The Final Step to Becoming a Physician: Interns’ Educational and Working Environment

Abstract

Internship is the transition period from studentship to professional life and therefore is a very important phase of medical education. Despite several attempts for improvement, many problems regarding internship period still continue. This study aims to investigate interns’ experiences and opinions about their educational and working environment, their interactions with the teaching staff, residents and nurses. Ethical approval for the study was obtained for the study, from DEUFM Dean’s Office and Ethical Board. In this cross sectional and descriptive study, data was collected by a questionnaire including closed and open-ended questions. Descriptive analysis and chi-square test was done. The answers to open-ended questions were read repeatedly by three authors independently, and repetitive, relevant and important statements that could be used as representative of the interns’ experiences were specified. Afterwards, these statements were discussed by all authors together and the ones having representative quality were specified by consensus. In April- May 2013, 79.9% of interns were reached and all agreed to fill in the questionnaire on voluntary basis and anonymously. The majority of the interns indicated that they were subject to drudgery (97.6%) and insulting words and behaviours which were humiliating (79.7%), they particularly had problems in interactions with teaching staff and especially with residents. The interns were thinking they are mostly not given due importance during clerkships (91.7%). They also felt that getting prepared for the Specialization Examination in Medicine had an unfavourable effect on their internship period. Survey findings indicate that most interns weren’t treated ethically. They particularly had problems in interactions with residents. In the light of the results, we believe that there is a need to define interns’ education process and the roles and responsibilities of them more explicitly and to structure it in a manner to protect the educational purpose of the internship period. We believe that this study will support other medical faculties, at the national and international level, to re-evaluate the internship period and to conduct further studies in this field in order to promote improvements and to discuss educational ethics.