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Identifies five types of museum accessibility: (1) physical; (2) socio-cultural; (3) economic; (4) sensory; and (5) intelligence/learning accessibility. Considers ways to coordinate museum services to ensure accessibility for potential museum patrons who are disabled. Describes various programs launched by the National Museum of Natural History in New Delhi to accomplish this goal. (WRM)

Background: Cancer mortality has doubled in India, a lower and middle-income country, from 1990 to 2016, depicting the ever-increasing burden of non-communicable disease. Karnataka, situated in the south of India, is one of the states with a rich medical college and hospital milieu. We present the status of cancer care across the state from the data collected by the investigators through public registries and personal communication to the concerned units to know the distribution of various services across the districts and give probable directives to improve on the present situation with emphasis on radiation therapy. This study may be taken as a bird's eye view of the situation across the country and form a basis based on which future planning of services and areas to emphasize on, may be considered., Purpose: The establishment of a radiation therapy center holds the key to the establishment of comprehensive cancer care centers. The existing situation of such centers and the need and scope for inclusion and expansion of cancer units is presented in this article.

COVID-19 has impacted the healthcare system across the globe. The study will span three pandemic waves in 2020, 2021, and 2022. The goal is to learn how the pandemic affects antenatal care (ANC) and emergency delivery care for pregnant women in Tamil Nadu, India, and how medical services respond. The study employs counterfactual analysis to evaluate the causal impact of the pandemic. A feedforward in combination with a simple auto-regressive neural network (AR-Net) is used to predict the daily number of calls for ambulance services (CAS). Three categories of the daily CAS count between January 2016 and December 2022 are utilised. The total CAS includes all types of medical emergencies; the second group pertains to planned ANC for high-risk pregnant women and the third group comprises CAS from pregnant women for medical emergencies. The second wave's infection and mortality rates were up to six times higher than the first. The phases in wave-II, post-wave-II, wave-III, and post-wave-III experienced a significant increase in both total IFT (inter-facility transfer) and total non-IFT calls covering all emergencies relative to the counterfactual, as evidenced by reported effect sizes of 1 and a range of 0.65 to 0.85, respectively. This highlights overwhelmed health services. In Tamil Nadu, neither emergency prenatal care nor planned prenatal care was affected by the pandemic. In contrast, the increase in actual emergency-related IFT calls during wave-II, post-wave-II, wave-III, and post-wave-III was 62%, 160%, 141%, and 165%, respectively, relative to the counterfactual. During the same time periods, the mean daily CAS related to prenatal care increased by 47%, 51%, 38%, and 38%, respectively, compared to pre-pandemic levels. The expansion of ambulance services and increased awareness of these services during wave II and the ensuing phases of Covid-19 pandemic have enhanced emergency care delivery for all, including obstetric and neonatal cohorts., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist, (Copyright: © 2023 Paramasivan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

As notified in the New Drugs and Clinical Trials Rules 2019, ethics committees (ECs), intending to review and oversee the conduct of Biomedical and Health Research (BHR) shall be required to register with the authority designated by the Central Government in the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Department of Health Research (DHR). The entire process of receiving and processing such applications is done online through the Naitik portal. Vide these rules, it has become mandatory for all institutions/entities whether publicly or privately conducting or intending to conduct BHR involving the human participants, to get their EC, registered with the DHR. A status report of the functioning of the National Ethics Registry and an analysis of ECs registered with the DHR are presented in this manuscript. A workflow of the processing involved in EC registration is given with sectorial segregation, and analysis of data on ECs across the country is made for the dissemination and information. This article elaborates on the registration requirements and process of the EC registry with the necessity of being registered with the DHR. 2100 login requests and more than 1560 applications for registration have been received; private hospitals and medical colleges have been the front-runner in getting their organization registered, and organizations in the commercial sector are faring better in terms of EC registration. Further dissemination and outreach efforts have to be made to draw the attention of various stakeholders regarding this requirement and thereby ensuring that all ECs in the country are registered with the DHR., Competing Interests: None

Objectives: We undertook a prospective evaluation of the Qualpro Syphicheck-WB rapid syphilis test to measure its diagnostic performance and utility as a point-of-care (POC) screening test among female sex workers (FSWs) in Bangalore, India., Methods: From August 2008 to May 2009, FSWs without a laboratory-confirmed history of syphilis attending STI clinics in Bangalore underwent POC syphilis screening using finger-prick whole blood, with onsite treatment if indicated. Serum samples were collected for local laboratory offsite rapid plasma reagin (RPR) testing and reference laboratory RPR, Treponema pallidum haemagglutination assay (TPHA), and rapid syphilis testing. FSWs who participated in standard offsite RPR screening from August 2007 to May 2008 in the same clinics formed the comparison group for treatment coverage., Results: Of the 1617 women who underwent POC syphilis testing, 7.4% had laboratory evidence of active syphilis with reactive RPR and TPHA, and 3.7% had an RPR titre > or = 1:8. Compared with the reference RPR and TPHA, the sensitivity and specificity of the POC syphilis test were 70.8% (95% CI 62.7 to 79.0) and 97.8% (95% CI 97.1 to 98.5). Because of the low rate of women returning for their test results after offsite RPR screening, the proportion of women with active syphilis who were appropriately treated rose from 44.8% to 68.3% with the use of POC syphilis screening (p=0.003)., Conclusion: The Syphicheck-WB test utilising finger-prick whole blood has a relatively low sensitivity in detecting active syphilis. However, among hard-to-reach populations who may not return for follow-up treatment, POC screening with this assay could still confer an advantage over offsite RPR testing with respect to treatment coverage.