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Background: Biostatistics is important to health workers, it helps clinicians determine the burden of a disease, help to evaluate which treatment modalities is effective and helps in appropriate interpret results in medical literature. Several studies have shown that attitude toward statistics have effects on students’ achievement in statistics, recent there has been poor attitude toward statistics in many clinicians. Despite the advancement in statistics yet many clinicians have poor understanding of basic statistics. Since we have limited information about biostatistics in our setting this study will aim at assessing the knowledge, attitude and the use of biostatistics among medical students, registrars and clinicians at KCMC.
Objectives: To assess the knowledge, attitudes and the use of biostatistics among medical students, registrars, and residents at KCMC.
Methodology: Descriptive cross sectional study was done from May to July 2016 where 422 56participants sampled from fourth and fifth year medical students, residents and registrars were included. Data were collected using constructed questionnaire with structured questions. Data were analysed by using SPSS version 20 descriptive analysis were generated. Categorical data were summarized in frequence and parcentages. Results are presented in tables.
Results: a total of 298 participants were included, majority of the participants 87.2% had adequate knowledge of biostatistics, also many had positive attitude towards biostatistics, 63.1% agreed that they like biostatistics and 81.5% agreed they will have application of biostatistics in their profession. 90.3% reported to have participated in research activities and about half of the participant they will be using biostatistics sometimes in the future after finishing school.
Conclusion: Most of the medical students, registrars and residents doctors had adequate knowledge and positive attitude towards biostatistics. Still work needs to be done so as to improve the knowledge and attitude on more and advanced methods of biostatistics since the study assessed more basic statistics. Also more teaching is needed since there is inadequate knowledge on chi square test and errors in statistics. |
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