Abstract
BackgroundA global effort has been made in the last years to establish a set of core competences that define the essential professional competence of a physician. Regardless of the environment, culture or medical education conditions, a set of core competences is required for medical practice worldwide. Evaluation of educational program is always needed to assure the best training for medical students and ultimately best care for patients. The aim of this study was to determine in what extent medical students in Portugal and Portuguese speaking African countries, felt they have acquired the core competences to start their clinical practice. For this reason, it was created a measurement tool to evaluate self-perceived competences, in different domains, across Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking African medical schools.MethodsThe information was collected through a questionnaire that defines the knowledge, attitudes and skills that future doctors should acquire. The Cronbach's Alpha and Principal Components Analysis (PCA) were used to evaluate the reliability of the questionnaire. In order to remove possible confounding effect, individual scores were standardized by country.ResultsThe order of the domain's scores was similar between countries. After standardization, Personal Attitudes and Professional Behavior showed median scores above the country global median and Knowledge alone showed median score below the country global median. In Portugal, Clinical Skills showed score below the global median. In Angola, Clinical Skills and General Skills showed a similar result. There were only significant differences between countries in Personal Attitudes (p < 0.001) and Professional Behavior (p = 0.043).ConclusionsThe reliability of the instrument in Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking African medical schools was confirmed. Students have perceived their level of competence in personal attitudes in a high level and in opposite, knowledge and clinical skills with some weaknesses.
Highlights
A global effort has been made in the last years to establish a set of core competences that define the essential professional competence of a physician
In order to develop this research we have selected, in the African Portuguese-speaking countries: the Faculty of Medicine of the University Agostinho Neto (FMUAN), Angola and the Faculty of Medicine of the University Eduardo Mondlane (FMUEM), Mozambique with traditional curricula according to the current curricular reform set up with new directives
Regardless of the environment, culture or medical education conditions, a set of core competences are required for medical practice worldwide [1,2,3,4,5]
Summary
A global effort has been made in the last years to establish a set of core competences that define the essential professional competence of a physician. The aim of this study was to determine in what extent medical students in Portugal and Portuguese speaking African countries, felt they have acquired the core competences to start their clinical practice For this reason, it was created a measurement tool to evaluate self-perceived competences, in different domains, across Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking African medical schools. During the last years a global effort has been made to define the minimum essential requirements and core competences that all medical graduates worldwide must have to be good physicians [1,2,3,4,5] These competences comprise not just a set of general knowledge and a set of clinical. The objectives of this study were to (i) create a measurement tool to evaluate self-perceived competences in different domains across Portuguese and Portuguese-speaking African medical schools and (ii) determine in what extent medical students in Portuguese and Portuguesespeaking African countries, felt they have acquired the core competences to start their clinical practice
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