Knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of medical students regarding HPV and HPV vaccine

Introduction : HPV (Human papilloma virus) is the most common sexually transmitted infection and constitutes an important part of cancers for which infectious agents are blamed in its ethology. The most important duty of informing the public about HPV and the HPV vaccine with a high protection rate belongs to doctors. The curriculum and scope of this subject in medical education in our country is uncertain. We aimed to determine the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours of our students about HPV and the HPV vaccine before the internship and to find out the change in their knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour status after the internship. Method : The population of the study consists of a total of 257 third and sixth grade students studying in the Faculty of Medicine at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University during the 2018-2019 academic year. A questionnaire, including questions and suggestions about sociodemographic characteristics, and knowledge, attitudes and behavioural status about HPV infection and the HPV vaccine, was administered under supervision to third and sixth grade students between April and June 2019 without specifying their name and surname. Chi-square test was used for statistical evaluation. For statistical significance, p 0.05). The reason why the students did not have the HPV vaccine was related to the fact that they found the vaccine expensive and did not consider it necessary. Only 46.7% of the sixth-grade students thought that they could give their patients enough information about the HPV virus and vaccine when they graduated. Conclusion : The frequency of vaccination in our country is very low even among doctors. Training strategies should be developed to enable doctors to graduate with full knowledge of HPV and the HPV vaccine with multidimensional training programs.