The effect of family medicine field education on anxiety status of final year medical school students before compulsory public service

Aim: Today, medical education is a comprehensive process that requires students to be equipped not only with academic knowledge but also with professional practice and real life experiences. This study, which was conducted among Term VI students at Akdeniz University Faculty of Medicine, aims to evaluate the changes in students' anxiety levels before and after clinical internships. In particular, we examine their anxiety before compulsory service and the potential impact of the family medicine internship on their anxiety. Method: Descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation, frequency and percentage distributions) were calculated for sociodemographic variables and anxiety measures as baseline analysis. The reliability of the scales was measured by Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Skewness and kurtosis values were used to test the conformity of the data to normal distribution. In addition, Shapiro-Wilk and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests were used to check whether the scale scores followed a normal distribution. After confirming the normal distribution, dependent and independent sample t-tests were applied to assess potential differences between students' anxiety states. Correlation analysis was used to examine the relationships between variables. A p-value threshold of 0.05 was accepted for statistical significance. All analyses were performed with IBM SPSS Statistics version 23 software. Findings: This study examined a participant group of 188 individuals. Considering the gender distribution, 51.6% (97 individuals) were female and 48.4% (91 individuals) were male. In terms of age distribution, most of the participants were between the ages of 23 and 24 (73.4%), while the number of participants belonging to other age groups was relatively low. In terms of marital status, 97.3% (183 people) of the participants were single, while only 2.7% (5 people) were married. In terms of health status, 83.5% of the participants (157 people) stated that they did not have any chronic diseases, while 16.5% (31 people) stated that they had chronic diseases. The results of the study showed that the majority of the participants (68.1%) experienced moderate anxiety. The rate of participants with mild anxiety was 18.6%, while the rate of those with severe anxiety was 13.3%. Based on the (STAI-1) measurements made between the beginning and the end of the internship process, it was determined that the internship did not have a significant effect on students' anxiety levels. The statistical findings show that the mean difference between the anxiety levels before and after the internship is statistically insignificant (p=0.946). Conclusion: It is emphasized that the duration and content of internship programs and students' personal experiences may have an impact on their anxiety levels. In this context, these factors should be examined in more detail in the future. It is recommended that the duration of the internship should be extended, structured more effectively and students should be offered more opportunities for practical application. It is also emphasized that comprehensive and multidimensional approaches should be adopted to better understand students' anxiety experiences. Keywords: Family Medicine Internship, Compulsory Service, Anxiety Levels, State Trait and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI 1-2)