The COVID‐19 outbreak has had a great impact on the social, economic, and health systems of Thailand. A variety of measures to curb the spread of the disease were implemented since the beginning of the pandemic, including a strict national lockdown protocol. The Thai government aimed to achieve herd immunity through an efficient vaccination programme. Initially, vaccine supply shortage and a lack of vaccine options plagued the health system, but this has since been improved. Continuous monitoring of the situation through research is being carried out to assess the level of immunity among the population whereby the current general recommendation is presently a fourth booster dose for adults. Hurdles towards achieving herd immunity remain. One such issue is the low level of vaccine literacy among those that are unvaccinated or inadequately vaccinated. Another obstacle is the sizeable rate of hesitancy towards getting booster doses. Achieving herd immunity in the Thai population would require multilateral cooperation, improved health promotion to target population groups, such as older adults, and a developed distribution system for those with limited access, such as those in the rural areas.

Depression and suicide rates among youths tended to increase. From reviews, many applications and online counseling could reduce depression and anxiety to promote well-being of youths and university students effectively. This study was conducted to develop "Friend from heart" application based on LINE system to promote well-being for undergraduate students of faculty of education, Kasetsart University. The research method included the survey of basic data for developing the application and evaluation of the application by specialists. A total of 72 voluntary students were invited to join an online survey. It was found that most of the students (81.94%) wanted applications that provide physical health information such as exercise, eating healthy food, and health care. However, about 16.66% of students needed an application that can speak or listen problems with video calls. Then, researchers took the services that students were interested more than 50% to develop the applications. It worked through the application, consisting of chatbot, physical health, mental health, and appointment with counselor. The index of item-objective congruence was 0.66-1.00 with additional specialists commenting that the application had an interesting design with good structure to help students. For ethical approval, it was obtained from the Kasetsart University Research Ethics Committee.

COVID-19 vaccine wastage is an emerging issue globally. In Thailand, which has declared COVID-19 to be an endemic disease, the risk of vaccine wastage lingers despite the remaining vaccine inequity. Although the country does not publicly report its vaccine wastage rate, a wastage incident has been reported. With the remaining secured vaccine doses that have yet to be delivered and Thailand's pandemic-to-endemic transition, Thailand should strategize to avoid vaccine wastage. This commentary highlights several factors that can potentially lead to vaccine wastage in Thailand: cold chain logistics issues, vaccine hesitancy, and unequal vaccine accessibility. The Thai government should continue its efforts in mitigating these issues to maximize its vaccination program.

This class action research required to develop online counseling teaching. The objectives were 1) to develop a learning management plan for an online counseling unit that promotes the competency in the counseling service of teaching professional students and 2) to study the change in the competency in the counselling service after studying with the online counseling unit learning management plan. The target group was teacher professional students, faculty of education, Government University in Thailand, who enrolled in the course of educational psychology and teacher guidance, academic year 2021. The instruments used in this research were: 1) the counseling unit learning management plan 2) a model reflecting learning outcomes in the counseling unit, and 3) a knowledge test in the counseling unit. The researchers analyzed quantitative data with percentile analysis and qualitative data with content analysis. The results showed that most of the students had 70% or more of post-learning knowledge of counseling. It reflected that learning counseling is useful for future use in the teaching profession. Including observation from the practice of counseling, it was found that students were able to apply the learned skills to psychological counseling.

This study developed an online health education program by applying the Health Belief Model with social support to prevent tobacco use by student teachers and evaluated the effectiveness of the program during the COVID-19 pandemic in Thailand. This involved mixed method research divided into 2 phases, with phase 1 combining an online focus group discussion (n=8) and a literature review to develop an online health education program to prevent tobacco use, while phase 2 involved evaluating the effectiveness of the program. Phase 2 used a randomized pretest-posttest control group design consisting of an intervention group (n=30) and a control group (n=30) selected by simple random sampling for both groups from student teachers in academic years 1–5 in the Faculty of Education, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand. The result from phase 1 for the proposed program for the intervention group involved 8 weeks of online activities, including exercise, meditation, music, games and lectures by experts in public health, health education, and experiences shared by ex-smokers. Leaflets were provided to all participants in both the intervention and control groups. The results from phase 2 showed significant differences in knowledge (p < 0.000; p < 0.007), attitude (p < 0.000; p < 0.034) and risk behavior to tobacco use (p < 0.004; p < 0.025) for both the intervention and control groups at 8 weeks post-intervention compared to pre-intervention, respectively. The program could support, guidance, and contributions of the many individuals and organizations that have been involved in the online process.