COMPARISON OF PAIN NEUROPHYSIOLOGY KNOWLEDGE AMONG HEALTH SCIENCES STUDENTS

Abstract

Introduction: Pain has been known to be the Fifth vital sign since the 1990’s. The chronic pain is of special consideration in the modern era, as its prevalence is increasing day by day. To treat these patients, a multi disciplinal approach is followed, which involves Pain Re-education and reconceptualization. The notion of healthcare practitioners is of prime importance. However, most educational programs, especially for health graduation students, include minimum or no content about pain and/or its management. The notion of pain retained by health care professionals is therefore essential for efficient therapy of patients.

Material & Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out in April 2019 in Khyber Medical College and Institute of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, KMU Peshawar. The sample size was 190. The data was collected by stratified sampling technique. Data collection was done using the latest version of Neurophysiology of Pain Questionnaire (NPQ). The collected data was entered into IBM SPSS v.25. The normality of the data was checked via One Kolmogorov Smirnov’s test. Our data distribution was not normal thus, we used non- parametric test. Frequencies of the demographics were calculated. The percentage of correct responses was calculated then, the total score for each participant was calculated. Finally, the mean score for each institute was found and compared with each other to see any statistically significant differences.

Results: The response rate of our study was 98% with 186 participants out of 190. 150 students (79%) participated from Khyber medical college while 36 students (19%) from Institute of physical medicine & rehabilitation. Mean Score on the NPQ-14 items was 7.01±1.9. There was no significant difference found between the level of knowledge held by students of KMC and IPM&R (p=0.10).

Conclusion: This study indicates that the students at Khyber Medical College and Institute of     Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation of KMU, as shown a satisfactory level of knowledge about Pain Neurophysiology.  The inclination physiotherapy students to answer some questions more than medicine students were observed on the subject of ‘Perception of pain’.