Stress Levels among Medical Students of Various Years INA Medical College, Thiruchirapalli, South India

The medical education aims to create citizens who care for the nation's sick, promote public health. Medical schools that produces doctors seem to exert more stress which many students fail to cope up with making them a vulnerable group in the society. This could have a negative impact on patient care, patient safety and their professional career. This study helps us to identify the level of stress with different years of medical students and compare among males and females.

A Cross sectional study was conducted among 200 medical students of all four years selected randomly of a private medical college and hospital at Trichy (Thiruchirapalli) for duration of 2 months from august to October, 2018. Data was collected using a pre-tested and semi-structured questionnaire ^[13].The questionnaire contains five indicators related to physical, sleep, behavioural, emotional and personal.

From the study, Overall dangerous levels of stress is seen among 27% of the total students. Very high levels of stress is seen among 39% of the total population. According to physical indicators, dangerous levels of stress is seen among 4^th year girls and among males, it is more common with 1^st year. According to sleep indicators, 4^th year male students tend to have dangerous levels of stress while it is more common with 1^st year female. Behavioural indicators of stress show that there is dangerous level of stress with 2^nd year females and 3rd year males. With personal indicators, dangerous levels of stress are seen with 4^th year girls and among 1^st year males. Dangerous levels of emotional stress is seen with the female students of 4^th year and male students of 1^st year.

The stress levels seem to vary between males and females of each year of study. Study shows there is high levels of stress among medical college students of Trichy.