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Background: Antibiotic misuse is a global threat. In recent years, inadequate awareness and inappropriate adherence to antibiotic prescription have been coupled with frequent self-medication practices. Aims: The study aims to assess awareness, perception and practices followed by nurses on antibiotics use at a tertiary care hospital in North India. Materials and Methods: This online survey was completed by 232 nurses working at a tertiary care teaching hospital in North India from September to October 2020. A pre-validated questionnaire of awareness, perception and practices was used to collect information. Appropriate descriptive and inferential statistics are used to generate the results. Results: The mean age of nurses was 27.84 (±3.06) years, and 60% were male. The majority of the nurses (80.17%) had a graduate degree in nursing, with a professional experience of 6.25 (±5.30) years. More than two-third (87.5%) of nurses are familiar with the word antibiotics resistance. Surprisingly, 47.4% of nurses used antibiotics more than two times without a prescription in the current year. Interestingly, 95.26% of nurses know antibiotics are effective against bacteria and are disease specific (93.79%). Further, 96.55% of nurses said that unnecessary antibiotic use might lead to resistance, and 68.10% agreed to take antibiotics after a doctor's prescription. Conclusions: Self-medication practices were high amongst nurses. Organising more in-service education, intense orientation programmes and instruction-based training needs to intensify nurses on the appropriate use of antibiotics and to set up an antimicrobial stewardship programme at the institute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diabetes is of the metabolic disorder that has become one of the major cause leading to morbidity and death around the globe. Antidiabetic medications that are more effective and have adverse effects less frequently are currently being sought after. Much little study has been done on polyherbal compounds, irrespective of the fact that several individual herbs have been shown to have antidiabetic properties in studies or clinically. It is thought that herbal mixtures made of various plant products have synergistic anti-diabetic properties and may strengthen the intended results. Numerous polyherbal preparations have been investigated as potential therapeutics for the treatment of diabetes. A thorough assessment of the literature was conducted using many significant databases to characterize the present state of research on polyherbal substances for the treatment of diabetes. This research focused on the formulation and evaluation of polyherbal tablets containing extract from leaves of Phyllanthus amarus, Tinospora cordifolia, Momordica charantia, Vinca rosea available in the local areas of Sambalpur, Odisha, India. Invivo studies showed that the blood sugar lowering effect was found more pronounced in higher dose 500 mg/kg than lower dose 250 mg/kg. The efficacy of 500 mg/kg of the formulation was almost equal to that of standard therapy. Along with it oral glucose tolerance test showed increase in blood glucose level within a period of 30 mins from the starting of test as compared to the initial level of glucose concentration. This hyperglycemia was maintained until 60 min and then began to decrease. The polyherbal formulation proves to be an effective method of treatment of diabetes mellitus thus required to be explored further for better promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]