The objectives of this study were to study the effect of COPD medication of 6 months or more duration on oral health parameters of adult patients. A cross-sectional study was conducted to assess and compare the decayed, missing, and filled teeth (DMFT), oral hygiene index-simplified (OHI-S), periodontal disease index (PDI) scores, and presence of candida (colony-forming units [CFU]) among adult patients aged 20-45 years who had a history of 6 months or longer duration usage of chronic respiratory disease medications, with controls. A total of 170 participants each were taken in both the groups. Oral health parameters like DMFT scores (p ≤ 0.002), OHI-S (p ≤ 0.001), calculus scores (p ≤ 0.001), plaque scores (p ≤ 0.001), and CFU/ml of candida species (p ≤ 0.001) were higher among cases than controls. DMFT scores and candida presence were significantly higher among those whose treatment duration was greater than 5 years as compared to those with lesser duration. Gingival-periodontal component scores of PDI were lower among cases than controls (p ≤ 0.001). Our findings suggest the need for regular oral health maintenance for those under COPD treatment and for greater research into the possible protective role of inhaled corticosteroids in limiting periodontal disease among patients.

The objective of this article is to describe NICE’s role regarding quality improvement in health and social care in England and to gain an insight into how NICE quality standards and indicators are used in the health and social care system. NICE is the national point of reference for advice on safe, effective, and cost-effective health and social care. NICE achieves this by providing advice aligned to the needs, uses, and demands of the resource constrained system. NICE’s role in quality improvement follows a stepwise progression starting with evidence-based guidance and recommendations through to quality standards and indicators. These are aimed to contribute to improved outcomes in health and social care.

The implementation of guidance and advice into practice is a crucial step in ensuring that the uptake of guidelines’ recommendations that can contribute to improvements in health outcomes and equitable access to health services. The objective of this paper is to give an understanding of the common barriers to guideline implementation and the evidence-based implementation approach adopted by NICE to overcome these barriers.

Objectives: Data management and statistical analysis are integral parts of any research. But there is difficulty in cleaning, organizing, and maintaining data in a systematic and meaningful way for accurate analysis without any tool. Hence, there is a need to learn a tool such as SPSS, STATA, R, SAS and so many for understanding the data. This study focused on the impact of short-course training on STATA on healthcare eye professionals and found an improvement in their competency to use computer-based statistical software packages for data management and analysis and identify the major challenges for participants and suggestions to improve the training. Materials and Methods: We organized a 10-day short course on data management and data analysis using STATA. A pre and post-test evaluation was done every day to find the impact. The questionnaire covered several areas of research methodology from data management to statistics. Categorical data were described in frequency and percentage whereas continuous data was described in median and interquartile range (IQR). Wilcoxon signed-rank test was applied to find out the significant improvement in the knowledge. Results: The 10 days cumulative median score for pre- and post-test was 43 (IOR = 39-47.5) and 72.5 (IOR = 69-77) respectively and was statistically significant (P = 0.012). Male participants, younger age groups, experience, and prior knowledge were identified as major determinants to improve the knowledge and performance in the usage of STATA. We observed that advanced training in the usage of STATA is highly beneficial to people interested/involved in research to gain autonomy in data management and analysis. Conclusion: The evaluation of the training confirms that hands-on training in the use of STATA software does have a significant impact on the knowledge, self-efficacy, and attitude of the learner. Since Stata is very user-friendly, we recommend that researchers and medical students should be offered a comprehensive training course in STATA.