Changes in personal perception performance during medical school: A cohort study

Abstract

IntroductionMedical students have a high academic load that interferes not only academically but also with their perception of satisfaction with their self-performance, such as sleep quality, non-medical social activities, mental health, and others. This study pretends to elucidate changes in their self-performance perception during their career and its association with the diagnosis of any mental disorder during the career. MethodsThis is an ambispective cohort of 120 medical students from CES University, Medellin, Colombia, between 2015-2016 and 2020-2021. Data was collected through a self-completed digital survey which asked about different skills and their perception of their self-performance. It was processed and analyzed using RStudio software. Finally, we used McNemar’s chi-squared test to explore the statistical difference between periods and the chi-squared test to explore the association with a mental disorder diagnosed during the career. ResultsWe found that satisfaction with self-performance decreases throughout the career, revealing statistically significant differences concerning time distribution, concentration, and mathematical skills between both periods. No statistical association was found between self-performance perception and mental disorder. ConclusionOur findings show that medical student’s perception of satisfaction with their self-performance is lower towards the end of their career than at the beginning, which could be explained by academic and non-academic related factors that impact their mental health and consequently their perception of their self-performance and vice versa.