Evaluation the level of compliance with ethical codes for clinical medicine educators in NKUMS from medical interns’ viewpoints during 2019-2022

In the present study, we investigated the viewpoint of clinical internship students about respecting the codes of ethics among clinical medicine educators in North Khorasan University of Medical Sciences (NKUMS).

In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 90 clinical internship students who were training in educational hospitals of NKUMS selected using simple random sampling. The data were collected using a valid, reliable researcher-made questionnaire, which consisted of three parts: 1) demographic information 2) evaluating the ethical codes for clinical medicine educators (9 components with 54 items), and 3) evaluation of ethical codes in different clinical departments based on a 5-point Likert scale.

The overall compliance with ethical codes for clinical medicine educators was 3.50 ± 1.08 at a semi-desirable or average level. The highest scores were respectively related to work conscience (3.85 ± 1.00) and secrecy (3.76 ± 0.98) and the lowest scores were respectively related to attention to the student (3.09 ± 1.14) and patience and good manners (3.19 ± 1.13). Our results also showed that departments of emergency medicine and pediatrics have the highest and the lowest ethics compliance levels. We observed significant differences between clinical departments in level of compliance with ethical codes (P˂ 0.05). 

Taken together, these results suggest that, although respecting the codes of ethics among clinical medicine educators in NKUMS are at a semi-desirable level, clinical medicine educators pay more attention to students and deal with them patiently and with good manners.