Medicine
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This repository contains the published and unpublished research of the Faculty of Medicine by the staff members of the faculty
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Item Improving psychological well-being among healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic with an online mindfulness intervention: A randomised waitlist-controlled trial(Wiley, 2024) Baminiwatta, A.; Fernando, R.; Solangaarachchi, I.; Abayabandara-Herath, T.; Wickremasinghe, A.R.; Hapangama, A.The high prevalence of psychological problems observed among healthcare workers (HCWs) during the COVID-19 pandemic called for interventions to safeguard their mental health. We assessed the effectiveness of a 6-week online mindfulness-based intervention in improving well-being and reducing stress among HCWs in Sri Lanka. Eighty HCWs were recruited and randomised into two groups: waitlist-control (WLC) and intervention groups. In the intervention, 1-hour online sessions were conducted at weekly intervals and participants were encouraged to do daily home practice. Stress and well-being were measured pre- and post-intervention using the Perceived Stress Scale and WHO-5 Well-being Index, respectively. One-way analysis of covariance was used to evaluate the effectiveness, in both intention-to-treat (ITT) and complete-case (CC) analyses. A significantly greater improvement in well-being occurred in the intervention arm compared to WLC on both ITT (p = .002) and CC analyses (p < .001), with medium-to-large effect sizes (partial η2 = .117-.278). However, the reduction in stress following the intervention was not significant compared to the WLC group on both ITT (p = .636) and CC analyses (p = .262). In the intervention arm, the median number of sessions attended by participants was 3. Low adherence to the intervention may have contributed to the apparent non-significant effect on stress.Item PubMed perspective of family medicine research: where does it stand?(Oxford University Press, 2005) Mendis, K.; Solangaarachchi, I.OBJECTIVE:The aim of this study was to obtain a view of family medicine research by analyzing PubMed citations from 1960-2003. METHOD: Family practice (FP) citations in PubMed from 1960 to 2003 were downloaded in MEDLINE format. This was written into relation database using 'PubMed Grabber/Analyzer' software developed at University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Search Query Language (SQL) and online PubMed queries were used for further analysis. RESULTS: There were 50288 FP citations from 80 countries. Of these, 33712 (67%) citations were from 15 FP journals. United Kingdom (18760), United States (13584), Australia (3262), Canada (1848), Germany-west (1340) were the five countries which had the most citations and 22 countries had less than 5 citations. Van Weel C (118), Geyman JP (116), Olesen F (87), Jones R (83) and Knottnerus JA (82) were numerically, the top five authors. Only 921 authors had more than 10 citations and the vast majority of authors had only one citation. Letters (5121), review (2715), editorial (2259), randomized controlled trials-RCT (1585) and Meta-analysis (44) were the top publication types. 40 citations found under 'qualitative research'. Discussion. The relatively few PubMed FP citations (50288) are by a small number of academics in developed countries. Citations showed an upsurge from the mid 1980s to the late 1990's but reached a plateau in the new millennium. Compared to PubMed citations from 1960-2003 in other specialties such as 2737655 for public health, 1151194 for cardiology & cardiovascular diseases and 318538 for medical informatics, the 50288 FP citations were paltry. Paucity of RCT (1585) and meta-analysis (44) was noted. The low 'qualitative research' citations (44) could have been due to the late introduction of the MeSH concept in 2003. CONCLUSIONS: Priority should be given to increase FP research and also to ensure the indexing of FP journals that are not currently indexed in PubMed. Efforts to increase citations in Medline may not give the desired results because of low priority given primary care specialties such as family medicine in the USA. Alternative solution of a separate bibliographic database for FP similar to PsycInfo may be too costly.Item Three decades of the Ceylon Medical Journal--analysis using MEDLINE (PubMed)(Sri Lanka Medical Association, 2005) Mendis, K.; Solangaarachchi, I.; Weerabaddana, C.INTRODUCTION: The Ceylon Medical Journal (CMJ) is the only Sri Lankan medical journal that is indexed in MEDLINE (PubMed). Publications in the CMJ from 1965 March to 2001 December were analysed using the PubMed interface of MEDLINE. METHOD: Using PubMed we downloaded the CMJ bibliography in MEDLINE format. Important tagged fields were written to a Microsoft-Access database using a PubMed Grabber/Analyser program. The analysis was done using Access-SQL and PubMed queries. RESULTS: There were 1472 citations by 1373 authors. 944 authors had only one and 176 had two articles. The top 10 authors contributed 8% and the top 25, 15.4% of the articles. Publications types were: 68.5% 'journal articles', 10.4% letters, 4.2% historical articles and 4.1% reviews. Controlled clinical trials, randomised controlled trials and clinical trials together totalled only 39 (2.1%). Articles were classified using 2 to 44 medical subject headings (MeSH; average 11.4, mode 9) from the MeSH vocabulary. CMJ articles classified using broad MeSH categories were (top five): infections 370(15 %), pathological conditions signs and symptoms 266( 10.8%), haemic, lymphatic and immunologic 199 (7.7%), endocrine, nutritional and metabolic 189 (7.7%), neoplasms 179(7.3%). DISCUSSION: For 938 (68%) authors, publishing in the CMJ was a one time affair. The top 50 authors contributed nearly a quarter (23.2%). A product of this research is an off-line CMJ searching system from 1965 to 2001 with menu driven search facilities which will be a useful tool for researchers.