A group of 265 urban private sector workers in Kuala Lumpur and adjacent Petaling Jaya responded to a self-administered questionnaires. Their knowledge of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, risk factors for and preventive measures against cardiovascular diasease a n d w h e n these should be started are relatively weak, though knowledge on symptoms of heart a attack are satisfactory. Relatively more males than females are current smokers and consumers of alcohol. Males tended to start smoking and drinking in their teen years while females tended to do so later in their non-teen years.
Preventive medicine has been incorporated in the medical school curriculum, but its effectiveness and the factors that affect it are yet to be widely looked into in the context of Malaysia. We aimed to measure the familiarity with, perception about the importance to learn, and the ability to practice preventive medicine as well as its determinants among the medical students in Malaysia. Thus, a cross sectional study was conducted through an anonymous online survey among 387 randomly selected final year medical students of four large public medical schools in Malaysia from March to September 2014. Of the total sample, 340 (response rate 87.8%) gave a written informed consent and took part in the survey. The familiarity of the sample with preventive medicine was measured in 19 preventive medicine areas, and their perception about the importance of preventive medicine and their ability to practice it were gauged on a Likert scale (low score indicates disagreement and high indicates agreement). Descriptive statistical analysis was performed, followed by logistic regression. The mean age of the respondents was 23.7 (SD 0.77) years, and 61.2% (n = 208) of them were females. Results showed that 22.9% of the sample (n = 78) had a low familiarity with preventive medicine, whereas 76.8% (n = 261) had a high familiarity. The study sample specified that among all the preventive medicine subjects, screening and control as well as smoking cessation and immunization are "extremely important to learn." In univariable analysis, being a female, medical school, family size, and perception about the importance to learn preventive medicine were associated with the ability to practice it. In multivariable analysis, the perception towards the importance to learn preventive medicine was the only significant determinant: aOR (adjusted odds ratio) for those who "agreed" 17.28 (95% CI aOR 4.44-67.26, P < 0.001) and for "strongly agreed" 35.87 (95% CI aOR 8.04-159.87, P < 0.001). Considering these findings, the familiarity of medical students with preventive medicine should be increased. The perception about the importance to learn preventive medicine is a strong determinant for the ability to practice it.
In 1999, the Department of Social and Preventive Medicine set up its website on the Internet (http://ummc.med.uni.edu.my/sps/. Setting up the website was a whole new experience for the author and many new things were learnt along the way. This paper describes how the website was constructed, the problems, and solutions to all these problems. The experience of the author in setting up the SPM website may be useful to others wishing to set up their own department websites. KEYWORDS: Internet, SPM, website, web page
Segmented service delivery with consequent inefficiencies in health systems was one of the main concerns raised during scaling up of disease-specific programs in the last two decades. The organized response to NCD is in infancy in most LMICs with little evidence on how the response is evolving in terms of institutional arrangements and policy development processes.