AN OVERVIEW OF INTEGRATED MEDICAL AND DENTAL UNDERGRADUATE PRE-CLINICAL CURRICULA AT B. P. KOIRALA INSTITUTE OF HEALTH SCIENCES, NEPAL: A MULTIPROFESSIONAL APPROACH

Curricular innovations such as multiprofessional education (MPE) sensitise health professionals towards the role of other health professionals and inculcate team spirit. This is a preliminary report on MPE in practice in the preclinical phase of dental and medical undergraduate courses at B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences, Nepal. The preclinical curriculum of the undergraduate courseis integrated, organ system based and partially problem based. There is an emphasis on early exposure of students to patients and to community. The undergraduate course in medicine started in 1994 and in dental surgery in 1999 based on the core curriculum developed at various workshops. The course duration and structure is similar in bo

Development of eAgromet Prototype to Improve the Performance of Integrated Agromet Advisory Service

In several countries, the systems for forecasting weather are being operated to deal with weather and its related factors affecting agricultural production. India meteorological department (IMD) is providing several types of weather forecasts. One of the forecast service is medium range forecast (MRF). As a part of MRF, the expected values of rain fall, temperature, cloud cover, humidity, wind speed and wind direction for next five days are forecasted twice a week by considering district as a unit. Agriculture is markedly affected by weather condition during crop season. IMD in collaboration with Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and State Agriculture Universities (SAUs) has set-up about 130 Agro-meteorological Field Units (AMFUs) and each AMFU covers about five districts. Based on MRF, IMD is rendering Integrated Agromet Advisory Service to the farming community of the country in the form of agromet advisory bulletin. The agromet advisory bulletins contain possible risk mitigation measures for the major crops and livestock. Based on the weather forecast, a group of interdisciplinary scientists and agromet scientists at AMFU prepare district-level agromet advisory bulletins. These bulletins are sent to the farmers and other stakeholders of the corresponding district. To ease the process of preparing agromet bulletins, an effort has started to build IT-based agrometeorological advisory system called, eAgromet. In this paper, we explain the concepts of eAgromet and its operation

A PROSPECTIVE STUDY OF DENTAL DISEASE PATTERN AND DRUG UTILIZATION AT THE DENTAL DEPARTMENT OF A TERTIARY CARE TEACHING HOSPITAL IN EASTERN NEPAL

To find out the pattern of dental diseases and drug utilization at dental out patient department (OPD) of B.P. Koirala Institute of Health Sciences (BPKIHS), a tertiary care hospital. A prospective prescription audit was conducted for a period of 10 days in the dental OPD and the data was analyzed using WHO drug indicators. The total number of prescriptions analyzed were 279. Dental caries (37%), Periodontitis (14%) and chronic gingivitis (11%) were the most common diseases with a maximum incidence between the age groups of 9 to 40 years. Mean number of drugs per prescription was 2.79. Of the total prescriptions, 223 (79.9%) had 314 antimicrobial agents (AMA) constituting 40.3% of total drugs prescribed. The mean number of antimicrobial agents per prescription was 1.13. The most commonly prescribed antimicrobial agents was amoxycillin (33.1%) followed by metronidazole (24.9%), doxycycline (17.2%) and tinidazole (12.7%). Fixed dose drug combination of amoxycillin + cloxacillin (26) and ampicillin + cloxacillin (10) were prescribed in 36 of the prescriptions. Povidone iodine gargle (41.2%) was the most commonly prescribed oropharyngeal preparation followed by Chlorhexidine gluconate mouthwash (32.4%). Non- steroidal anti-inflammatory agents (20.66%), multi-vitamins (19.51%) and oropharyngeal preparations (17.45%) constituted the rest of the drugs prescribed. Diclofenac (60.86%) was the most commonly prescribed among NSAIDs and fixed dose drug combination of ibuprofen and paracetamol was prescribed in 19 of the prescriptions. All drugs were given by oral route (except for gentamicin in one prescription) and were prescribed under brand names. None of the prescriptions had instructions whether the drug should be taken before or after food. The results indicate that dental caries was the most common dental disease, anti-microbial agents were prescribed to majority of the patients and constituted a little less than half of the total drugs prescribed. Commonly used anti-microbial agent was amoxycillin which in two thirds of the cases was prescribed as an fixed dose drug combination. The high incidence of anti-microbial agent prescribing may be modified by a feedback to the prescribers. Key words: Dental morbidity, prescribing pattern, drug utilization, dental OPD, antimicrobial agents