Jeena Ramesh1, Reshmi Ramachandran2
BACKGROUND
India has been facing various challenges in the past decade, which include
outbreaks of different communicable diseases and the rising of slow pandemics
of non-communicable diseases. The current COVID 19 pandemic brings to light
the need to revamp the training in public health during the internship. A
standardized and outcome-based approach to internship training is the need of
the hour for the Indian medical graduate (IMG). The internship program in
community medicine should train the Indian medical graduate to develop patient
management and administrative skills to promote health care through a health
facility. The training provided is not standardized or evaluated across the medical
colleges. Hence, it was aimed to study the effectiveness of educational
interventions on internship training during the posting at the rural training health
centre (RTHC).
METHODS
A quasi-experimental study was conducted among the interns posted in the rural
training health centre using a validated semi-structured questionnaire as a pretest
followed by a post-test after two weeks of training on the primary health
care system. The perception of the students towards the training was assessed
using the Likert 5 point scale.
RESULTS
The pre-test score was 5.30 (SD 2.105) and the post-test mean score was 9.35
(SD 2.033) [P < 0.01]. The gender-based analysis also showed significance
within genders. Student perception revealed 80 % found the training useful, 90
% agreed that the guidance provided by the field staff helped them and 90 %
agreed that the intervention changed their outlook towards the internship
training in community medicine.
CONCLUSIONS
The study has brought a positive outlook towards giving adequate guidance to
acquire knowledge and skills to interns by the active involvement of faculty. Rethinking
and re-implementation of the existing internship training in the
community is the need of the hour.
