Background: Tobacco use is a leading cause of preventable death worldwide and an estimated 250 million children and adolescents in developing countries die prematurely because of tobacco consumption. The objectives of the study were to determine the pattern of tobacco use among the adolescents and assess the factors associated with its use in urban slums of Jorhat, Assam.Methods: A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted in two randomly selected urban slums of Jorhat district from September 2015 to February 2016 among 110 adolescents using predesigned pretested proforma. Data were analyzed using SPSS - trial version 16; risk analysis was done using odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals.Results: 106 (96.36%) adolescents had ever used a tobacco product and 97 (88.18%) were current users. 57.73% consumed smokeless form and 3.1% used smoking form exclusively while 39.17% used both smoking and smokeless tobacco. Exclusive smokeless tobacco use was more common among girls. Smoking as well as combined smoking and smokeless tobacco was more common among boys. Gutkha was most common smokeless product (94.84%) and cigarette was commonest smoking form (34.02%) used. Awareness regarding its harmful effects was high (77.28%). Tobacco use in family is significantly associated with current use of tobacco (OR 5.88).Conclusions: Tobacco consumption is an emerging threat to health of adolescents in urban slums. Smokeless tobacco use is high in our study, especially among girls. Tobacco use by family is a major reason behind using tobacco indicating an urgent need to carry out behaviour change communication (BCC) activities among adolescents and their family members.

Hospital admissions pattern helps to understand the acceptability and utilization of health care services and also indicates the disease burden prevailing in the serving community. This study is an attempt to determine the current pattern of admissions and their clinical outcomes at a tertiary care hospital in Assam. A retrospective record-based study was conducted in Jorhat Medical College and Hospital from 2011 to 2014. A total of 9, 10,157 patients have attended the Out Patient Department (OPD) and 1,28,824 patients were admitted to the In Patients Department (IPD). The daily average of patients attended the OPD ranges between 688-848 and about 77 to 98 patients were admitted to the IPD. In OPD, majority of the patients attended medicine department (19.5%) followed by Emergency (15.4%) and Orthopedics (10.2%) department. Similar pattern was observed in the IPD with Medicine having the highest case load (30.5%) followed by Obstetrics and Gynaecology (25.6%) and Surgery (16.7%). The rural urban patient ratio was calculated as 60:40. The Bed Occupancy Rate (BOR) of the hospital was found 87.8%. Approximately 3% patients died in hospital, 80% improved and 12% were referred to other institution. We could not evaluate the status of 5% patients who were Discharged Against Medical Advice (DAMA). Our study indicates that the services provided by this teaching hospital are acceptable to the community and showing an increasing trend of patient flow with efficient bed occupancy rate. Majority of the admitted patients were discharged from the hospital on improvement. For a newly established government hospital it may be labelled as time-honoured advancement.

Although efforts have been made to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) -5 "Improvement of Maternal Health" of reducing the maternal mortality ratio (MMR) by three-quarters by 2015, this goal has not ABSTRACT Background: Antenatal service is an important strategy for improvement of maternal and child health, reduction of maternal mortality and neonatal death. But mere presence of this service is not enough. Utilization of the antenatal service is the most important aspect and there are many socio demographic factors that influence the women for its utilization. The objective of the study is to assess the utilization of antenatal services in the urban slums of Jorhat municipality, Assam and the socio -demographic factors affecting it. Methods: A community based cross-sectional study was done among women of the slum areas who had at least a child less than one year by using a pre structured and predesigned questionnaire. Results: Adequate utilization of antenatal service was 19% while inadequate utilization was 66%. 74.2% of women had at least one dose of TT and 87.2 % consumed Iron and Folic Acid tablets for four months or more. Women who were high school and above had either adequate (13.2%) or inadequate utilization (81.1%) and only 5.7% of them did not have any antenatal service at all as compared to 37.5% among illiterates. Religion, caste, age of the women, parity did not have much role in its utilization. Among women from the joint families who did not have any antenatal service was only 4.8% as compared to 19.2% of women from nuclear families. Conclusions: Majority of women had inadequate utilization of antenatal service in the slum areas and education played a very important role.

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Background: Jaundice is a term use for the condition in which yellow colouration of the skin and the sclera occurs and is caused by a raised level of bilirubin. There are a number of herbal medicines or self-remedy medications widely in use among the people especially in the rural areas and suburbs. Various study showed that people have also switched over to modern methods of treatment. The purpose of the study is to assess the awareness of people towards Jaundice and the methods of treatment they preferred and practiced.Methods: The study was a community based cross-sectional study which was conducted amongst the people of an urban slum of Jorhat district of Assam, over a period of three months. A sample of 156 study participants of age group (21-60) was taken. Data were collected using a pre-designed and pre-tested proforma. MS excel and SPSS version-23were used to analyze the data.Results: Majority (88.4%) of the study participants were aware of Jaundice while amongst them (89.6%) respondents were in the age group of (21-30) years. (56.5%) study subjects were aware of traditional methods of treatment whereas only (5.1%) were aware of modern methods. However (36.9%) were aware of both traditional and modern methods. (74.6%) preferred as well as practiced traditional methods of treatment .Majority of respondents 56 (54.4%) had influence of society for practicing traditional methods for treatment of Jaundice followed by belief 32 (31.1%).Conclusions: Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) and Information Education Communication (IEC) activities regarding Jaundice should be promoted.