QUALITY OF POST GRADUATE MEDICAL TRAINING IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE TERTIARY CARE HOSPITALS OF KARACHI

Abstract

Objective: To assess the quality of postgraduate fellowship training and todetermine the differences in the quality of postgraduate fellowship training inpublic and private teaching hospitals of Karachi.

Methodology: It was a cross sectional survey conducted in four public andprivate sector hospitals of Karachi from January to March 2012. A total of 246postgraduate fellowship trainees were interviewed. A standardized questionnaireadopted from CPSP guidelines on postgraduate training standards wasdeveloped. Postgraduate fellowship trainees (PG's) were selected on the basisof convenient non-probability sampling technique. Fisher's exact test and chisquaretest were used to find differences in quality of postgraduate training.

Results: The mean duty hours per week was highest in private sector hospitalsi.e., 72.1 as compared to government sector hospital which was 58.3 (P-value<0.01). Of the respondents, 66.0% of PG's in private hospitals agreed thatthey have a structured study program as compare to 46.5% in public hospitals(P-value <0.001). Only 38.1% of PG's in public hospitals agreed that theyspent appropriate amount of time with their family and friends as compareto 1.8% of PG's in private hospitals (P-value <0.001). No significant differencewas found in quality of supervision in both public sector and private sectorhospitals.

Conclusion: The attributes of different aspects of training were different inpublic and private sector hospitals. So significant room exists for improvementin the quality of postgraduate medical training as indicated by the lessthan desirable proportion of trainees being satisfied with different aspects oftraining.