The impact of a psychiatry clinical rotation on the attitude of South African final year medical students towards mental illness
Date
2019-04-25
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
BMC (part of Springer Nature)
Abstract
Background: Stigmatising attitudes of health care professionals towards mental illness can impede treatment
provided for psychiatric patients. Many studies have reported undergraduate training to be a critical period for
changing the attitudes of medical students, and one particularly valuable intervention strategy involves time spent
in a clinical psychiatric rotation. In South Africa, medical students are exposed to a clinical rotation in psychiatry but
there is no evidence to show whether this has an effect on attitudes toward mental illness.
Methods: This prospective cohort study involved a convenience sample of 112 South African medical students in
their 5th or 6th year of undergraduate training. This sample attended a 7-week psychiatry rotation. The Attitudes to
Mental Illness Questionnaire (AMIQ) was used to assess students’ attitudes toward mental illness before and after
the clinical rotation which includes exposure to a number of psychiatric sub-divisions and limited didactic inputs.
Results: There was a significant improvement (p < 0.01, t-test) in the students’ attitude toward mental illness
following the psychiatric rotation. Females displayed a more positive attitude towards mental illness at the end of
the rotation compared to males. The participants’ attitude significantly deteriorated for the non-psychiatric vignette
describing diabetes (< 0.01, t-test).
Conclusions: Our findings suggest that clinical training and exposure to a psychiatric setting impacts positively on
medical students’ attitude towards mental illness, even when this training does not include any focused, didactic
anti-stigma input.
Description
CITATION: De Witt, C. 2019. The impact of a psychiatry clinical rotation on the attitude of South African final year medical students towards mental illness. BMC Medical Education, 19:114, doi:10.1186/s12909-019-1543-9.
The original publication is available at https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com
The original publication is available at https://bmcmededuc.biomedcentral.com
Keywords
Stigma (Social psychology), Mental illness -- Study and teaching (Higher), Residents (Medicine) -- Attitudes, Clinical Skills Rotation
Citation
De Witt, C. 2019. The impact of a psychiatry clinical rotation on the attitude of South African final year medical students towards mental illness. BMC Medical Education, 19:114, doi:10.1186/s12909-019-1543-9