Assessment of doctors in training - at two academic hospitals - knowledge of the basic principles and clinical applications of nuclear medicine
Date
2016
Authors
Dhoodhat, Shireen
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Nuclear medicine (NM) is the cornerstone of molecular medicine and is an important diagnostic and therapeutic tool in disease management. Undergraduate training of medical students in the field of NM is varied and sometimes limited. This often results in inappropriate patient referrals or the option of NM in the patient management protocol being entirely overlooked.
OBJECTIVE:
To survey interns and registrars at Charlotte Maxeke Johannesburg Academic Hospital (CMJAH) and Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital (CHBAH) to determine their knowledge of the basic principles and clinical applications of NM.
DESIGN AND METHOD:
This is a descriptive study whereby a questionnaire was distributed to the study population. A total of 141 doctors participated in the study. The questionnaire was adapted from an original questionnaire used by Zakavi et al from “Assessment of general practitioners’ knowledge on the clinical applications of nuclear medicine” published in 2004. Additional questions were adapted from a study by Mubeen et al “Knowledge about ionizing and non-ionizing radiation among medical students”, published in 2008. The minimum score was 0 and the maximum score 13. Correct answering of less than 25% of the questions was considered poor, 25-50% was fair, 50-75% was medium and >75% good.
RESULTS:
The interns form 55% of the respondents, while the remainder was registrars. When looking at the overall score of respondents, the largest proportion of respondents
(62/141 or 44%) scored in the medium range, the second largest proportion of respondents (44/141 or 31%)scored in the fair/poor range; whilst the smallest proportion of respondents (35/141 or 25%) scored in the good range. When looking at the individual questions asked, the respondents scores for largest proportion of questions (9/13) was in the medium range and the respondents scores for the smallest proportion of questions (4/13) was in the fair/poor range. The overall result was considered adequate.
Of the 141 respondents, 58 (41%) indicated that they had had undergraduate exposure to NM education. Of these 58 respondents 52% had 5 hours or less NM training. Only 9.9% of the respondents deemed their undergraduate NM education exposure to have been sufficient. The mean NM knowledge score for those who had had undergraduate exposure to NM training (63%, SD 15.4%) was significantly higher than that of those respondents who had not had such exposure (56.0%; SD 17.4%) (p=0.025).
CONCLUSION
Our study shows that the level of knowledge of interns and registrars in the field of NM is satisfactory but can be improved with adequate undergraduate teaching. The study has shown an association between undergraduate training in NM and better scores achieved by respondents. The majority of respondents confirmed that receiving more information regarding NM would be beneficial. There is a need to improve the undergraduate curriculum with regards to NM.
Description
dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Master of Medicine in Nuclear Medicine
Johannesburg, 12 October 2016