Abstract—New medical graduates were recruited during their internship programme from 10 teaching hospitals for a cross-sectional study, carried out in Riyadh area, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A total of 200 participants were included in the study. All the participants filled out the study questionnaire. The questionnaire contained 10 basic Biochemistry questions that the graduates were supposed to recall answers for those questions from their prior knowledge. Other information included were gender, medical school attended, year of graduation, training hospital, whether preparing for board examination such as USMLE and PLAB. Results revealed that out of the 200 participants recruited for this study, 124 were males and 76 were females. 26% of the participants graduated from medical schools adopting PBL curriculum whereas 74% were from traditional medical schools. Less than 10% of the participants correctly answered score ≥ 7 whereas 64% scored ≥ 4 to 6 and only 26% scored less than 4 of the basic biochemistry questions. Correlation of scores attained by the participants with other variables in the questionnaire revealed interesting findings. Gender, time since graduation, training rotation and preparation for examinations showed no significant correlation with score. However, of the teaching approach adopted by their schools of graduation showed significant correlation with score with P-value of 0.006.
The findings suggest that basic biochemistry is perceived as a tough and irrelevant subject and expedite the need for reforms in the way the subject presented to the medical students.

Index Terms—Biochemistry, PBL, MCQs, Medical Schools.

The authors are with Faculty of Medicine, King Fahad Medical City, King Saud Bin AbdulAziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (Tel:+966-1-2889999 ex: 7518 Email. mahahmed@kfmc.med.sa).

Cite: Muaawia Ahmed Hamza, Ahmed El Tahir Idris, Asma Almohanna, Abdulaziz AlKabaa, NasserAlHamdan, Abdalla Saeed, and Gwiria M. H. Satti, "Recall Knowledge of Biochemistry for Interns after Graduation from Medical Schools," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 16-19, 2013.