| dc.description.abstract | Makerere University Radiography students currently do not have internship as part of their programme despite the fact that other medical courses such as Medicine and Surgery have an ongoing programme for internship after their bachelors’ degree. The justification for internship includes; improvement of clinical skills and confidence, equips students with practical information about the profession, enables clinical orientation, and improves management skills as well as increases the practice time. In this context this is a gap for the undergraduate Radiography students as reported by a study in Ghana (Kyei et al, 2015), that apart from general Radiography, most of the students do not get ample time to practice in the other specialized modalities such as fluoroscopy, mammography, computed tomography and intravenous urography.
A descriptive quantitative cross-sectional study was carried out using a convenience sampling method. The data was collected through a self-developed structured questionnaire and analyzed using Microsoft Excel programme.
The study involved 27 respondents of which 16 were third year students and 11 fourth year students who were purposively selected by the researcher. From the study it was revealed that 100% of the students were aware of the existence of internship as part of skills development in the education sector and 60% of the respondents believed that internship was important after completion of the undergraduate studies; hence achievement of the main objective of the study which was to establish the views of third and fourth year Makerere University Radiography undergraduate students on the need for internship upon completion of their four-year bachelors’ degree.
Despite the fact that majority (60%) of the respondents acknowledged that internship was important, a few of them (35%) wanted internship to be part of the undergraduate programme while the majority (65%) did not want it to be part of the undergraduate programme. The research further showed that 35% of the students were undecided on the importance of internship after the completion of the undergraduate studies in Radiography. A paltry 5% said it was not necessary because Radiography is a practical course therefore, there is no need for an internship and that it would promote laziness among the students.
In conclusion, a majority of the respondents believed that internship after the end of the fourth year of the undergraduate degree studies was important and 35% of the respondents were willing to take part in it if introduced. However, 35% remain undecided and a few think that it was not important. All the Radiography students at Makerere University College of Health Sciences were very aware of internship proven by the fact that they stated the importance of internship. Therefore, the study revealed mixed results such as awareness, knowledge level, and interest. However, more studies about the same issue involving views of the lecturers and clinical instructors, perhaps even qualified Radiographers with the same award in understanding about this phenomenon need to be done for a definite conclusion and decision to be made in order to integrate internship in Radiography studies. | en_US |
