Computer education: attitudes and opinions of first-year medical students

Students' attitudes toward medical informatics were evaluated with self-administered questionnaires, answered by 140 (77%) first-year medical and dental students. Fourteen per cent classified their computer literacy as negligible and 49% as deficient. Ninety-six per cent had used a computer before and 59% used one regularly. Nineteen per cent had computer education in secondary school and a further 16% attended courses given by a computer company. Only 16% read regularly about informatics. These results are similar to those observed in more industrialized countries, except that high-school education is more deficient. To 93% of these students, computer literacy is important for doctors, and to 85% computers may be very useful in many areas of health care. In the opinion of 66% of students, the computer-based patient record will be available within the next 3 to 10 years. Women showed lesser computer literacy (77% computer illiteracy to 39% in men), but there were no relevant differences in attitudes, behaviour and beliefs towards medical informatics between gender, for the same level of computer literacy. Computer education in the undergraduate curriculum was demanded by 92%, and 75% of these preferred an elective course. Weekly hours suggested for lectures should be 1 (54%) or 2 (42%), and for hands-on practice 2 (54%) or 4 (31%) hours. The curriculum should include medical applications (83% of students), information science theory and technology (44%), micro-informatics (44%), bibliographic database search (27%), programming languages (23%) and statistical packages (23%). Gender, computer literacy or course did not correlate significantly with students' opinions about the contents of undergraduate education.