A Survey on Knowledge and Attitudes towards Medical Ethics among Undergraduate Medical Students

Knowledge of Medical ethics is mandatory for all healthcare professionals but it is not included as a part of MBBS curriculum in many medical colleges. Hence, a cross-sectional study was conducted in a private medical college in Malaysia to gauge the extent of knowledge, awareness and attitude of undergraduate medical students of different seniority and from different socio-demographic backgrounds, towards medical ethics. A total of 348 undergraduate medical students voluntarily participated in the study. A structured questionnaire including awareness of principles of medical ethics, attitudes towards core values for guidance, attitudes regards to duties of doctors towards patients and attitudes towards learning medical ethics in curriculum, was distributed to the students. Five points Likert scale (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree) was used to assess the attitudes. Independent t-test and one-way ANOVA was used to determine the relationship between sociodemographic characteristics and attitudes regards to medical ethics. Among the participants, 31.0% were year-3, 30.7% year-4 and 38.2% year-5 students. 37.8% of the students stated doctors must follow medical ethics and 57.9% said it was very important. Majority of the students received medical ethics knowledge from lectures, seminars and clinical discussions during their clinical years while 45.4% received from online sources, 39.3% from media and 23.8% from medical journals. 36.1% were aware of four basic principles of medical ethics, but only 18.4% knew what the principles were. There was no significant difference of attitude scores regarding core values for guidance of doctors and duties of doctors towards patients between genders, ethnicities, nationalities and scholarship statuses. But year-4 students had significantly lower attitude score regards to duties of doctors towards patients (mean score of 22.7 (SD 3.4)) than year-3 and year-5 which had mean score of 24.3 (SD 3.7) and 24.1 (SD 4.0) respectively. In conclusion, the undergraduate medical students had a reasonable knowledge and positive attitude towards medical ethics across all socio-demographic background though attitude of doctors towards patients differed according to seniority of students. However, the teaching of medical ethics should be part of the medical curriculum to strengthen these attitudes and to expose the students to the training classes using real case scenarios, workshops and seminars on medical ethics so that once they become doctors, they are not found wanting in dealing with ethical issues.