From: Attitudes towards psychiatry amongst medical and nursing students in Singapore
 |  | Overall (%) | Medical (%) | Nursing (%) | p value†| |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |  | Agree | Disagree | Agree | Disagree | Agree | Disagree | |
No.a | Items expressing positive view | |||||||
17 | Empathy with patients is as important as factual knowledge in clinical practice | 90.3 | 1.2 | 94.6 | 1.8 | 86.0 | 0.6 | < 0.001 |
15 | Psychiatric skills are essential in general practice. | 87.8 | 0.8 | 93.0 | 0.8 | 82.6 | 0.8 | 0.020 |
7 | The problems presented by psychiatric patients are often particularly interesting and challenging. | 86.4 | 1.7 | 83.1 | 2.4 | 89.8 | 1.0 | < 0.001 |
11 | Mental illness presents us with one of the great challenges within the field of medicine. | 81.4 | 2.0 | 87.8 | 1.2 | 75.0 | 2.8 | < 0.001 |
13 | Psychiatrists are more concerned than other doctors to establish a rapport with their patients. | 75.0 | 7.0 | 76.3 | 8.6 | 73.8 | 5.4 | 0.227 |
5 | Psychiatrists try to treat the whole patient and not just the disease. | 74.9 | 6.9 | 76.7 | 7.2 | 73.0 | 6.6 | 0.394 |
14 | Too little time is devoted to psychiatry in the medical/nursing school curriculum. | 51.3 | 12.0 | 42.6 | 18.1 | 60.0 | 5.8 | < 0.001 |
6 | Psychiatrists are at the forefront of the movement to humanize medicine. | 42.1 | 9.3 | 38.8 | 13.3 | 45.4 | 5.2 | 0.002 |
2 | Psychiatrists are, on the whole, less dogmatic than other doctors. | 14.0 | 60.7 | 9.2 | 69.1 | 18.8 | 52.2 | < 0.001 |
No.a | Items expressing negative view | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â | Â |
1 | Psychiatrists are often merely failed physicians. | 2.0 | 87.2 | 0.8 | 93.8 | 3.2 | 80.6 | < 0.001 |
10 | Within medicine, psychiatry is one of the least important specialties. | 10.9 | 71.5 | 5.0 | 83.1 | 16.8 | 59.8 | < 0.001 |
3 | Psychiatrists tend to be more emotionally unstable than other doctors. | 10.9 | 68.3 | 9.2 | 75.3 | 12.6 | 61.2 | < 0.001 |
8 | Psychiatric patients hardly ever get better. | 15.8 | 52.4 | 14.1 | 59.2 | 17.4 | 45.6 | < 0.001 |
4 | Psychiatrists are held in poor regard by most other doctors. | 21.3 | 46.9 | 24.3 | 47.4 | 18.2 | 46.4 | 0.615 |
16 | The practice of psychiatry is unrewarding because treatment is so lengthy and the results inconclusive. | 25.3 | 43.0 | 21.9 | 52.8 | 28.8 | 33.2 | < 0.001 |
12 | Psychiatry is too inexact; it seems to lack a proper scientific basis. | 25.0 | 39.5 | 27.7 | 42.6 | 22.4 | 36.4 | 0.764 |
18 | Psychiatric patients, generally speaking, are not easy to like. | 35.2 | 31.6 | 27.5 | 37.6 | 43.0 | 25.6 | < 0.001 |
9 | Psychiatric patients tend to make more emotional demands on their doctors than other patients. | 62.4 | 11.2 | 71.9 | 10.0 | 52.8 | 12.4 | < 0.001 |