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Israel Honors UTEP’s Singhal for Role in Positive Deviance Research

Last Updated on November 26, 2019 at 12:00 AM

Originally published November 26, 2019

By UC Staff

UTEP Communications

The State of Israel’s Ministry of Health and its National Center for Infection Control presented a Special Recognition Award to a research team that included The University of Texas at El Paso’s Arvind Singhal, Ph.D., the Samuel and Edna Holt Marston endowed professor of communication.

The State of Israel’s Ministry of Health and its National Center for Infection Control presented a Special Recognition Award to a research team that included UTEP’s Arvind Singhal, Ph.D., the Samuel and Edna Holt Marston endowed professor of communication. Photo: UTEP Communications
The State of Israel’s Ministry of Health and its National Center for Infection Control presented a Special Recognition Award to a research team that included UTEP’s Arvind Singhal, Ph.D., the Samuel and Edna Holt Marston endowed professor of communication. Photo: UTEP Communications

The team was recognized for its “Developing Strategies Based on the Positive Deviance (PD) Approach for Maintaining Infection Prevention Rules and Reduction of Hospital-Acquired Infections in Israeli Hospitals: An Applied Behavioral Model” during the Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Infection Prevention Conference on Nov. 14, 2019, in Israel. Anat Gesser-Edelsburg, Ph.D., head of the Health Promotion Department in the University of Haifa’s School of Public Health, led the team.

Singhal, an international expert in the field of positive deviance, worked closely with Gesser-Edelsburg to initiate the project in 2017. The research was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed PLOS One journal in September 2019.

“While this national-level recognition honors the participants and research team members, it also demonstrates the value of the positive deviance approach to address highly complex social and organizational problems, to include clinical practice that saves lives,” Singhal said.