STRESS AND COPING STRATEGIES AMONG MEDICAL STUDENTS OF A PUBLIC MEDICAL COLLEGE IN LAHORE

Post-secondary education is considered to create a highly stressful environment for students and a further addition to that already stressed environment is medical education and training. Objective: This descriptive cross sectional survey method research aimed to investigate relationship between stress, Coping Styles, socio demographic (Gender & Academic Year) and to identify most influencing source of stress and widely used Stress coping styles among medical students studying at Ameer ud din medical College Lahore during 2017. Methodology: The purposive sampling technique was used for selecting 100 MBBS regular and host elite students (50 girls and 50 boys) with age range 18-26 (M= 21)from all 5 study years of medical education. A self-Designed demographic questionnaire, The Medical Students Stress Questionnaire MSSQ-40 (Yusoff, Rahim, 2010) was used to asses sources of stress among students, whereas The Brief Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced COPE-28 (Montel,Albertini, Desnuelle, Spitz, 2012) was applied to find coping strategies adopted by students. Pearson product moment correlation analysis was performed to identify relationships among stress and coping strategy and demographics of medical students. T-Test and Anova was carried out to find the differences of study variables and demographics. Results: Results revealed a high stress level in female students as compared to male students. Academic stressor was found to be the most influencing factor whereas Avoidance coping is mostly used by medical students.at Ameer ud din Medical College. ANOVA explored study year differences, a higher stress rate was observed in final year medical students among all study years. Conclusion: Stress has a positive relationship with coping and significant differences were found regarding socio-demographics (gender, year of study). Keywords: Medical Students, Stress, Coping strategies, gender, year of stud