Undergraduate medical students' perception of pathology

With the current trend of internationalization of medical school curricula, pathology role tends to gradually shrink. This potentially could negatively influence the students' decisions of selecting pathology as their prospective career. Besides, a pathology-related knowledge gap might be created as a side effect. In 2013, the College of Medicine in Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University launched a new curriculum adopted from Monash University in Australia. Consequently, the pathology time was compromised to be 72 instead of 138 h in total. This study was planned to investigate the students' perspective of pathology that address the aforementioned concerns. A survey was distributed among the targeted participants. The response rate was 90.4%. While 8.7% of the students considered pathology as a possible prospect clerkship program, only 2 students elected it as their first option. Out of 230 participants who either chose not to consider pathology or were not sure to consider it or not, 172 declared their reasons. For almost half of them the cause was another favored specialty. The vast majority of students chose traditional lectures as their preferred way of learning. Twenty-six and 85 students identified themselves as either not aware or not sure if they discern the exact role of pathologists in clinical care; respectively. While 86.6% of the students think that providing relevant clinical data and differential diagnoses is necessary for the pathologists as they are not pure morphologists, only 13.4% of the cohort were aware of the indications of intra-operative consultations. In conclusion, the majority of students selected lectures as the preferred way of learning, but their responses regarding their knowledge of the exact role of pathologists, and the indications of infra-operative consultations, as well as their response toward considering pathology as future career all are implicit for combining hands on, active learning along with the passive lectures.