MAIN ASPECTS OF TEACHING THE DISCIPLINE “PHITISIATRY” FOR MEDICAL STUDENTS

Abstract

Tuberculosis remains one of the major challenges for the health care system in many countries around the world. In the context of reforming the medical sector in Ukraine, the management of TB patients is entrusted to primary care physicians. As a result, the needs for knowledge on various aspects of phthisiology, primarily by family doctors, has increased. In higher education institutions at the undergraduate stage, the duration of study in this discipline remains within 90 hours, of which only 30 hours (33 %) are allocated for practical classes, and 10 hours (11 %) for teaching lectures. At the same time, the discipline program is quite overloaded. Therefore, in practical classes it is not possible to cover all sections of phthisiology, some issues are presented in a concise form. The purpose of our study was to determine the attitude of 5th year students of the medical faculty, who were studied in the discipline “Phthisiologyˮ, to the main aspects of TB management. A survey of 185 students who completed the cycle in the 2022–2023 academic year was conducted. The questions of the questionnaire were combined into three blocks. In the first block of questions, devoted to the attitude to the problems of TB detection, it was found that students note significant stigmatization in relation to TB patients. A quarter of respondents attribute the insufficient detection of cases with limited access to the examination of patients with suspected TB in non-specialized health care facilities (25.9 %). In the second block of questions, which related to the problems of treatment of TB patients, we learned that almost all respondents (96.5 %) support the need for controlled treatment, and only 3.5 % of respondents believe that it is better for patients to be treated on their own, without supervision by medical staff. More than half of the respondents (55.2 %) believe that problems in outpatient treatment arise from the patientʼs attitude, and not from the lack of desire of medical staff to organize controlled TB treatment. The third block, devoted to the problem of stigmatization of TB patients, highlights the fact that 34.1 % of future doctors believe that breaks in TB treatment occur due to antisocial behavior of patients. The majority of future doctors (92.9 %) admit that there is a problem of widespread stigmatization of TB patients.

Taking into account the answers of higher education applicants, the teachers of the Department of Internal Medicine 2, Phthisiology, Occupational Diseases and Clinical Immunology decided to pay more attention to the problematic issues of phthisiology.