The Assessment of Anxiety Levels in Undergraduate Medical Students and The Determination of Various Coping Mechanisms Used

The aim of this study was to assess the level of anxiety experienced by undergraduate medical students in Peshawar, Pakistan (PK) and to identify the most effective coping strategy. A cross-sectional study was conducted on the undergraduate medical students of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Professional MBBS classes enrolled in KGMC and RMI. A total of 300 self-administered questionnaires were distributed. To determine the level of anxiety experienced by both male and female students the Hamilton Anxiety Scale was used. In order to identify the various coping strategies implemented by students, the Brief Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced Inventory was utilized. There was a total of 244 respondents with a response rate of 81.3%. There was no significant difference between the anxiety levels irrespective of the various aspects that were assessed: gender, medical institution, student residence, and year of academic study. The mean age of our study sample was 21.34 ± 1.30 years. The most frequent coping method made use of “religion” followed by “planning”, “acceptance” and “active coping”. The least commonly used coping strategy was “substance use”. The lower the anxiety score, the higher the score was on the Brief COPE scale, indicating that students with better coping strategies suffered from lower levels of anxiety.