Computer skills and attitudes to computer-aided learning among medical students

One hundred and forty-four third-year medical students at the University of Edinburgh were surveyed as to levels of computing skills and confidence in carrying out computing tasks. Attitudes to computer-aided learning for clinical teaching were also measured. Thirty-one per cent of students had not used a computer in the previous year and 38% had not used a computer outside supervised laboratory work. Twenty-two per cent had never used the university library computerized catalogue and 43% had never carried out a medline search using the library CD-ROM. Students were not confident of their ability to carry out simple computing tasks. Fifty-four per cent said they would need support or instruction in printing out a document, 69% were not confident they could copy a file onto a disk and 74% did not believe they could independently create a graph in a document. Students who had completed an intercalated honours year were significantly more skilled and confident in computing tasks. Attitudes to computer-aided learning were related to computing confidence. Medical students who have not acquired basic computer information technology (IT) skills by the third year of undergraduate training are unlikely to do so in the final hospital-based years. Undergraduate curricula for medical students must incorporate specific computer (IT) training.