Role of Teachers’ Quantity on the Academic Achievement of Secondary School Students

Sequel to a national personnel audit that was recently conducted on public and private education in Nigeria, there has been a growing debate on the immediate need to increase the academic staff strength in all secondary schools in the country. This debate has however taken a controversial trend as a large part of the educational chiefs in the country have stood on an opinion to ordinarily improving the working condition of the existing academic staff since, to them, teachers’ quantity has no direct impact on students’ academic achievement. This paper therefore investigated the role of teachers’ quantity on the academic achievement of secondary school students to determine whether small or excess teachers’ quantity have a direct significant influence on how students perform academically. Using a descriptive survey design, the study sampled 120 teachers from a population of 1,205 in Chikun local government area of Kaduna state, Nigeria. A researcher-designed questionnaire of Likert scale was used for the data collection and descriptive statistical tools of frequency counts, percentages, mean and standard deviation were used for the data analysis. It was therefore concluded that most schools in the local government are underserved with teachers and that – that had created some sorts of low academic achievement among the secondary school students. Schools do not give a fair share of their revenue to improve staff strength in their schools. Also, schools that are characterized by a low number of teachers are faced by pressure, high workload, and overstress which invariably influence the poor academic achievement of students. Keywords: role, teachers’ quantity, academic achievement, secondary school, students DOI: 10.7176/DCS/13-1-06 Publication date: January 31st 202

Incidence of adverse drug events in public and private hospitals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: the (ADESA) prospective cohort study

Objectives: To determine the incidence of adverse drug events (ADEs) and assess their severity and preventability in four Saudi hospitals. Design: Prospective cohort study. Setting: The study included patients admitted to medical, surgical and intensive care units (ICUs) of four hospitals in Saudi Arabia. These hospitals include a 900-bed tertiary teaching hospital, a 400-bed private hospital, a 1400-bed large government hospital and a 350-bed small government hospital. Participants: All patients (≥12 years) admitted to the study units over 4 months. Primary and secondary outcome measures Incidents were collected by pharmacists and reviewed by independent clinicians. Reviewers classified the identified incidents as ADEs, potential ADEs (PADEs) or medication errors and then determined their severity and preventability. Results: We followed 4041 patients from admission to discharge. Of these, 3985 patients had complete data for analysis. The mean±SD age of patients in the analysed cohort was 43.4±19.0 years. A total of 1676 ADEs were identified by pharmacists during the medical chart review. Clinician reviewers accepted 1531 (91.4%) of the incidents identified by the pharmacists (245 ADEs, 677 PADEs and 609 medication errors with low risk of causing harm). The incidence of ADEs was 6.1 (95% CI 5.4 to 6.9) per 100 admissions and 7.9 (95% CI 6.9 to 8.9) per 1000 patient-days. The occurrence of ADEs was most common in ICUs (149 (60.8%)) followed by medical (67 (27.3%)) and surgical (29 (11.8%)) units. In terms of severity, 129 (52.7%) of the ADEs were significant, 91 (37.1%) were serious, 22 (9%) were life-threatening and three (1.2%) were fatal. Conclusions: We found that ADEs were common in Saudi hospitals, especially in ICUs, causing significant morbidity and mortality. Future studies should focus on investigating the root causes of ADEs at the prescribing stage, and development and testing of interventions to minimise harm from medications

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