Attitudes, beliefs and values of students in undergraduate medical, nursing and pharmacy programs

Abstract

First and final year students in medicine, nursing and pharmacy programs at the University of Auckland completed a questionnaire used in studies of professional subcultures. Before entering training, students differed in how they believed clinical work should be organised. The collectivist attitude of pharmacy students was greater among those completing their studies than it was among those commencing study. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other professional groups are expected to work in multidisciplinary teams to deliver high quality health services. This study suggests that the individualistic attitudes of medical students may need to be addressed during training if medical students are to graduate with a commitment to working in THE CLINICAL GOVERNANCE literature identifies quality improvement as a central concern of the management of contemporary health care organisations and the clinical staff who work in them. [1][2][3][4] Clinical governance includes an understanding that health professionals will support the systemisation of clinical work and subscribe to power sharing within multidisciplinary approaches to clinical work. Degeling and colleagues have described the subcultures of medicine, nursing and management arising from numerous studies in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. [5][6][7][8][9] These studies demonstrate that medical, nursing and managerial staff have different attitudes, beliefs and values with respect to how they believe clinical work should be undertaken, what leads to variations in its quality, the role of teams and what it means to be accountable for performance. Their work suggests that nurses believe that clinical work is best performed within a systems view of organisation, and further, that the health care organisation in which the work is being carried out needs to endorse and take ownership of the work systems. This is in contrast to medical practitioners who favour a more individualistic approach to the way work is organised and carried out. Mintzberg' s 10 conception of nurses is similar. He suggests that as a group nurses focus on

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