Scoring Stress in Medical Students: A Stratified Analysis to Help Develop an Effective Mentor-Mentee Program in a Medical School Setting, Bhubaneswar, Odisha |Biomedgrid

Medical education is demanding and has one of the longest and toughest curricula. Medical students who have just entered late adolescence, thus have stress that can be categorized as family, friends, self-care, and academics, as per their sources of origin. The current study shares the results of a survey wherein students from 1 medical school, from different semesters, volunteered for counselling sessions planned for them by the Institution in the post-pandemic school opening. The tool was a self-administered questionnaire-based tool eliciting responses to score the stress experienced by the students due to family, friends, self-care, and academics on a Likert scale of 0-4(no stress to severe stress). The 4 subscales were adapted from the MSSQ questionnaire, which is seen to be easy to administer and understandable. The study had 378 participants, of which 63% were girls. The study brings out strongly that academic stressors are highest among medical students (25.69 (23.08-28.3)) and more so among the girls, with a mean difference of score being 11.65 (95% CI 6.428- 16.873; p<0.005). The next significant stressor was self-care, which was equal for males and females. Thus, the study offers good inferential grounds to design a need-based counseling program for the students.