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Abstract
Objective Management of diet-related chronic diseases may benefit from improved nutrition education of medical students. This study aims to investigate the effects of a nutrition education course on nutritional knowledge and intentions towards nutritional counselling in Dutch medical students.
Design This is a pre–post intervention study with a comparison group. Participants completed self-reported questionnaires on nutritional knowledge and intentions towards nutritional counselling.
Participants In total, 118 medical students (64.4% undergraduate, 73.2% women) were recruited from two medical schools in the Netherlands (n=66 intervention group, n=52 comparison group).
Intervention The intervention group completed a 25-hour course in nutritional counselling (the Students Experienced in Lifestyle and Food (SELF) course) in addition to the standard medical curriculum. The comparison group followed the standard medical curriculum.
Outcome measures Self-reported nutritional knowledge and intentions towards nutritional counselling, including attitude, self-efficacy and social support.
Results Nutritional knowledge (B: 2.42, 95% CI 1.81 to 3.02), attitude in men (B: 0.50, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.87) and self-efficacy (B: 0.78, 95% CI 0.62 to 0.95) significantly increased in the intervention group compared with the comparison group. No significant differences were found for social support (B: 0.20, 95% CI −0.02 to 0.43) and attitude in women (B: 0.08, 95% CI −0.24 to 0.31) between the two groups.
Conclusions The SELF course increased medical students’ nutritional knowledge and stimulated their intentions towards nutritional counselling. Future research is needed to evaluate the long-term impact of nutrition education interventions on physician practice patterns and patient outcomes.
- nutrition education
- knowledge
- intentions
- attitudes
- social support
- self efficacy
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Footnotes
Contributors HLC contributed to and coordinated the design of the study, was responsible for the execution of the experiment, collected and carried out the data analysis, and wrote the manuscript. SCD and JCS developed the design of the study. SCD and JCS reviewed and critiqued the manuscript. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval The study was conducted according to the ethical standards declared in the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000, and approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Medical Centre Amsterdam (2018.345). Active informed consent was obtained from all participants.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available upon reasonable request. Data analysed in this study are available from the corresponding author in response to requests that comply with ethical principles of good research.