Opinions of doctors on integrating physical activity as a component of healthy lifestyle into the medical school curriculum

Background and aim: Educating medical students about the importance of physical activity (PA), which is being omitted in many universities across the world, may have an impact on PA counseling and prescribing. The study was carried out to determine opinions of doctors on integrating physical activity (PA) as a component of healthy lifestyle into the medical school curriculum. Method: A 10-question questionnaire prepared by the researchers was completed online by medical students, and family medicine (FM) residents and family physicians (FPs). Preliminary descriptive statistics were given as mean±standard deviation and percentage. Results: Totally 182 participants (84.6% from Turkey, 15.4% from other countries) completed the questionnaire. Mean age was 36.49±10.42 and 41.8% of the participants were male. The distribution of medical students, residents, and FPs was 23.6%, 14.5%, and 61.6%, respectively. While 91.2% expressed that medical students should have an active lifestyle, 44.5% thought that medical students should be trained by an elective social activity, rather than an obligatory lesson. To the participants’ opinions, PA was a lifestyle (92.9%), useful to prevent non-communicable diseases (77.6%), necessary for being a role model (76.5%), helped to find solutions for patients (67.1%), and should start at an early age (88.0%), and an inactive doctor would also recommend PA (53.8%). The participants thought that PA prescribing training should be obligatory (65.4%) and integrated into PA lessons (65.9%). Conclusion: The preliminary results of the ongoing study suggested that PA was important and medical curricula could include both PA lessons and PA prescribing training.