RESUMEN
Unfortunately, infections acquired during receiving health care contribute significantly in morbidity and mortality worldwide and hands are the principal mode of germ transmission in all health care facilities. Therefore, hand hygiene is the most useful intervention to curb the spread of harmful germs and avert health care-associated infections (HCAIs). But, health care providers very poorly comply with standard practices of hand hygiene. There is a paucity of studies which looks at the knowledge of standard hand hygiene precautions among medical and nursing students in eastern India. This study was conducted to assess and compare level of knowledge amongst medical and nursing students and to identify gaps in their knowledge.METHODSThis cross sectional study was performed by selecting 95 Second Professional MBBS students and 31 first year B.Sc. Nursing students with verbal consent and their level of knowledge was assessed with WHO hand hygiene questionnaire and analysed using percentages.RESULTSOut of total 27 questions asked, only 13 questions were answered correctly by more than 50% students of both groups but only 7 and 5 questions were correctly responded by more than 75% nursing and medical students respectively. Nursing students were significantly more aware in response to 5 questions whereas medical students outperformed their counterpart in only 3 questions. This study revealed that definitely there was a gap in the knowledge regarding hand hygiene amongst medical and nursing students but still comparatively nursing students were more knowledgeable in this field.CONCLUSIONSRepeated hand hygiene training sessions with monitoring and immediate performance feedback to generate awareness amongst students and to provide the current knowledge regarding prevention of HCAIs are the need of the hour.
RESUMEN
Background. This study was done in 2008–09 to assess the nutritional status among adolescents (10–19 years of age, Classes V–XII) in 5 schools in rural Goa to inform the content of a health promotion intervention in these schools. Methods. Three methods were used. First, nutritional status was measured by assessing body mass index among 1015 students during a health camp in each school. Second, a diet analysis was done to measure energy and protein intake of 76 randomly selected underweight students. Third, a selfreport questionnaire survey measured the prevalence of hunger among 684 students. Results. One-third of students (338; 37.8% boys and 27.5% girls) who attended the health camps were underweight and 59.2% of the 684 students who completed the survey reported experiencing hunger due to inadequate food consumption. More boys were underweight than girls (p<0.001) and under-nutrition was uniform across all the years of schooling. Energy intake of underweight students was significantly lower than the recommended daily allowance. The results were shared with the School Health Promotion Advisory Boards to generate information on the stakeholders’ perception about the issue and ways to address it. Conclusion. There is an immediate need to address the high burden of hunger and under-nutrition in adolescents of both sexes in schools by instituting routine annual monitoring of nutritional status, extending the mid-day meal programme to all school-going adolescents, providing nutritional counselling for underweight adolescents and expanding research on the causes and impact of under-nutrition and evaluation of the impact of the enhanced mid-day meal programme.