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Background: COVID-19 has become a global health threat and the disease burden is expected to increase more. Nurses are the front lines of COVID management. Because this work requires close personal exposure to patients with COVID-19, nurses are at high risk of infection, contributing to further spread. Nurses’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices can influence the prevention and control of pandemic. Thus, the aim of the study was to assess knowledge, attitude, and practice regarding the prevention and control of COVID-19 among nurses.   Methods: Descriptive cross-sectional study design was carried out among 141 nurses from the central hospital, Kathmandu. A purposive sampling technique was used and the data collection date was June 5 to July 20, 2020. A self-administered semi-structured questionnaire was used. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.   Results: The study showed that 60.3% of the participants had good knowledge, 53.2% of them had acceptable practice and a cent percent (100%) of them had a positive attitude on the preventive and control measures against COVID-19. More than 3/4th (75.8%) of them were agreed to handle the COVID-19 outbreak confidently in their healthcare setup. Although, 85.8% of participants were worried that they and their family members will probably get infected with COVID-19 while working in the hospital. However, 39% of them were feeling isolated by their community, and relatives due to their profession.   Conclusions: Nurses have good knowledge, a positive attitude, and acceptable practice about prevention and control of COVID-19. However, the level of some knowledge and practice was still lower than that expected.      Keywords: Attitude; COVID; Knowledge; nurses; prevention and control; practice  

Introduction: Several studies suggest that health workers and medical students suffer from psychological problems during the pandemic. Paramedic trainees were doing duty at the hospital round the clock as other trainee health care workers during the first wave of COVID-19, but there was no published study regarding mental health issues of paramedic trainees till the date in Nepal. This study aims to assess their well-being to full fill the gap. Methods: This is a descriptive, cross-sectional study design carried out with 280 paramedics. The study period was September - October 2020. Depression, anxiety and stress scale – 21 (DASS 21) and self - care assessment worksheet was used to collect the data after getting permission from the concerned authors.  Results: The point prevalence of psychological problems as defined by DASS-21 was 117 (45.3%). Specifically, DASS-21 sub-scales-defined caseness was: Depression 31 (12.0%), anxiety 55 (21.3%) and stress 31 (12.0%), where 218 (80%) of participants were not taking any self-help care-related training to enhance their coping skills to date. Chi-square (χ2) test found that there was a significant association between emotional self-care and severity of depression (P = 0.001), anxiety (P = 0.03) and stress (P = 0.04).  Conclusions: A significant number of paramedic trainees suffered from depression, anxiety and stress during the first wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Therefore, psychological interventions like stress management, positive coping skills, and self-care training may be beneficial to help them cope with the situation.

Smartphone and internet overuse can result into severe problems in users’ personal and social lives. In this backdrop, the present study aims to find the relationship between cyberbullying and smartphone addiction among BBA students. Participants were 123 males and 157 female students whose ages ranged from 17 to 29 years. The questionnaire with Smartphone Addiction Scale- Short Version (SAS-SV) and Revised Cyber Bullying Inventory-II (RCBI-II) were used to assess the smartphone addiction and cyberbullying respectively by using a convenience sampling method. The cyberbullying perpetration was reported by nearly 30% respondents and more than 60% respondents were victimized by cyberbullying. The password hacking and sending embarrassing and hurtful messages were common in cyberbullying. The study found that male students were significantly involved in cyberbullying perpetration. The study further revealed that time spent on smartphone in a day was significantly associated with both cyberbullying perpetration and cyberbullying victimization. This study found significantly positive correlation between smartphone addiction, cyberbullying perpetration and cyberbullying victimization. These results suggest the need to develop educational programme to educate the students to use smartphone effectively and safely to prevent cyberbullying.