Effectiveness of preventive medicine education and its determinants among medical students in Malaysia.

Preventive medicine has been incorporated in the medical school curriculum, but its effectiveness and the factors that affect it are yet to be widely looked into in the context of Malaysia. We aimed to measure the familiarity with, perception about the importance to learn, and the ability to practice preventive medicine as well as its determinants among the medical students in Malaysia. Thus, a cross sectional study was conducted through an anonymous online survey among 387 randomly selected final year medical students of four large public medical schools in Malaysia from March to September 2014.