Factors affecting orthopedics and traumatology awareness and specialty preferences of medical faculty students

Abstract

Medical students are influenced by many different factors when choosing the specialty they will do throughout their lives. These are factors such as professional comfort, financial gain, malpractice, and shifts. Orthopedics and traumatology is a challenging specialty during and after the specialty training process. In our study, we aimed to investigate whether medical faculty students are knowledgeable about the department of orthopedics and traumatology and what factors affect their specialty preferences. A total of 1085 students were administered a questionnaire via Google forms on the basis of volunteerism to all grades of medical faculty students except the 1st grade. A questionnaire consisting of 24 open-ended and multiple-choice questions about the department of orthopedics and traumatology, including demographic data and factors affecting specialty preference was applied to 506 students who accepted the study. The data obtained were analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics 20.0. A total of 506 (46.6%) students participated in the study. 303 (59.9%) students were female and 203 (40.1%) were male. Most of the students had knowledge about the department of orthopedics and traumatology. Students especially considered professional comfort while choosing specialization, and financial gain was the second most important factor. Although female students generally did not prefer surgical departments, they stated that orthopedics and traumatology was at the bottom of their preferences. In this study, it was determined that the level of knowledge of orthopedics and traumatology department of medical faculty students was sufficient regardless of gender. It was found that students primarily preferred departments that were comfortable and with high financial gain. It was found that female students did not prefer orthopedics and traumatology because of the perception that it is a male-dominated department and that working conditions may be harsh for women.