A survey on medical students perception, attitude toward evidence-based medicine in a medical school in Taiwan

Article type
Authors
Yang Y, Liou W, Lee C
Abstract
Background: Evidence-based medicine is an increasingly important concept in medical education and medical school curricula. EBM will help medical professionals effectively update themselves with medical knowledge. It seems to be necessary to incorporate EBM course into the medical education program.
Objectives: To explore the medical students whether percept the need of learning the EBM skills and agree the incorporation of EBM courses into medical education recently a survey was conducted from a medical school in Taiwan.

Methods: The survey was conducted from January through February of 2004 with the help of the Planning Division of the medical university. To accelerate the answering rate, a short-form questionnaire was designed. An overall of 1450 questionnaires were distributed to all students of medical, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy and public health departments in a medical university.

Results: There were nine hundred and thirty nine students (64.8%) answered the questionnaire. Among them, six hundreds and sixty five (70.9%) respondents were male. Specialty representation included 661 (70.5%) in medicine, 116 (12.4%) in nursing, 71 (7.6%) in dentistry, 52 (5.5%) in public health and 34 (3.6%) in pharmacy. Among them, the numbers of participants in grade 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were 214 (22.8%), 198 (21.1%), 189 (20.1%), 195 (20.8%), and 141 (15%), respectively. When asking Have you ever heard of the term Evidence-Based Medicine before filling in the questionnaire? , two hundreds and seventy-seven (29.5%) participants replied YES and 52.2% replied NO . When asking Do you know the Cochrane Library collect and provide the medical evidences by using critical evaluations? , eighty hundreds and twenty-nine participants (88.4%) replied NO . When asking If there is a course to learn the skill of EBM are you willing to attend? , six hundreds and forty two (68.4%) replied YES , only thirty one (3.3%) replied NO . Seven hundreds and eighty five (78.5%) respondents perceived that it s important to learn the skill of searching medical article in medical school. When asking Do you think it s important to learn the skill of evaluating the quality of medical journals in medical school? , seven hundreds and forty nine respondents (79.8 %) replied YES and 174 (18.5%) replied NOT SURE , and 16 (1.7%) replied NO .

Conclusions: This study shows that although EBM is new to medical students in Taiwan, the importance of EBM skills are well perceived and the incorporation of the EBM courses into traditional teaching program are mostly agreed.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Hsieng-Sheng Wu who volunteered to distribute and collect questionnaires in this project.