Original Article: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Internship Program of Medical Laboratory Students at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences (original) (raw)

Introduction: Medical Laboratory graduates are experts who will be responsible for performing clinical laboratories practices, and therefore theses students must acquire the necessary skills and knowledge during the internship course. Identifying the problems that reduce quality of internship and solving these problems seems to be essential to increase efficacy of this course. This research was conducted with the purpose of recognition of the problems, hoping to promote the quality of the internship course. Materials and Methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted on twenty undergraduate medical laboratory students during the internship course, at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. In order to evaluate the learning level of students internship skills and the response level of learners satisfactions to this training, a man-made questionnaire was used. Data were analyzed by descriptive statistics (mean, SD and percentage) using SPSS. Results: Scores obtained from the respondents regarding the Performance of the school and the internship coordinators, for questions 1,5 ,8, 11 were intermediate and in response to questions 2,3,4,6,7 and 10 were very good. With respect to the Performance of the Laboratory and the Internship Instructors, students evaluation for question 9 was weak whereas for questions 1,2,3,4,5,8, satisfaction scores were very good and in response to question 6 and 7 excellent scores were obtained. Conclusion: According to the results of this study, to improve quality of the internship course, the active presence of the educational instructors in the internship sites will have a great effect on increasing the students' motivation and interest to participate in practical internship activities and consequently will have a stronger effect on educational attainment.