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Addiction medicine training in undergraduate medical education: From understanding to attitude improvement

First published: 10 May 2019 | Last updated: 20 May 2019

Aims

The aim of this study was to disentangle the effects of perception and knowledge about addiction on the attitude towards addicted patients. We evaluated hypotheses: i) addiction medicine training is effective in improving medical students’ attitudes towards addiction and change their perceptions of addiction, and ii) the knowledge and perceptions of addiction acquired from the training predict the attitude after the training.

Design

An observational non-randomized controlled trial study.

Setting

The school of medicine of the Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Participants

Fourth-year medical students (N = 188) participated in this study. They enrolled in an elective block of their preference, addiction medicine (intervention) or others (control).

Measurements

The Medical Condition Regard Scale and the Illness Perception Questionnaire addiction version were used to measure participants’ attitude and perceptions, respectively. The effect of addiction medicine training was analyzed by a repeated-measure MANOVA. A linear-regression analysis was used to predict the attitude after the training, among participants of the intervention group (n=46).

Findings and Conclusions

We found that addiction medicine training improved participants’ attitudes towards addiction and their coherent understanding of addiction, compared to the control group. Moreover, our model showed that this illness coherence perception acquired from the training predicted the attitude after the training, while knowledge did not. We concluded that addiction medicine training is effective in improving the medical students’ attitude towards and coherent understanding of addiction. For the attitude development, improving the coherent understanding might be more important than only improving knowledge.

Report Author

Astri Parawita Ayu


Astri Parawita Ayu was born on 22 April 1978 in Jakarta, Indonesia. She finished her medical training at School of Medicine Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia in 2003. She continued to the psychiatric training at Department of Psychiatry University of Indonesia/Cipto Mangunkusumo hospital in 2004. Shortly after obtaining her specialty in psychiatry, she returned to Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia as an academic staff in 2008. At that time, she started to focus more on addiction medicine/addiction psychiatry in her academic and clinical work. In 2009 she received a grant from the Indonesian National AIDS commission to follow the Training on Management of the AIDS Response at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2010, she received the WHO/ISAM travel award to present her work at the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM) meeting in Milan, Italy. Since then she has regularly presented her works at the ISAM meeting: Geneve, Switzerland (2012); Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2013); Dundee, Scotland (2015); and Motreal, Canada (2016). She also presented her works at other meetings, such as the Global Addiction Conference (Lisbon, Portugal in 2011 and Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 2014). Additionally, she has been teaching addiction medicine and psychiatry at the university since 2009. She also worked as a psychiatrist at a community-based addiction treatment clinic. This clinic is part of the university project to reduce the harmful consequences of substance use, especially HIV/AIDS infection. In 2014 she received a grant from the Indonesian Directorate General of Resources for Research, Technology and Higher Education, Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia, for a PhD study at Radboud University, the Netherlands. Her PhD project has focus on the addiction medicine training in medical education. The project and its results are described in this thesis. After finishing her PhD, she has returned to Indonesia and continues working at Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. With other psychiatrists of the school of medicine, she initiated the Addiction Medicine study group. Currently, she is responsible for the evaluation of the addiction medicine block curriculum. She has also joined a project at the HIV/AIDS research center of the university. She is the study coordinator for the HIV Early Testing and Treatment project, a project funded by the World Health Organization, the Indonesian Ministry of Health, and Kirby Institute UNSW, Australia.

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