Regional Energy Agency of Crete

Emergency departments (EDs) are critical healthcare settings that often face challenges related to patient overcrowding and sub-optimal resource use, and these issues have been linked to reduced effectiveness of care and increased patient mortality. This protocol describes a study to enhance electronic health records (EHR) with real-time dashboards developed for healthcare staff, administrators, and other stakeholders in order to address these issues. These dashboards will be analytic tools, fed with data directly from the electronic health records, allowing healthcare indicators to be monitored dynamically and interactively. The indicators will provide a comprehensive overview of patient flow, crowding levels, waiting times, and other key operational metrics to support healthcare providers by enabling real-time monitoring and decision-making. Administrators will also benefit from the dashboards by gaining insight into system bottlenecks and overall ED performance, facilitating more effective management of resources. This study is part of the eCREAM (enabling Clinical Research in Emergency and Acute care Medicine through automated data extraction) project, and 32 EDs from six different European countries will be involved in this 36-month study. A panel of experts will test the usefulness of the dashboards, set up for each end-user type, using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The EHRs, integrated with these ad-hoc dashboards, will empower clinical teams and policymakers to understand department operations dynamics better, ultimately contributing to improved patient outcomes and reduced crowding in emergency settings. Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov , identifier: NCT06372379.

Between April and May 2025, an outbreak of travel-associated Legionnaires’ disease (TALD) occurred, involving six cases at a hotel in Crete, Greece. Including two cases reported in 2023 and two additional cases from 2016 to 2017, ten cases were associated with this accommodation site. All TALD cases were reported by the European Legionnaires’ Disease Surveillance Network (ELDSNet). In compliance with the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) surveillance and investigation protocols for hotels associated with the patient’s stay, local public health authorities conducted on-site inspections at the hotel by collecting water samples and performing risk assessments, while simultaneously recording the required epidemiological, environmental, and physicochemical data. A total of 181 statistically analyzed water samples showed positive rates for L. pneumophila of 12.71% (95% CI: 7.86–17.56) for (≥50 CFU/L) and 6.08% (95% CI: 2.60–9.56) for (≥1000 CFU/L). Risk assessments identified 18 stagnation points, systemic maintenance deficiencies, and high cumulative structural (30/52) and water (36/71) system risk scores. Low microbiological positivity of water samples does not necessarily equate to low risk, thus necessitating continuous risk assessment, implementation of Water Safety Plans (WSPs), and integrated monitoring by accommodation facilities to prevent LD cases.

This paper introduces and describes the GSSVET (Geothermal and Solar Skills Vocational Education and Training) project, an Erasmus+ funded project. The added value of the project is the development of a training platform that contains three programs that enable learning, assessment and certification and has been tailored to the needs of target users. The training material in all curricula is formed in a way that triggers the trainee to learn and evaluate at any stage the new knowledge he has learnt and the knowledge he should study more. In this way the training process is not boring or tiring and can be adjusted to each trainee needs.

Staff behaviour plays a key role in the cybersecurity position of an organisation. Despite this, behaviour-change interventions are not commonly applied within the field of cybersecurity. Behaviour change technique could be particularly beneficial given increasing concerns around healthcare cybersecurity risks; particularly following the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack which had devastating results on healthcare services. Cyber-risk is particularly concerning within healthcare given the criticality of medical systems and the potential impacts of a cyberbreach or attack. In worst case scenarios, cybersecurity incidents could result in patient harm or even fatalities. Whilst there has been concerted investment in improving healthcare’s technological defences against cyberthreat, the same level of investment has not been made in healthcare staff. This has left staff behaviour as a vulnerability which can be exploited by attackers. This paper introduces a structured approach to help organisations work through four key steps that we refer to as the AIDE approach to Assess, Identify, Develop and Evaluate behaviour change techniques to facilitate more secure behaviour. We include a worked example of how we are applying this approach to the development of interventions to mitigate insecure cybersecurity behaviours in a healthcare context.

Although a number of human Legionnaires' disease in tourists are recorded annually in Europe, there are few cases where a direct link can be made between the infected person and the source of infection (hotel or other accommodation). We present a scheme followed in order to track down and identify the source of infection in a tourist suffering from L. pneumophila sg 5 infection, who was accommodated in seven different hotels during his holidays in the island of Crete, and we comment on various difficulties and draw-backs of the process. Water samples were collected from the seven hotels where the patient had resided and analyzed at the regional public health laboratory using cultivation and molecular tests. Of 103 water samples analyzed, 19 (18.4%) were positive for Legionella non-pneumophila and 8 (7.8%) were positive for L. pneumophila. A successful L. pneumophila sg 5 match was found between the clinical and environmental sample, which led us to the final identification of the liable hotel. Timely notification of the case, within the the European Legionnaires' Disease Surveillance Network (ELDSNet) of the partners involved, is crucial during a course of travel associated with Legionella case investigation. Moreover, the urinary antigen test alone cannot provide sufficient information for the source identification. However, acquiring clinical as well as environmental isolates for serogroup and SBT identification is highly important for the successful matching.