Assessment of professionalism among undergraduate medical students in Faisalabad: where do we stand?

Abstract

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 <p><strong>Background and Objective:</strong> Teaching medical professionalism is considered important for identity formation of healthcare professionals and must be a part of the curriculum at the undergraduate as well as postgraduate levels. Undergraduate students are often ignored in our culture when the question of professionalism comes under discussion and all the importance is usually given to postgraduate students. This study was designed to compare the professionalism among undergraduate medical students of the public and private medical institutes in medical colleges of Faisalabad city, Pakistan.<br /><strong>Methods:</strong> It was a cross-sectional comparative study conducted in a public and a private medical institute in Faisalabad from September 2021 to November 2021. A total of 462 undergraduate students were included from both colleges. The modified version of Penn State College of Medicine Professionalism Questionnaire for medical students was used to assess seven domains of professionalism among the students. SPSS 23.0 was used for statistical analysis.</p>
 <p><strong> Results: </strong>Response rates of 89.7% and 59.2% were achieved from the public and private medical college respectively. Respect was the highest scored domain among students of the public sector institutes, while equity was the highest scored domain by the private sector medical college (mean = 4.34 ± 0.81 and 3.91 ± 0.99, respectively). The enrichment domain was scored lowest by the students with public and private sector institute (mean = 3.9 ± 0.041 and 3.7 ± 0.055, respectively). There was a significant difference in the domains of professionalism among students based on their years of education (p > 0.05).<br /><strong>Conclusion: </strong>The undergraduate medical students at public as well as private sector colleges have positive professional attitudes, especially at the stage of first and the final years of training. The reasons for a declining trend of professionalism during mid-years of medical education among students are yet to be explored.</p>