The Attitudes of Patients toward the Presence of Students in Internal Medicine Inpatient and Outpatient Practice

Abstract

Objective: The medicine educators increase the clinical skills and professional thinking ability of students by examining patients, showing their attitudes towards them, and attracting their response in the presence of medical students. In this study, we aimed to investigate the attitudes of patients who applied to internal medicine toward the presence of medical students and the possible factors that may influence such attitudes.Methods: This study was performed between February and December 2013. The patients who were admitted to our four general internal medicine outpatient clinics and one general internal medicine service were included in the study. Their ages ranged from 16 to 88. In this study, we used a questionnaire that was formed by extracting questions that were used in literature.Results: We obtained the data of 723 individuals in the study. The mean age of participants was 40.72±13.91 years (male: 41.95±14.56 years and female: 40.17±13.59 years; p=0.112). Of these patients, 31% were males and 69% were females. Of these patients, 88.4% reported that they “would not be disturbed in the presence of medical students” during the examination and 71.1% allowed “physical examination by a medical student under the supervision of a clinician”. The rates of giving importance for the training of future doctors to the proposals of “the presence of medical students or being examined by the medical students, while being interviewed by the physician” were 89.2% and 97.1%, respectively.Conclusion: Our study is the first in our country that investigated the attitudes of patients towards the presence of medical students in internal medicine practices of examination and treatment of patients. In accordance with the literature, we have detected that the patients who were admitted to the internal medicine clinics are positive and were not in discomfort in the presence of medical students for whom these attitudes may be affected by some conditions

Keywords

• Medicine education
• medical student
• clerkship
• patient attitude
• patient behavior