A cross-sectional study on knowledge and awareness of palliative care among health science students

Abstract

This study was done to determine the knowledge and awareness of palliative care among health science students in UniKL RCMP. To assess the difference of knowledge on palliative care between students who have been exposed to palliative care posting/class and students who have not been exposed to palliative care posting/class. This was a prospective, cross-sectional study that took place between March and April 2018 by using simple random sampling method. The study population will be divided according to their courses which were; MBBS, Nursing, Pharmacy, Physiotherapy and Radiology. The knowledge of most participants was at a poor state as most of them fall in Group 1, the lowest range of score. The fact that more unexposed students were in Group 2 than exposed students were showed that exposure towards any palliative care teaching was not playing its part fully among UniKL-RCMP students in terms of knowledge. It also showed that most of MBBS and Diploma of medical imaging students fall into Group 3. Most of Bachelor in Pharmacy and Diploma in Nursing students fall into group 2 while most of the Diploma in Physiotherapy students fall into group 1 and 2. Majority of the health science students have low or average knowledge regarding palliative care regardless of their exposure towards palliative care teaching. Short posting time might also be one of the reasons for this situation.