Reinforcement of medicolegal knowledge of interns to reduce common medicolegal errors.

Introduction: The medicolegal duties like preparing injury certificates and PM reports, doing various medicolegal duties as MO, in field ar done by the Medical officers. These MOs committee multiple common errors while performing medicolegal duties, which leads to miscarriage of justice. The reinforcement of the medicolegal knowledge of interns can reduce common medicolegal errors done by MOs.

Materials and Methods: This prospective, observational study was conducted on Interns of Guru Gobind Singh Medical College, Faridkot in the Department of Forensic Medicine after approval from Institutional Ethics Committee. The consent of the interns was taken beforehand. A Pre-test and Post-test questioner with structured open-ended questions were prepared to assess the medicolegal knowledge about the common medicolegal issues (there was no need for validation of questioner as the questions were of basic knowledge). The study begins after brief introduction, pre-test was taken to assess the medicolegal knowledge of the interns, followed by 1-hour lecture each day for a period of two weeks regarding medicolegal issues, along with this small group discussions were also done about common medicolegal issues. After the re-enforcement of knowledge delivered to interns, a post-test with structured open-ended questions to assess the knowledge gained by the interns was taken after the gap of 2 weeks of re-enforcement of medicolegal knowledge. The marks obtained by the interns in both the tests were compared, assessed and then analyzed statistically with the help of Microsoft Excel 2007 sheet. The P value was calculated by Wilcoxen signed rank test. The comparison between the mean and standard deviation of pre-test and post-test marks obtained from questioners of various topics.

Results and Conclusions: The mean and standard deviation of marks of Pre-test and Post-test of various topics shows that there was significant increase in medicolegal knowledge. And ‘p’ valve was found to be highly significant among all the topics of the both the questioners. Forensic Medicine posting for Interns, which is at present optional, should be made compulsory. This program if implemented will provide the core for the development of a high quality of Medico-legal services.