Background: Written communication skill is of the important skills for medical doctors and medical professionals. Written communication includes daily notes, letters, memos, personal requests, summaries, reports, editorials, and essays. An essay is a form of written assessment used by educators to make inferences about a problem, evaluate a situation, and assess their knowledge and understanding among students. Essay writing is an important tool for developing thinking, critical thinking, and analytical skills. Aim: To do a comparative evaluation of essays by first-year students of pre-med and pre-health education Materials and Methods: In this study, essays written on the topic “My Childhood” by students who studied Communication Skills in the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 academic years were evaluated using the 6 criteria of the Rubric and the group discussion identified the problems students faced when writing essays. Results: Among the essays of 568 first-year basic education students who studied in the 2022–2023 academic year, 32.6% had spelling errors, 25.5% had grammatical and composition errors, and 20.4% were insufficiently written in terms of content. It was identified that 28.6% of the essays of 525 students who studied in the 2023–2024 academic year contained spelling errors, 21.8% contained compositional errors, and 18.6% lacked content. Additionally, 10.5% did not have the required essay structure for writing their essays. Conclusion This indicates the need for content reforms in the curriculum to further improve students' writing skills.

Background: Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection remains a major global health concern. Approximately 55–85% of individuals with acute HCV infection progress to chronic disease, which is often asymptomatic. Therefore, early diagnosis and treatment are crucial to prevent long-term complications. This provided the rationale for our study to evaluate the clinical characteristics, diagnosis, and treatment outcomes of chronic HCV patients using direct-acting antivirals (DAAs), with comparisons by viral genotype. Aim: To compare the clinical features, diagnosis, and treatment outcomes of chronic hepatitis C according to viral genotypes. Materials and Methods: A total of 1203 chronic HCV patients attending the outpatient department of Arkhangai Provincial General Hospital were included in this prospective and retrospective cohort study. HCV genotyping was performed, and patients received DAA therapy. Clinical manifestations, laboratory findings, HCV RNA levels, and fibrosis scores (APRI and FIB-4) were assessed at baseline, at week 4 of treatment, and at 12 weeks post-treatment. Statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS version 26.0. Results: : Among all patients, 6.7% had liver cirrhosis, and 1.4% had previously received interferon-based therapy. Patients with cirrhosis more frequently reported fatigue, abdominal discomfort, insomnia, right upper quadrant pain and loss of appetite (p<0.001). Virologic response at week 4 was 98.9%, and sustained virologic response at 12 weeks post-treatment was 99.3%. The mean APRI score decreased from 0.71±0.67 to 0.31±0.54, and FIB-4 from 1.61±0.41 to 1.16±0.26 (p<0.001). The most common adverse events were fatigue, headache, and nausea. Conclusion Treatment outcomes were 99.5% in patients with genotype 1b, 100% in genotype 1a, and 75% in genotype 2, with statistically significant differences (p<0.001). Both APRI and FIB-4 scores significantly decreased after treatment, confirming the effectiveness of DAA therapy in improving liver fibrosis (p<0.001).