Survey of some aspects of patients admitted to general internal medicine wards of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences with emphasis on educational needs of medical students.

Introduction. Undergraduate medical students at Shiraz University of Medical Sciences spend most of their internal medicine rotations in inpatient wards and their teaching is inpatient oriented. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the patients admitted to general internal medicine wards have enough diversity to fulfill the educational needs of undergraduate medical students. Methods. During a two years period patients admitted to two major general internal medicine wards were surveyed with emphasis on diagnosis, duration of admission, and monthly patient turner. Results. On overage 265 patients were admitted to each ward monthly. The ten most common diseases included 68 percent of admissions and were as follow: diabetes and its complications, chronic and acute renal failure, congestive heart failure, pneumonia, poisoning, deep vein thrombosis, G.I bleeding, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, and malignancies. The mean duration of admission for each patient was 145 days and mortality was 18.3% for male and 14.6% for female patients. On average patients with 156 different diseases were admitted to each ward monthly. Conclusion. Patients admitted to our general internal medicine wards lack the necessary diversity needed for teaching undergraduate students and expansion of out patient teaching is necessary.