18 August 2026 · 9 min read
The Institute of Medicine is Tribhuvan University's central institute for health sciences, based at Maharajgunj Medical Campus in Kathmandu. It teaches MBBS and allied bachelor programmes alongside postgraduate MD, MS, MDS and MPH, and for every postgraduate programme a thesis is not an optional extra — it gates your final examination. Residents searching for the IOM thesis format usually turn up three or four different templates in circulation, which is why the first section below is about which document actually binds you.
There is no single national thesis format for medical postgraduates in Nepal, and the Medical Education Commission does not publish one — MEC runs the entrance examination and governs admissions, seats and fees. Your format comes from the institution that awards and examines your degree, which for IOM residents means three documents, in this order of authority:
Collect all three in your first weeks of residency, in their current issued version, and work from those rather than from a senior's copy. Guidelines are revised, and an older template is the most common reason a formally correct thesis is returned. Anything in this guide that differs from your issued copy loses to your issued copy.
Under the Nepal Medical Council's regulations for postgraduate medical education, the thesis has to be reviewed and approved by the department concerned and submitted at least six months before the theory and clinical or practical examinations, and acceptance of the thesis is a prerequisite for appearing in the final examination. Read that last clause carefully: an unaccepted thesis does not cost you a grade, it costs you the exam sitting.
Working backwards from it is the whole planning exercise. Submission six months before finals, a year for data collection, analysis and writing, and one to two months for ethical approval before you may collect anything at all, puts the finished protocol very early in residency. Residents who begin the protocol in second year are almost always compressed at the end, and compression shows up as a rushed analysis chapter.
The protocol and the thesis are separate deliverables with separate formats. The protocol is the proposal you defend and submit for ethical clearance — typically a short document, heavy on methodology, with the consent forms and data collection proforma annexed. The thesis is the final bound work, and it inherits the protocol's methodology chapter almost intact if the protocol was written properly. Students who treat the protocol as a throwaway rewrite the same methodology twice.
Chapter numbering and whether aim and objectives sit inside the introduction differ between departments — another reason to hold the current departmental copy. What does not differ is the audit trail: every objective in Chapter 3 must appear in the methodology, in the data collection proforma, in the results and in the discussion. Reviewers check that chain, and a missing link is the single easiest finding for an examiner to raise.
Medical thesis formats in Nepal cluster around a common set of typing conventions, and IOM's guideline specifies its own version of each. Set these up in your word processor before you write — reformatting 90 pages at the end is where numbering and contents errors are introduced.
Referencing is Vancouver for medical work at IOM, as it is across BPKIHS, KUSMS and PAHS. Number sources in citation order, follow the NLM punctuation convention, and keep in-text numbers and the reference list in exact correspondence. A reference manager set to Vancouver at the start of the write-up saves a day of manual repair at the end.
Any research involving human participants needs ethical clearance before any activity that touches a participant — recruitment, interviews, sampling, photography or record extraction. Approval is not retrospective, and data collected before clearance generally cannot be used.
The most common protocol revision at any Nepali medical institution is a sample size that does not follow from the primary objective. Your primary objective defines the primary outcome, and the calculation must be based on that outcome — not on a secondary one, and not on what is achievable in the time available. Show the formula, the prevalence or effect size assumed, a citation for where that figure came from, the confidence level, the power, and any adjustment for non-response or attrition.
Every medical institution in Nepal is required to have a biostatistician available for postgraduate theses. Use them at the protocol stage. After the data is collected, a design problem cannot be repaired, and the discussion chapter ends up carrying an apology instead of a finding.
Have your guide read the work early rather than at the deadline, and get the sample size and analysis plan signed off separately by your biostatistician. Then walk the audit trail once more — objectives, methodology, proforma, results, discussion — and check the mechanical layer that examiners notice first: contents page against actual page numbers, table and figure lists complete, abbreviations all expanded at first use, annexes attached including the IRC letter.
For the layout side of a general TU proposal, see our guide to the TU thesis proposal format; for where postgraduate medical guidelines come from more broadly, see our guide to MEC Nepal thesis and research proposal guidelines. Both are companions to this page rather than substitutes for the guideline your department issues, which remains the binding version.
Preparing an IOM thesis or protocol and want it reviewed for structure, sample size justification, Vancouver referencing and ethical documentation before it goes to your guide? Assignment Nepal's researchers can help — message us on WhatsApp at +977 9768768340.