Postgraduate students in Nepal's medical and health sciences programmes search for "MEC thesis guidelines" expecting one national document that settles the format. The reality is layered, and knowing the layers is what stops you writing to the wrong one. The Medical Education Commission regulates medical education nationally — admissions, seats, fees and standards. The document that governs your thesis format is issued by your own university and institution, and the approval that governs your data collection comes from an Institutional Review Committee and, for many studies, the Nepal Health Research Council.
That means there are three authorities on your desk and they are not interchangeable. Your university's thesis format document decides structure, front matter, margins and referencing. Your institution's IRC decides whether you may collect data at all and when. NHRC sits above the IRCs and registers them, and a study outside your IRC's scope goes to NHRC directly.
This page sets out what each layer actually requires and, more usefully, the order to do them in. The most expensive mistake in a Nepali health thesis is not a formatting error — it is starting data collection before approval, which can invalidate everything collected.
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The Medical Education Commission is the national regulator for medical education in Nepal. It sets and administers the common entrance examination, allocates seats and scholarships, regulates fees, and issues the Eligibility Certificate that students who studied abroad need before practising or continuing here. It is the body students meet most visibly, which is why its name attaches to searches about thesis format — but the thesis format itself is not where its authority lands.
Your thesis structure is set by your degree-awarding university — Tribhuvan University through IOM, Kathmandu University through its School of Medical Sciences, BPKIHS, Patan Academy of Health Sciences, NAMS and the others each publish their own. Where a teaching institution sits under a university, the institution frequently adds its own requirements on top. The document your department handed you governs, and anything you read elsewhere, including this page, is subordinate to it.
Ethical clearance is a separate track entirely and runs through the Institutional Review Committee of your institution. NHRC registers and oversees IRCs, and studies that fall outside an IRC's registered scope — multi-centre work, studies involving certain populations, or research where no registered IRC covers you — go to NHRC's Ethical Review Board directly. Confirm which route applies to your study before you write the protocol, because the two ask for slightly different things.
Health research protocols across Nepali institutions converge on a common shape, even where the cover page differs: title and investigator details; introduction with background and rationale; a problem statement; a literature review proportionate to the study rather than exhaustive; research question, objectives stated as general and specific, and hypotheses where the design has them; methodology covering study design, site, population, sampling technique and sample size with its calculation shown, inclusion and exclusion criteria, data collection tools and procedure, and the planned statistical analysis; ethical considerations; a work plan and budget; references in Vancouver style; and annexes carrying the consent forms, the proforma or questionnaire, and any instrument permissions.
Two of those sections account for most returns. The first is sample size: a number with no calculation behind it is sent back almost every time, and reviewers want the formula, the prevalence or effect size you assumed, where that assumption came from, and your margin of error and confidence level. The second is ethical considerations, which students often write as three generic sentences about confidentiality. A committee wants the consent process described, including how consent is taken from participants who cannot give it themselves, what the risk to a participant actually is, what happens if screening identifies someone who needs care, and how identifiable data is stored and for how long.
Objectives are the third recurring problem, and the cheapest to fix. Read your specific objectives and your statistical analysis plan side by side. If an objective has no test behind it, either the objective goes or the test comes in. Reviewers read those two sections together precisely because the mismatch is so common.
Approval before collection, without exception. Data collected before ethical clearance cannot be retrospectively approved, and a thesis built on it can be rejected outright at submission after the work is finished. This is the single most damaging mistake in Nepali health theses, and it is almost always made by a student trying to save time.
Because IRCs meet on a cycle rather than working a queue, the wait is measured in committee meetings, not working days, and a revision request restarts it. Treat approval as a scheduled phase of the project with its own start date, and submit a complete pack the first time — a submission missing a consent form or an instrument permission does not get reviewed, it gets returned, and you lose a full cycle to a missing annex.
The realistic order is: topic and supervisor agreed, protocol drafted, supervisor sign-off, IRC submission, approval in hand, then collection, then analysis, then writing. Students who write chapters one to three while waiting for approval use the wait well. Students who collect while waiting risk the whole thesis.
Medical and health programmes in Nepal use Vancouver, the numbered style, and the mistakes are consistent: numbers that do not run in order of first appearance, a reference list alphabetised as if it were APA, journal names abbreviated inconsistently, and web sources with no access date. Use a reference manager and set it to your department's named variant, because Vancouver has variants and the one your institution specifies is the one that counts.
Formatting requirements are institutional and specific — margins, line spacing, font, the order of front matter, whether the certificate pages come before or after the acknowledgement, and how tables and figures are numbered and captioned. None of it is intellectually demanding and all of it is checked. Get the format document before you start writing rather than reformatting eighty pages afterwards.
Keep your approval letter, your data collection dates and your raw data organised and dated from day one. If your work is later questioned, the trail is what answers the question, and it cannot be reconstructed afterwards.
MEC's role is regulatory — entrance examinations, seat and fee regulation, standards and the Eligibility Certificate. The thesis format that governs your submission is published by your degree-awarding university and, frequently, refined further by your teaching institution. Ask your department for the current format document; a version circulating between students may be out of date.
For most single-institution student studies, approval from your institution's registered Institutional Review Committee is the route. Studies that fall outside a registered IRC's scope — including some multi-centre work — go to NHRC's Ethical Review Board. Confirm which applies to your study before drafting the protocol, because the submission requirements differ.
Longer than students plan for, because IRCs review on a meeting cycle rather than a rolling queue and a revision request costs you a full cycle. Build it in as a scheduled phase with its own start date, and submit a complete pack first time — an incomplete submission is returned rather than reviewed.
No. Data collected before clearance cannot be retrospectively approved and can invalidate the thesis at submission, after all the work is done. Use the waiting period to write your introduction, literature review and methodology chapters instead.
Vancouver — numbered in order of first appearance in the text, with the reference list in that same numeric order rather than alphabetical. Vancouver has variants, so set your reference manager to the one your institution names in its format document.
Protocol structure, sample size derivation, the ethical considerations section, the statistical analysis plan, Vancouver referencing, data analysis once you have collected, and defence preparation. We do not collect your data, write your thesis, or have any part in the approval process — that submission is yours and must be.
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