Social wellbeing: a positive energy for wellness in medical students

ABSTRACT

The objective of the study was to compare the level of social awareness amongst medical students of public and private medical universities of Karachi - Pakistan. It was a cross sectional, questionnaire based study which randomly recruited 800 medical students from three government and five private medical colleges. Their responses on various aspects of social wellness were graded from 0-4 [never, sometimes, mostly and always]. Non-parametric methods were employed for the comparison of social wellness between the students of two types of institutes. Factor analysis was run to extract common factors in our setup. Students from public and private medical universities [public MU/private MU] acquired significantly similar scores on communication wellness. Both group of students reported that they had network of close acquaintances. Students from public institutes not only showed a significant problems solving attitude to help their fellows but also exhibited significant frankness and fairness while dealing with their social bounds. On the other hand the private MU students contributed more social time and money to community projects. Strategies should be made to involve public MU students in community projects. Private MU students need to be taught to care for their social bounds and enhance activities to share their beings with friends and family