Attitude towards Occupational Medicine Questionnaire

Introduction
Occupational medicine is not very well represented in most medical curricula. It is impossible to go through all aspects of occupational medicine in the allotted time. In addition, the specialty seems to operate far from the educational goals from medical students. Therefore, one of the aims of the educational programs is usually to raise the interest of medical students for the specialty. Our aim was to develop a questionnaire to measure this effect on attitude towards occupational medicine

Methods
We drew up as many statements about possible attitudes or drivers of attitudes that we have heard during our teaching both valued positively and negatively. We used a five point Likert scale to elicit answers from third year medical students. Questionnaires were analyzed with exploratory factor analysis to find common scales based on an Eigenvalue of more than 0.40 for individual questions and a Crohnbach’s alpha of more than 0.70

Results
The initial 45 statements were reduced to 18 for the final questionnaire. They could be summarized in five different scales describing a choice for a career as occupational health physician, the occupational health physician helping patients, occupational medicine as an interesting specialty, every doctor’s involvement with occupational medicine and the role and position of the occupational health physician. All the scales had sufficient Crohnbach’s alphas and were based on items with an Eigenvalue of more than 0.40

Discussion
If it is one of the outcomes of educational programs to improve medical students’ attitudes towards occupational medicine, this outcome should be measured to find the most effective components that help to achieve this. The questionnaire that we constructed is a validated tool to measure medical students’ attitude towards occupational health. The questionnaire should be further validated in other samples in different cultures and settings