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Background and Aim: The Nurses' Cancer Pain Management Competency Scale is a tool to explore nurses' competencies and subjective experiences in cancer pain management, and to help nurses understand their current shortcomings in cancer pain management. Furthermore, based on the scale's specific score, nurses can evaluate their lack of understanding about cancer pain management, advance research into this area, and enhance their capacity to control cancer pain while providing patient care. The scale is currently available only in English and in Chinese. The aim of this study was to translate the new scale and measure its reliability and validity in the Italian context., Study Design: Methodological research model., Methods: The population of this methodological study included Italian nurses working in the oncology departments of 21 hospitals in Northern, Southern and Central Italy; the sample involved 243 nurses who met the inclusion criteria., Results: Cronbach's alpha of the scale was 0.814. The Guttman half-reliability of the scale was 0.819. Nurses' cancer pain management competency includes four factors, which accounted for 71.43% of the cumulative variance: the context of pain management, pain assessment and measurement, management of pain, and multidimensional nature of pain. On a 4-point scale for total competency, the mean score was 2.65 ±0.89. The multidimensional nature of pain (2.88 ±0.76) was the factor that showed the highest mean score, whereas the management of pain factor was the lowest (2.52 ±0.73)., Conclusion: Nurses' cancer pain management competency can be assessed using the Italian version of the Nurses' Cancer Pain Management Competency Scale, which has strong validity and reliability.

. Nosocomial infections during the COVID-19 outbreak. Observational study in an Italian ICU., Introduction: Infections are common among ICU patients., Aim: The purpose of this study is to examine the incidence of nosocomial infections among patients admitted to the ICU with SARS-CoV-2 infection., Methods: A prospective observational study in adults with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection requiring intensive care unit (ICU) admission was performed. From May 2020 to October 2021, a total of 109 admitted patients were included., Results: The incidence rate of new infections was 39.4%. The main infections observed were multidrug-resistant germs infections (39.5%), catheter-related blood infections(24.4%), pneumonia (VAP)(18.6%), and urinary tract infections (17.4%). The overall mortality rate was 32.1% (n= 35) and was significantly higher in patients who had a new infection during hospitalization (n= 26/43, 60.4%) than in patients who did not have a new infection (n= 9/66, 13.6%) (RR = 4.43; 95% CI = 2.31-8.52; p <.001)., Conclusions: Our data suggest that secondary infections are associated with a longer duration of mechanical ventilation and hospital stay and may negatively impact patient survival. However, larger studies are needed.

Aim: to analyze the prevalence of Burnout defined by the MBI-GS among Italian Intensive Care (ICU) staff during the COVID-19 outbreak., Method: a multicentric study was conducted. A sample of 197 ICU health professionals (135 nurses and 62 physicians) participated in the study. Between 25 March and 15 May 2020, the Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey (MBI-GS) questionnaire was made available online by using the Google Forms platform in order to detect and measure the severity ofBurnout Syndrome (BOS)., Results: BOS-related symptoms (medium or high score) for individual MBI-GS domains have been identified in at least 69% of ICU healthcare professionals. Ninety-eight healthcare professionals (49.7%) had a moderate-high risk of emotional exhaustion, 108 (54.8%) ofdepersonalization, and 102 (51.8%) of reduced professional accomplishment. A high risk of emotional exhaustion, a moderate risk of depersonalization(56.3% vs 32.2%) and a moderate risk for reduced professional accomplishment (60.7% vs 24.2%) were observed among nursing staff. A strong association between increase in age and increase of the Burnout risk in ICU's staff was observed., Conclusions: the results suggest that ICU staff during the coronavirus pandemic, had high levels of work-related suffering and were at risk of physical and emotional exhaustion. However, further research should be undertaken to establish causal relationships between BOS and personal and environmental risk factors among healthcare professionals in relation to the COVID-19 outbreak.