ABSTRACT
Rational and Background: University of Health Sciences (UHS) is a unique health institution in Laos that trains medical doctors. Annually more than 150 new medical doctors graduate from this institution but only some of them are recruited in the government health sector and a small number of them continue their higher medical education. Post¬graduate education has increasingly been established and developed at the UHS but very little is known about the expectation and awareness on post¬graduate medical training of the final year medical students. Understanding this issue may help health policy makers to develop strategic plans for medical doctor training appropriately and realistically. Additionally, attitude and suggestion of medical students on the current training program would also be important and essential to improve the curriculum. Methodology: This was a descriptive study to explore the expectation and awareness of the final year medical students on post-graduate medical training at the UHS including their attitude and suggestion towards the current medical training using face¬ to ¬face interview technique with application of pre-designed and pre¬tested questionnaire. Results: Of the 208 final year medical students in the academic year 2010, 186 (89.4%) were interviewed. The proportion of the students with expectation to continue their post¬graduate medical training was 53% (98/186) while the remainder wished to work following their graduation. The percentage of students who wished to continue their training was not significantly different between those who came from provinces [60/120 (50%)] and those who lived in Vientiane Capital [38/66 (58%)], P = 0.32 but this figure was statistically lower among those who had previously worked as health workers compared to those who had not [4/20 (20%) vs 94/166 (57%), P = 0.006]. Only 64.5% of all respondents knew that there is post¬graduate medical training at the UHS. Residency (90%) and family medicine (85%) training programs were the most common post¬graduate medical education of which they were aware but only 21% them correctly understand about residency training program and 16.6% about family medicine program. The training programmes that respondents most commonly stated that they would like to study were OBGY (21%) and Internal Medicine (21%). Among 81 interviewees (43.5%) who expected to work following their graduation, 68 (84%) intended to work for the government sector particularly in the public hospital (75%) for the reason that they wanted to help patients (53%). Only 7.5% of all respondents mentioned that the existing undergraduate training program was good and did not require further improvement while the remainder strongly suggested that the curriculum need to be revised with the emphasis on more practice in the laboratory and hospital. Conclusion: Approximately half of the last-year medical students (academic year 2010) expected to work in clinical practice while the rest wished to continue their further training. But their understanding of the post¬graduate training programs was very low. Most of these students suggested that the existing undergraduate training program be revised with the emphasis on more practice in the laboratory and hospital.