Social accountability: Attitudes and awareness among undergraduate medical students in Morocco

As future health professionals, medical students should be aware of their social accountability and their role in the society. The aim was to assess the attitudes and awareness of medical students regarding the social accountability and to identify the factors determining their attitudes and possible levers for action.

Online survey among undergraduate students at the medical school in 2019 (N = 2128). The data collection tool was developed based on the literature review, the principles of social accountability SR and the toolkit (The development of the Students' Toolkit on Social Accountability of Medical Schools was a collaboration between the International Federation of Medical Students' Associations (IFMSA) and the Training for Health Equity Network (THEnet). The data were collected in December by LimeSurvey software version 1.90 and analyzed by SPSS version 16 according to the usual descriptive and bivariate. The Fisher test was used to compare two percentages and the Student t-test to compare two means on two independent samples (significance level was 0.05). The verbatims were grouped and analyzed.

271 students participated (response rate = 12.7%). The mean age was 20.6±2.6 years (N = 257). The Female/Male ratio was 1.85. Only 33.5% had heard of social accountability. It was linked to "commitment to the community" in 75.1% of cases, "to be a good citizen" in 66.1% and "to be responsible for one's actions" in 56.4%. Nearly 79% thought that students did not really have a role in society and that they should focus on their studies. Being a member of an association was a factor determining the positive attitude towards the SA (82.1% versus 65.2%, p=0.031). Students believed that the school had some strategies of social accountability. The results of the verbatim emphasize the need to multiply the practices and opportunities for interaction with the social environment for students.

The level of knowledge of the concepts by the students seems to be average. It would be necessary to look for the means to plead in favor of reinforcing our school strategies to concretize the principles of SR while training the students.