Serious, frightening and interesting conditions: differences in values and attitudes between first-year and final-year medical students.

CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVE: During medical education and training, the values and attitudes of medical students are shaped both by knowledge and by role models. In this study, the aim was to compare the views of first- and final-year students concerning patients with different medical conditions. PARTICIPANTS AND METHOD: In the spring of 1998 all first- and final-year medical students at Göteborg and Lund Universities, Sweden, were invited to answer a questionnaire. A total of 20 medical conditions were to be rated on visual analogue scales, according to three aspects: their perceived seriousness, the student's own fear of them and interest in working with these conditions in the future. RESULTS: The overall response rate was 75%. Concerning seriousness, there was a high degree of concordance between the first- and final-year students. Concerning their own fear, the concordance was less pronounced. When the conditions were rated from the aspect of interest, for the final-year students, gastric or duodenal ulcer replaced infection with Ebola virus for the first-year students, among the five highest-ranked conditions. The correlations between seriousness and fear were lower among the final-year students, but this reached statistical significance only in a few cases. DISCUSSION: A reasonable interpretation of the results is that the values and attitudes of the students were influenced by increased knowledge, as well as by role models encountered during the clinical parts of the training. Conditions less likely to be contracted become less feared, and conditions with effective treatment become more interesting; and the converse was true for each of these changes.