Knowledge and Attitudes of 6^th Grade Medical School Students about Global Warming, Evaluation of Behavior and Affecting Factors

It is important for senior medical faculty students, who are the physicians of the near future, to have knowledge about climate change and global warming, which is an important environmental problem, together with the education they receive during their university education, to develop positive attitudes and behaviors and to protect the society against health problems that will occur. The population of the study consists of 213 6th-grade 213 students of Gaziantep University Faculty of Medicine in the 2023-2024 academic year. On the basis of volunteerism, 193 students (participation rate 90%) were reached by applying a face-to-face questionnaire. The questionnaire form, which was created by reviewing the literature, consists of sociodemographic characteristics, global warming knowledge scale, global warming attitude scale, and environmentally friendly behavior scale questions. It was found that the mean scores of the global warming knowledge scale (113.71 ± 11.09) (M=110.29 ± 12.43) (p=0.047), the mean scores of the global warming attitude scale (145.75 ± 23.23) (M=134.74 ± 28.36) (p=0.004) and the mean scores of the environmentally friendly behavior scale (47.34 ± 10.55) of the female students were higher than the male students (45.10 ± 10.03) (p=0.132). It was found that 68.9% (n:133) of the students knew what greenhouse gases were, were aware that we are facing climate change due to global warming (94.8%) (n:183) and that global warming is caused by human factors (93.8%) (n:181). 93.8% (n:181) of the participants are aware that global warming and climate change negatively affect human health and that disease-carrying organisms will spread to wider areas with global warming (78.8%) (n:152). 59.1% (n: 114) of the participants stated that they tried to consume less energy, 72.5% (n:140) turned off the lights if they were the last person to leave the room, and 68.9% (n:133) paid attention to water consumption while bathing. As a result of our study, it is revealed that senior medical students have knowledge about global warming and climate change, but their attitudes and behaviors need to be increased.