Attitudes of Undergraduate Medical Students towards Personal and Professional Advancement (PPA): A Cross- sectional Study at School of Medicine, Maldives National University

Abstract

Introduction: Personal and Professional Advancement module (PPA) is introduced in today’s updated medical school curriculum. The main purpose of PPA is to assess student’s personal growth and professional development. It emphasizes the importance of “hidden curriculum” as part of medical training. The success story of a modern-day physician center is substantially based on the knowledge of proper professional skills. PPA is introduced to achieve the general objective of producing medical doctors who are caring, holistic and professional in their approach. Therefore, it has become extremely important to start a professional skills course early on in undergraduate medical study, but to date, this has been given relatively little or no emphasis. In the present study, an attempt was made to assess the attitude of undergraduate medical students towards learning the PPD module
 Methods: A total of 130 undergraduate medical students at School of Medicine were included in the study. This study was based on an anonymous self-administered questionnaire on attitudes of undergraduate medical students towards personal and professional advancement module. The data were collected from all the batches of students. All participants (n=130) had completed the questionnaires completely, therefore, 100% of samples were included for data analysis. Data was coded and entered into Microsoft Excel software and analyzed using SPSS version 22.0
 Results: The content that was covered by the PPA sessions satisfied the needs of the 46.2% of students, 44.6% were not sure and 9.2% were not satisfied. The students seem to embrace the course better as they go into clinical practice.
 Conclusion: This study provides perceptions of undergraduate medical students towards PPA module learning. We suggest the integration of PPA module curriculum into the undergraduate medical syllabus, with an acceptable, focused, and interesting teaching module.