Radiologic educationExposure to, Understanding of, and Interest in Interventional Radiology in American Medical Students
Section snippets
Materials and methods
An online survey was created using the anonymous and secure website www.surveymonkey.com. The survey was structured into two halves. The first half included questions designed to identify student exposure to IR during their medical education and their interest in the field. The second half consisted of 10 didactic questions designed to assess student's knowledge of IR procedures (Appendix 1). Respondents were asked to include their year in medical school as well as indicate the state in which
Results
Seven hundred twenty-nine responses were obtained during the 6-month period of March 2009 through August 2009. Respondents were from 21 states (Table 1). The distribution of respondents was equal across medical school years (Table 2). Exposure to IR among the sample population was very limited. An overwhelming minority (.4%) of medical students reported that their medical school has a mandatory IR rotation (Table 3), with 70.8% saying their school did not and 28.8% being unsure. Only 1.7% said
Discussion
To the best of the authors' knowledge, to date there are no large studies of US medical students to determine their affinity for IR. The data acquired from the anonymous survey of >700 respondents from 21 states suggest that IR has a small role in medical school education around the nation and that understanding of this field is limited among both those interested in the field and those interested in other medical specialties. The data suggest, however, that interest in hands-on specialties is
Conclusions
Exposure to IR during the clinical years of US medical education is very limited. While many students are interested in pursuing hands-on specialties such as surgery (15), fewer are interested in IR. Jung et al (15), for example, found that 24% were very interested in surgery and 45% were somewhat interested, whereas we found 15% were interested in IR. The problem is not unique to IR, however, as those in other procedural specialties such as anesthesiology are also questioning how to better
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