The perspectives of clinical level medical students on animal-assisted therapy: a study in Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The role of animal-assisted therapy (AAT) in complementary and alternative medicine is well acknowledged. AAT is widely patronized, in developed countries such as USA, Canada, and many European countries, but less so in developing countries in Africa including Ghana. For persons in developing African countries and elsewhere to benefit from AAT, healthcare professionals must be acquainted with it recommend it to their patients when necessary. This study therefore assessed the perspectives of clinical-level medical students on AAT. METHOD: A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data in a cross-sectional study from 206 randomly selected clinical-level medical students of the University for Development Studies, Tamale, Ghana. The data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel and SPSS (Version 26) and the results were presented in Tables and charts. The association between demographic variables and the knowledge and attitude of the students were determined using ANOVA, while bivariate Pearson's correlation was used to measure the relationships between continuous variables. Associations were considered significant when p-value < 0.05. RESULTS: The knowledge about AAT among the medical students was very poor (0.971 ± 2.407 over 10; 9.7%); almost all of them (≈ 99.0%) had very little or no exposure to AAT in school or at home. The attitude of the students was however averagely positive (3.845 ± 0.748 over 7; 54.9%), with a perceived health benefit of ATT score of 4.768 ± 1.002 (68.1%). The motivation of the students to acquire more knowledge and skills about AAT mostly through lectures and practical sessions (70.9%) was good (4.809 ± 1.221; 68.7%). Female students were significantly more knowledgeable about AAT than their male counterparts (1.5 versus 0.6; p-value = 0.006). No other sociodemographic characteristics had any significant association with knowledge, attitude, and perception of benefit variables. However, a significant positive relationship was found to exist between the students' knowledge, attitude and perception of animal-assisted therapy (r ≥ 0.236; p-value ≤ 0.001). CONCLUSION: We conclude that the knowledge about AAT among medical students is inadequate and this is worrying given the beneficial complementary role of AAT in achieving SDG 3. Medical schools and their regulators in Ghana should incorporate complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) lessons in their training curricula. For practising medical doctors, topics on CAM should be discussed during their Continuous Professional Development sessions. With better knowledge, physicians would possibly be more willing and confident in recommending this useful complementary and alternative medicine to patients who may seek other forms of therapy besides conventional medicine or which will augment the orthodox medication the patients may have been using to treat their conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".