The Attitude of Physical Therapy Students Towards their Profession and Education in Punjab

Abstract

Background: The quality of medical teaching can be refined based on the attitude of the students towards their clinical and teaching environment. The objective was to determine student attitudes towards their profession and education in Punjab.
 Methodology: This cross-sectional survey was conducted from 20th July to December 2021 after taking ethical approval. The data was collected through an online google document from physical therapy undergraduates and post graduates from different institutes of Punjab. The outcome was measured using “physical therapy student attitudes questionnaire (PSAQ)”.It had four sections, section A is about the knowledge of the profession, section B includes beliefs about future, section C is about patient exposure in clinical trainings and section D is about level of satisfaction from the learnings. The data was encoded and analyzed using SPPS V.23. The descriptive statistics and mean+ standard deviations were used to present the scores. The independent sample t-test was used to find the difference in mean scores of males and females with p value ≤ 0.05 taken as significant.
 Results: The current study comprised of 82(32.15%) males and 173(67.84%) females with mean age of 22.5+6.5 years. The overall satisfaction level regarding knowledge, future beliefs, clinical exposure and learning was good with total mean± SD of 87.62+17.64 for males and 87.97+18.67 for females. There was no statistically significant difference of satisfaction among male and female students with P >0.05
 Conclusion: The student attitude was quite satisfactory regarding their choice of physical therapy profession, good future, patient exposure and learning skills. There was no statistically significant difference based on the gender.
 Keywords: Education, Patients, Physical therapy, Satisfaction, Training.