Prevalence of habits, behaviors and interests among medical students from 5 medical schools in Chile

Abstract

Most of their time, medical students are engaged in studying the courses needed for their professional training. Thus, they develop an adequate scientific knowledge and acquire medical skills. However, physicians also need to develop humanistic abilities.

The purpose of the present work is to assess the prevalence of habits, behaviors and interests among medical students from different public and private medical schools across the country, considering the areas of culture, leisure, sports, community and social care, religion, politics and paid jobs.

An anonymous survey was carried out among 299 randomly selected medical students from 5 Chilean Universities who were in the first, the third and the seventh year of their career. Data analysis was  performed with EpiInfo 2002.

The results were as follows: 31,11% were smokers; 73.91% drank alcohol; 75.59% read the newspapers, favoring national and culture news; 51.2% and 51.51% performed non-sport leisure and sport activities more than once a month; 27.09% were involved in community aid, and 79.26% considered such activities as important; 61.54% expressed interest in politics, and only 55.85% were listed on the electoral roll; 71.57% adhered to any religion, 70% declared themselves Catholics; 77.93% did not work, most of them due to lack of time; among those who worked, 62.5% did it to obtain extra money.

Almost half of medical students spend part of their time in cultural activities, and although most of the students consider community care as an important factor for their training, very few put into practice such activities. Medical schools do not encourage clearly enough the development of arts and letters, therefore the integration of medical humanities to the medical curriculum should be encouraged.