An assessment of professional awareness of senior undergraduate students in physiotherapy and rehabilitation schools in Turkey

Abstract

Purpose: Professional awareness requires knowledge of the competencies of the profession, occupational laws and regulations, duties and responsibilities. Individual demand cannot always determine the profession of people. In the literature, level of professional awareness of senior students in physiotherapy and rehabilitation schools in Turkey has not been extensively assessed. The aim of the study was to evaluate level of professional awareness of senior grade students, and to compare professional awareness between the students who prefer the department on their willingness and the students who prefer the department unwillingly.

Methods: For this study, 10 universities were selected to be as samples in Turkey. A 10-item survey was applied to the participants about professional awareness. The descriptive statistics were given. Chi-Square test was used to compare the students' professional awareness levels.

Results: The 850 senior students from physiotherapy and rehabilitation participated in the study. The 71.19% of the questions were answered correctly. It was detected that 77.29% of the participants preferred due to their wish. There was no difference in terms of professional awareness among those who preferred the department whether based on their wish and not (p>0.05).

Conclusion: In this study, it was seen that most of the last year physiotherapy and rehabilitation students had good professional awareness. However, level of professional awareness in some schools was moderate. We thought that it would be beneficial to accomplish activities such as seminars and interviews for increasing the levels of professional awareness in these schools.