Infection Prevention Handbook for Seafarers Working in Cargo Ship

The fact that cargo ships are involved in the transportation of almost all commodities sold worldwide is well documented. These cargo ships need the services of healthy and skilled seafarers for their maintenance, operations, and repair. The seafarers are confronted with a lot of health challenges as dictated by the nature of their job as they voyage across different parts of the world and the ship’s limited space and cramped environment have made them highly susceptible to contract and spread infectious diseases. Evidence has shown that enough research has not been done to acquaint and familiarise the seafarers with information regarding the infection prevention measures. This is a project-based thesis which has a product in the form of a handbook as its scope. The purpose of this thesis was to prepare electronic handbook in English that contains guidelines for the prevention of infections among seafarers who work in cargo ships. The objective was premised on improving the infection prevention knowledge of cargo ship seafarers all over the world. It is believed that this will help to considerably reduce the morbidity and mortality of infectious diseases among the seafarers and mitigate the spread of these diseases by them. This project has enabled the authors to deepen their intellectual acumen, broaden their knowledge of the topic and sharpen their re-search skills to provide a worthwhile, informative, and incisive product. The product is an electronic handbook which was created using Adobe InDesign and FlipHTML5. It is a 48-page handbook that is divided into eight chapters. It contains twenty-one infections commonly faced by the seafarers. Each of the infections was concisely addressed under six headings namely key facts, mode of transmission, incidence, health implications, symptoms, and prevention. Prevention is further discussed under three sub-headings – primary, secondary, and tertiary. Scrum agile project methodology was used for the implementation of the project as it was carried out in five phases namely initiation, planning and estimation, implementation, reviewing and releasing. The method was adopted due to its ability to accommodate modifications. It is imperative to assert that the information provided in this thesis was extracted from credible and reliable sources in accordance with SAMK guidelines. Ethical principles were strictly adhered to according to SAMK and TENK guidelines