PERCEIVED STRESSORS AS DETERMINANTS ON QUALITY OF LIFE AMONG THE MEDICAL UNDERGRADUATES IN INDIA

INTRODUCTION:   Medical education involves multiple challenges, which can take a toll on the quality of life, which elevates the perceived stress. This can have further detrimental effects on mental health, relationships, productivity and accomplishments. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of Stress on Quality of Life among the undergraduate students in medical education. 

METHODS:   Medical and dental undergraduate students in Kochi, Kerala, India (n= 517) were administered with WHOQOL Bref to assess the Quality of Life, along with Source and Severity of Stress Scale (S3S) to find about the nature of stressors (the study duration was nearly 5 months). The Validated Source and Severity of Stress Scale (S3S) identified stressors that were grouped under 5 different Stressor Domains (SD) - Academics, Self-Expectations, Relationships, Living Conditions, and Health&Value Conflict. WHOQOL Bref explored 4 components of Quality of Life- Physical, Psychological, Social, and Environmental.

RESULTS:  

All the stressor domains showed a Significant but low Correlation with different components of WHO QoL BREF Scale (Overall Stress with QoL, Spearman Rank Correlation coefficient = –0.48). Gender-wise comparisons showed a significant difference on the Physical and Psychological components of QoL (p=0.002 and 0.006). A significant difference between dental and medical students’ QoL was observed in Physical and Environmental components. Year of the study is found significant only with the Psychological component of QoL. Overall Stress and Stress domains- ‘Academics’, ‘Self-expectations’, ‘Relationships’ & ‘Living Conditions’ are found to cause a progressive decline on all the 4 components of QoL, with very high significance (p<0.001). On ‘SD- Health&Value Conflict’, significant decline on QoL was found on Physical and Social components, p<0.001.

CONCLUSIONS:   Perceived stress on different domains does have a telling effect on different components of Quality of Life. It is necessary that concerned institutions and policy makers alike address this issue.