Medicines play a very significant role for treating many diseases and conditions, but at the end of the treatment it is very important to dispose them of properly. So, the knowledge and awareness of proper drug disposal are essential for safe environment. Lack of knowledge and practice can lead to various problems like environmental pollution and various health hazards directly or indirectly. Hence, the study was aimed to assess the knowledge, practice, and awareness towards disposal of unused / expired drugs among healthcare professionals such as doctor, medical students, pharmacy students and nurses. This was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study conducted in a tertiary care teaching hospital. About 400 participants in each category were included in the study. The questionnaire consisted of three parts which included demography, and multiple choice questions related to knowledge and awareness of the drug disposal. The collected data was expressed in percentage. A total of 393 participants have completed the survey which includes 32% males and 68% females. It was found that the commonest discarding pattern of the expired/ unused medicines was through household trash (67%). A total of 349 (89%) were aware of the significance of improper disposal. It was observed that the participants 44(11.1%) had partial knowledge about proper drug disposal but there was a lack of practice 264 (67.1%) of safe disposal methods. This study aimed to create an awareness to bridge the lacunae between knowledge, practice of proper and environmental safe methods of disposing expired/ unused drugs among health care professionals.

Background: Nursing is a very challenging profession, which requires very stringent training since initial years of nursing education. Throughout the training period, students are exposed to various stressful situations. Inability to cope up with varied stressors may lead to psychological distress and impede students' pursuits of nursing career. Objectives: The aim of the present study is to assess stress and coping strategies among nursing students of Western Rajasthan. Materials and Methods: Two hundred and twenty-one undergraduate nursing students were recruited for the study through total enumeration. Standardized Student Nurse Stress Index and brief cope scale were used to assess stress and coping strategies. Results: Nearly 82.4% of the students reported moderate level of stress. Interface worries (mean score 17.88 ± 4.9) and academic load (mean score 17.6 ± 4.78) were the major source of perceived stress. Students considered attitude of other professionals toward nursing, lack of free time, and fear of examination as most likely reasons of their distress. Active coping was the most commonly used coping strategies. Level of stress was found to have significant association with the interest of students in nursing. Conclusions: Interface worries and academic-related concerns emerged as major source of stress. A positive trend was evident in the use of adaptive coping strategies over succumbing meekly. However, there is a great need to plan and implement stress management programs so that these budding health professionals could be better equipped and trained to face various challenges of the profession.

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Background: The objective of the study was to assess the awareness of the human papillomavirus (HPV) infections and vaccination among the young students of a tertiary care teaching hospital. Methods: A cross sectional study was done among the students of a tertiary care teaching hospital. The students were assured of the confidentiality and were provided a questionnaire about HPV infection and HPV vaccine. Results: About 94.3% of students implicated that HPV is a causative agent of cervical cancer and 5.7% students didn't know about the association. About 72.1% were aware of the availability of the vaccine to be immunized against HPV infection but 3.3% answered wrongly and 24.6% didn't know about it. Thirty one percent students knew the correct age of initiation of the vaccination, 23% answered wrongly and about 45.9% of the students didn't know the answer. Only 4.1 % of the students have been vaccinated with HPV vaccine. About 63.9% students didn't agree to vaccinate themselves against HPV as they felt it would give a false sense of security and 68.8% of the students were against the routine vaccination of the young Indian population against HPV as the sexual exposure occurs at late age. 73% students referred the age of vaccination to be >25 years. Conclusions: Lack of knowledge among medical students can be detrimental to the health of the society. So there is a need to create awareness among the future health educators against various aspects of HPV, cervical cancers and its prevention.

This descriptive cross sectional study was conducted to assess the level of knowledge, attitudes and practices towards research among Undergraduate Medical students. This study also focused to emphasize the need of Research Methodology training programs for undergraduate medical students. About 308 undergraduate medical students of S.R.M. Medical College, Chennai were given a structured questionnaire to evaluate their knowledge, attitudes and practices about medical research. A total of 301 returned the completed questionnaires and were included in the analysis. Data collected was subjected to descriptive analysis. About 68.4% of students are interested in participating in research and 9.3% of them actively participated in research projects. Lack of knowledge about research methodology (40.86%), lack of time (39.86%), Lack of guidance (14.2%) and lack of financial support (4.6%) were considered as the obstacles to carry out research projects by the interested students. In conclusion even though a fair number of undergraduate students interested in research, a very few actively participate in research projects. This was probably due to lack of knowledge about research methodology and lack of time.

Introduction: The COVID-19 Pandemic has caused anxiety and stress among people. Nursing students, being an important link in the delivery of health care services, are always exposed to stressful situations which in turn put a great toll on their mental health. Moreover, the perceived risk of pandemics motivates people to embrace different protective measures so as to reduce any potential threats of an emerging health concern. Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the COVID-induced anxiety and protective behaviors among nursing students. Methods: Nursing students studying at 02 nursing institutes of Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India were enrolled for the study. The data were collected using COVID-induced anxiety scale and protective behaviors towards COVID-19 Scale. These scales were converted to online google forms, and the link was circulated among 370 nursing students through emails and WhatsApp. A total of 229 students submitted their responses within stipulated time and were included in the final data analysis. Results: The response rate of the survey was 62%. Evidently, nursing students had a moderate level of anxiety (mean score 31.28 ± 5.29) due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Overall protective behavior mean score was 56.63 ± 6.4 which reflects that students were following higher quality of protective behaviors. There is a negative linear correlation between anxiety score and protective behavior score. Conclusion: The nursing students exhibited a moderate level of anxiety, and routing protective behaviors were frequently performed by these students. There is a timely need to plan and implement interventions for nursing students so as to make them self-capable to resolve psychosocial issues, especially during disease outbreaks.

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Objectives: This systematic review aims to evaluate and summarise the findings of all relevant studies which identified the effect of early vs delayed parenteral nutrition (PN), early PN vs early supplemental PN and early PN vs standard care for critically ill adults. Methods: The literature search was undertaken using PubMed, Embase, Medline, Clinical Key, and Ovid discovery databases. The reference lists of studies published from 2000 till June 2020 were hand searched. Result: On screening 2088 articles, a total of five RCTs with 6,277 patients were included in this review. Only one clinical trial compared early PN and late PN; the results reported significantly shorter periods in intensive care unit (ICU) stay (p=0.02) and less ICU related infections (p=0.008) in the late PN group compared to the Early PN group. Two trials compared total parenteral nutrition (TPN) and enteral nutrition (EN) +TPN groups. Both found a significantly longer hospital stay duration (p<0.05 and p<0.01) with a higher mortality rate in the TPN group compared to the EN+TPN group. A statistically significant improvement was observed in patients’ quality of life receiving early PN compared to standard care (p=0.01). In contrast, no significant difference was found in the supplemental PN vs the standard care group. Conclusion: The supplemental PN patients had shorter ICU stay and lower mortality rates than TPN. However, these findings should be interpreted carefully as included studies have different initiation timing of nutritional support, and the patients’ diagnosis varied. Systematic review registration: PROSPERO: CRD42020183175