Internet Knowledge and Use Skills among Clinical Medical Students in Delta State University, Abraka

Literature Review

The Internet has facilitated and contributed to knowledge development. It has aided quick access to information and remove the barrier of distance in retrieving information. According to Omotayo (2010) the Internet provides scientist, lecturers and students, access to on-traditional sources of information at any point of the globe. It is becoming more and more convenient to access the Internet. With this premise in mind, clinical medical students can access the Internet and benefit from its up to date information in their field of study as the present day clinical medical student can no longer depend on only conventional information sources to cope with the recent trend in their field.

Sharma et al. (2006) posits that the Internet is a worldwide computer network allowing communication among millions of users and access to different resources. Biological researchers and Scientists are increasingly becoming more and more dependent upon computers to manage the generated information. They further posits that the Internet has become the world’s biggest library, where retrieval of scientific resources can be done within minutes; electronic hospital libraries are the most sophisticated methods for research profiles to be set up and searched regularly; the Internet has revolutionized the medical practice with the increasing use of telemedicine and evidence based medicine. The use of bulletin boards and e-forums to get information is fastly getting popular among students. They further asserts that by the use of telemedicine, through broadband high capacity network connections, we can cross these barriers to provide timely medical care in the remotest corner of the country and to achieve this, it is important for the practitioners to have ample knowledge of computers and Internet. They concluded by saying that to meet the need of increased computer and Internet use among health care professionals, it is urgently required to introduce short refresher course in computer application and internet use among the students. The students should be trained to extract valuable information from the special medical web sites and should be encouraged to check the authenticity of information by correlating with existing evidences.