ABSTRACT
Background: Nomophobia, stands for “no mobile phone phobia". The tremendous increase in mobile phone usage among youngsters has led to negative impact on their mental health status. Current study aims at finding out the prevalence of nomophobia (mild, moderate, and severe), various health related conditions and independent risk factors of severe nomophobia among medical students of a tertiary care college and Hospital of Central Odisha.Methods: A cross sectional study carried out among 450 students of a medical college of Central Odisha. Simple random sampling was done. Predesigned pretested questionnaire including Nomophobia questionnaire (NMP-Q) was used for data collection. Data was analyzed using SPSS and logistic regression was used to evaluate the independent risk factors of severe nomophobia.Results: Out of 450 students, 246 (54.6%) were boys and rest were girls. Nomohobia was universally present and students suffering from mild, moderate and severe form of nomophobia comprised of 33 (7.3%), 327 (72.7%) and 90 (20%) respectively. Independent risk factors of severe nomophobia were fourth year of study and above (aOR=2.69), use of costly handsets (aOR=4.56), monthly bill of more than rupees 500 for cell phone use (aOR=6.09) and anxiousness of staying updated with news all the time (aOR=4.86).Conclusions: Nomophobia is a highly prevalent condition among the medical students found across age groups, gender and socio-economic status which depends on phone usage. It is recommended that screening and proper counselling should be available in order to decrease the burden and create awareness about nomophobia among the medical students.
ABSTRACT
Background: According to a report by World Health Organization (WHO) in 2003, approximately 50% of all patients fail to take their medicine correctly. This is due to errors in prescription, underuse or misuse of medicines and ignorance of prescribers, dispensers, and patients. Methods: It is a hospital-based interventional-study carried out in a secondary level multispecialty hospital of Delhi. Investigators collected 536 prescriptions from the outpatient department of various departments and studied according to WHO core prescribing indicators for assessing drug prescription writing pattern. Interventions to improve the prescribing pattern included one continued medical education session and one workshop on prescription writing (providing essential drug list [EDL] etc.,), sharing the baseline data with the physicians and administrative approach. Evaluation of the prescribing pattern after 6 weeks of the intervention was done to find out the impact. Results: On an average 3.43 drug per encounter before intervention increased to 3.46 drugs per encounter. Inclusion of generic drugs and from EDL increased significantly from 54.8% to 73.4% and 76.9% to 88.4% respectively.. Prescribing antibiotics and injectables showed no significant reduction from baseline. The completeness of the prescriptions with respect to the various components improved significantly. Conclusion: Combining different intervention seems a noble approach to improve the prescription writing practices with respect to completeness and inclusion of generic drugs, drugs from EDL.