ASSESSMENT OF PERCEIVED MEDICAL EDUCATION AND RELATED CLINICAL TRAINING STRESSORS IN THE ARAB AMERICAN UNIVERSITY DENTAL STUDENTS

Abstract

Background: Hard stressful moments in academic life of dental students have been described as pure burning-out, and clinical medical training psychologically considered as enough high toxic environment. Such situations may affect not only the personal mental and emotional function of the individual future dentist, but seriously it might affect patients' care delivery services. Aims: The aim of this study is to explore the status of those possible available stressors in medical education and clinical training among the Arab American University dental students. Methods: A quantitative cross sectional descriptive research design was carried out on dental students of Arab American University. Dental students from the different 5-year levels of study were asked to answer a provided self-administered questionnaire. The sample was chosen randomly (n= 267 (responded 232); males=127; females= 105; age range= 19-24yrs). Further, descriptive statistics was employed to generate the results. Results: Dental students suffer from all kinds of stress, in particular individual, academic, staff, institutional, faculty and administrational stressors. It was found that dental students are not in a better situation when it comes to stress and its sources. Conclusions: On the light of our results, findings indicate that medical education and related clinical trainings are stressful and sources of high stress for dental students. Such findings are dangerous, not merely on education of students and their prospected to be obtained clinical skills, but they may affect severely all students life and related health aspects.