ABSTRACT
Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the impact of covid-19 on the learning of medical students of Federal Medical College, Islamabad. Material(s) and Method(s): This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on 215 medical students of Federal Medical College, Islamabad from October to December 2021. A pretested validated tool was used to collect primary data from medical students via random sampling. SPSS version 25 was used for data analysis. The chi-square test was used to see the association between various variables. Result(s): This study included 54.9% (118) females and 45.1% (97) males. 188 (87.4%) students reported that they were tak-ing online classes. Most of the students, 181 (84.2%) thought that COVID-19 affected their study durations. The pandemic has caused wastage of time was reported by 155 (72.1%) students and 60 (27.9%) stated pandemic had given them extra time to clear their concepts. More than 2/3rd of the students (78.6%) were concerned about their professional examinations due to the present situation of the pandemic. Among all the respondents, 177 (82.3%) were not satisfied with this method of learning and also 184 (85.6%) students have lost interest in their studies. Most of the students 173 (80.5%) were facing difficulty in establishing the boundary between their work and home and 180 (83.7%) were missing classroom engagement. Conclusion(s): Covid 19 has severely affected medical education. E-learning is not suitable for medical students as most of their learning involves practical performance and interaction with patients.Copyright © 2023, Khyber Medical College. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic affected life-saving childhood immunization globally and affected Vaccine-Preventable Diseases eradication and elimination efforts. During the initial phase of the pandemic, some countries temporarily stopped vaccination campaigns against measles, meningitis, polio, tetanus, typhoid, and yellow fever. This study was conducted to quantify the effect of COVID-19 on EPI vaccination. A cross-sectional study was conducted in the district Swat of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa from June to August 2022. The data was extracted from the EPI Management Information System for the four months of the pre-pandemic period and four months of the lockdown period. The pre-pandemic four-month data was taken as a baseline and was compared with the four-months lockdown period. A 7-19% decrease was found during the lockdown period in various antigen coverage. Coverage of Penta-3 was most affected having a 19% decrease while measles coverage was less affected showing a 7% decrease during the lockdown period. BCG coverage was affected by 14%, PCV by 11 to 18%, Rota by 12 to 16%, and IPV by 18%. The vaccination coverage improved in the later months of the lockdown, but the number of defaulters and zero-dose children increased. To fill this gap, a robust strategy for vaccination is recommended.
ABSTRACT
Background: Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a contagious infection caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-COV-2) and it has infected and killed millions of people across the globe. Objective: In the absence or inadequate provision of therapeutic treatments of COVID-19 and the limited convenience of diagnostic techniques, there is a necessity for some alternate spontaneous screening systems that can easily be used by the physicians to rapidly recognize and isolate the infected patients to circumvent onward surge. A chest X-ray (CXR) image can effortlessly be used as a substitute modality to diagnose the COVID-19. Method: In this study, we present an automatic COVID-19 diagnostic and severity prediction system (COVIDX) that uses deep feature maps of CXR images along with classical machine learning algorithms to identify COVID-19 and forecast its severity. The proposed system uses a three-phase classification approach (healthy vs unhealthy, COVID-19 vs pneumonia, and COVID-19 severity) using different conventional supervised classification algorithms. Results: We evaluated COVIDX through 10-fold cross-validation, by using an external validation dataset, and also in a real setting by involving an experienced radiologist. In all the adopted evaluation settings, COVIDX showed strong generalization power and outperforms all the prevailing state-of-the-art methods designed for this purpose. Conclusions: Our proposed method (COVIDX), with vivid performance in COVID-19 diagnosis and its severity prediction, can be used as an aiding tool for clinical physicians and radiologists in the diagnosis and follow-up studies of COVID-19 infected patients. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press.
ABSTRACT
Objective: With sudden onset of online teaching and learning after the lockdown, this study aims to explore how COVID-19 has impacted medical education in Pakistan. Methods: A survey-based research with open versus closed questions format was conducted from April-May 2020. Respondents were medical teachers from private and public-sector medical and dental colleges of Pakistan, An adequate and representative sample was intended therefore data were collected until relevance of the participants, time and data saturation were reached. Closed-ended questions employed descriptive statistics. Whereas, qualitative data was thematically analyzed by all authors independently to ensure analytical triangulation, Results: Responses from one hundred and twenty-five medical teachers highlighted an impact on the stakeholders, assessments, and educational environment. The transition from face-to-face to online teaching went hasty and haphazard therefore, stakeholders found difficulty in adapting. Factors such as rudimentary system, inefficient internet, lack of previous experience further accelerated the situation. It was difficult to teach Anatomy and clinical skills online. Teachers were not satisfied and preferred actual classrooms. Students were non-serious owing to didactic lectures with no interaction. There was uncertainty about online assessments, The climate was too robotic without emotions, eye contact and physical presence. Conclusion: COVID-19 has impacted medical education at different levels. This study has revealed institutional unpreparedness regarding stakeholders training with online modalities. We need to train stakeholders to let them cope well with the present situation. It is therefore suggested to introduce user friendly online teaching modalities in new medical curricula.