Medical students of today, practitionars of tomorrow; are they listening?

Abstract

Aims: To know listening style of under graduate medical students. Settings and Design: questionnaire based cross sectional study. Methods and Material: A printed listening style inventory consisting ten questions was distributed in second mbbs students of our institute. They were asked to answer each question in a five point likert scale (never to almost always). Completely answered questionnaires were collected and analysed. Statistical analysis used: Mann-Whitney U test and unpaired t test using SPSS version 16. Results: Out of 150 questionnaires were distributed, 121 students returned the completed questionnaire. 62% students of our study were passive listeners and only 3% were active listeners. There was no significant difference in the listening style of males and females of our study. ( p- value 0.693).Conclusion: majority of the future practitioners are passive listeners. There is an acute need to evaluate and improve listening of medical students by significant changes in teaching-learning environment.