new self-imposed rule is a full week quarantine of dry magazines before doing a workshop, but I will continue this process of collage being ever so mindful of universal precautions. 

References 

Institute for Hygiene and Environmental Medicine, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, Greifswald,Germany. nhuebner@uni-
greifswald.de. (2011). Survival of bacterial pathogens on paper and bacterial retrieval from paper to hands: preliminary results.

 American Journal of Nursing.