Evidence-based medicine (EBM) for undergraduate medical students in Sudan: sources of information, knowledge about terms, skills related to EBM and attitude toward EBM in Sudan

Abstract

Background Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is the use of the current best evidence for patient care. Medical students should critically appraise the research evidence to help them during their clinical practice in the future. We conducted this study to assess the skills, terms and attitude toward EBM. Method We conducted a cross-sectional study for medical students from governmental universities. Students completed an online validated questionnaire consisting of several sections to assess skills, attitude and knowledge about terms related to EBM. We used a scale ranging from 1(strongly disagree) to 5(strongly agree) for the 11 questions assessing the attitude and a scale ranging from 1(Poor) to 5(advanced) for EBM skills. Results A total of 761 medical students with a mean age of 21.97 ± 1.64 participated in the study. 327 (43 %) of them were males. The most commonly used search engines were Google 690 (91 %) and Wikipedia 465 (61 %). Medical books 719 (94 %) and lecture notes 353 (46 %) were the most common sources for health information. The majority of students rated their skills related to EBM as average and below average for all questions (overall = 2.18 ± 0.8). Students rated their skills as poor (31 %) in locating professional literature, as average (34 %) in searching online databases, poor (42 %) in critical appraisal of a scientific publication reporting findings from clinical research and poor (36 %) in Critical appraisal of available scientific literature. Regarding attitude, the overall mean score was 2.83 ± 0.76. There is no significant difference in attitude score between students with or without EBM training (P = 0.2). The terms with the highest understanding were case-control study (45 %) and case report (44 %) for study design. Median (44 %) and sample size (43 %) for statistics. Incidence (46 %) and prevalence (44 %) for epidemiology. Conclusions Medical students have a knowledge gap in skills and terms related to EBM and an average attitude towards EBM. The majority of them were using a nonscientific search engine to obtain medical information. There is a need to educate students about the proper steps for getting the scientific literature and EBM skills.

Investigating the role of internet-based educational application in the dental sciences

“…The outcome follows the study findings [ [10] , [11] , [12] , [13] , [14] , [15] ]. Moreover, similar to the findings of [ [16] , [17] , [18] , [19] , [20] , [21] , [22] , [23] ], this study believes that information retrieval systems can support students and clinicians to focus on evidence-based dentistry. These research results agree with those of related medical disciplines [ [24] , [25] , [26] , [27] , [28] ].…”

“…Clinicians are required to make well-informed judgments on patient care by relying on the most reliable data derived from research studies and clinical guidelines. The ability to effectively obtain, assess, and utilize pertinent medical literature is crucial in order to provide effective healthcare service [ 17 ]. In addition, as dental school draws to a close, the clinical component should include additional instruction and a variety of knowledge retrieval tasks.…”

Implementation of medical research module and the effect to medical students’ knowledge and perceptions

“…This shows that the need to add research subjects into the curriculum of medical school is a must [19]. In Sudan, students' positive perceptions towards EBM would raise their awareness of the importance of research, even though their knowledge about methodology, statistics, and scientific literature related to the EBM skills is still low [8], [20].…”

“…Students' appreciation of the values or the benefits of statistics on their medical professional career was good enough, but they had a negative to neutral attitudes towards their own intellectual knowledge and skills in statistics [24]. Less understanding of statistics, Mathematics, and the statistical data processing applications in computers, could became the causes of their anxiety which affected negative perceptions towards research [20]. Besides, negative perceptions towards the benefits of research made the students unaware of their professional tasks as medical staff who must do lifelong learning.…”

Self-directed learning and approach to seeking medical evidence: perceptions of students from a private medical university of Karachi

“…A study conducted in Sudan showed that majority students were using nonscientific learning resources for seeking evidence. 25 A study conducted in Hungary showed that the students who did not take formal training of EBM relied on printed books for seeking evidences, while those who had taken formal training used professional guidelines. 11 The PMC encouraged SDL and seeking evidence-based information from databases in undergradate curriculum a few years ago.…”