Prevalence and sources of stress among hospital training pharmacy students in Universiti Teknologi Mara

In this modernised world, people are more aware of the importance of health in our life. As stated in The World Health Organization (WHO) “Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”(WHO, 1946) and “mental health can be defined as a state of well-being enabling people to realize their abilities, cope with normal stresses of life, work productively and fruitfully, and make contribution to their communities.” (WHO, 2014). Mental health of a person related closely to the stress contributes to them. Stress is a term often used by individuals in a variety of social, academic and employments setting (Marshall, Allison, Nykamp, & Lanke, 2008).

Stress can happen to all individual regardless of their backgrounds. Nevertheless, most studies emphasized that university students are more prone to the stress rather than other people. Although, stress can have positive effect in life, excessive exposure to the stressful environment can lead to negatives impacts on emotional, mental and physical well-being of the students. Stress among students may lead to psychological problems due to neglecting and lack of stress management. (Backovic, Maksimovic, Davidovic, Zivojinovic, & Stevanovic, 2013)

However, among all those students, medical courses students are even more affected to stress. Numerous studies conducted by various researchers. Stated that, training of medical students need to take before graduated further adds into the already stressful environment (Mohd Sidik, Rampal, & Kaneson, 2003). These studies indicated that they have high prevalence of stress ranging from 30 % to 50% (Mohd Sidik et al., 2003; Muhamad, Ahmad, & Yaacob, 2009; Saipanish, 2003; M. S. B Yusoff, Rahim, & Yaacob, 2010; Zaid, Chan, & Ho, 2007). The excessive stress level associates with the students lowered the students’ self esteem (Linn & Zeppa, 1984), cause anxiety and depression (Rosal et al., 1997), have difficulties in solving interpersonal conflicts (Clark & Rieker, 1986), sleeping disorders (Niemi & Vainiomaki, 2006) and many other symptoms.