Medical Student's Knowledge, Attitude and Practice about Cervical Cancer Screening Method

Introduction & Knowledge and attitude are important factors in predicting health behaviors. Also, they are effective factors in performing screening procedures. We aimed to investigate medical students’ knowledge, attitude and practice about cervical cancer screening method. In this analytic cross sectional study, 368 undergraduate medical students were assessed. Data were collected through a questionnaire consisted demographic characteristics, knowledge assessment (20 questions), attitude assessment (14 questions) and performance assessment (6 questions). Patients were divided in 3 groups based on the acquired score in knowledge assessment: poor knowledge (< 20), moderate knowledge (20-30) and good knowledge (> 30). The attitude questions were designed as 5 degree likert index. Data were analyzed by chi-square test and Pearson correlation coefficient in SPSS software (version 21). 16.6%, 28% and 55.4% of the students had respectively good, poor and moderate knowledge. The most negative attitude was about the necessity of pap smear in those women who had sexual contacts (64.3%) and the most positive attitude was about encouraging family to do the test (82.2%). 100% of married students had referred to a gynecologist in the past 2 years and none of them had Pap smear. There was significant Correlation between knowledge score and age (r = 0.368, P = 0.0001). In the female students, 24.5% had good knowledge, but none of male students had good knowledge (P = 0.0001). There were significant differences between the two gender groups in 12 sentences out of 14 of attitude sentences. 39.6% of intern students had good knowledge, but in other educational levels none of the students had good knowledge (P = 0.0001). Also, there was significant difference between all attitude questions in the three educational levels (P < 0.05). Our study showed that student's knowledge regarding cervical cancer screening test was relatively low, but most people had a good attitude toward it. Also, their performance was relatively poor. So, it is suggested to have more educational programs.