Health numeracy skills of medical students:cross-sectional and controlled before-and-after study

Ivan Buljan,Matko Marušić,Ana Marušić,Ružica Tokalić

doi:10.1186/s12909-019-1902-6

Abstract

BackgroundAlthough numeracy, defined as understanding and handling numbers, is an important skill for the medical profession, it is not clear whether it changes during graduate medical education and whether it can be improved by specific interventions. The objective of this study was to assess objective and subjective numeracy levels at different stages of medical education and explore whether a research methodology/statistics course improves numeracy levels in a longer period.MethodsWe performed cross-sectional and controlled before-and-after studies. First-year sociology students and first- to sixth-year medical students from the in the cross sectional study and two groups of first-year medical students in a controlled before-and-after study. The intervention was a course on biostatistics and research methodology using blended approach. Numeracy was measured using Subjective Numeracy Scale (Cronbach α = 0.70) and Numeracy Understanding in Medicine instrument (Cronbach α = 0.75).ResultsWhereas first-year medical students did not differ from first-year sociology students in objective numeracy, medicine students had higher results on subjective numeracy. Students from higher years of medical school had generally higher subjective and objective numeracy scores. In the controlled before-and-after study, the intervention group improved more in subjective numeracy (median difference on a 0–8 scale = 0.5, 95% CI 0.3 to 0.7 vs − 0.4, 95% CI − 0.4 to − 0.1, P < 0.001) but not in objective numeracy.ConclusionsAlthough the numeracy levels at the beginning of the medical school are within the range of non-medical population, both objective and subjective numeracy improve during the higher years of medical school. Curriculum during medical school may help in numeracy increase, while research methodology training may help to increase subjective but not objective numeracy skills.

Highlights

Numeracy, defined as understanding and handling numbers, is an important skill for the medical profession, it is not clear whether it changes during graduate medical education and whether it can be improved by specific interventions
There was no difference between the first-year medical students and sociology students on objective numeracy results (Table 2)
Fourth, fifthand sixth-year medical students were always superior to first- and third-year students (Table 2)

Summary

Introduction

Numeracy, defined as understanding and handling numbers, is an important skill for the medical profession, it is not clear whether it changes during graduate medical education and whether it can be improved by specific interventions. Taking into account that it is difficult for the general population to follow the development of treatments in medicine, the very idea of health literacy is very broad and includes different concepts [3] These concepts range from understanding health information and clear comprehension of health risks to performance of basic mathematical operations in the health context, making the entire. The aim of our study was to compare objective and subjective numeracy levels between non-medical population and medical students in different levels of medical education using a cross sectional approach and to explore whether a blended course on research methodology could improve subjective and objective numeracy among undergraduate medical students after 3 months’ period using a controlled before-and-after approach

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion