Thank you for your interest in our poster looking at the institutional funding of medical students for research conferences. This work was completed by a group of medical students at Kansas City University and I served as the project PI. We were interested in looking at outcomes of students that were pursuing educational research opportunities in order to enhance their applications for residency and does this potentially impact the students in ways that might be opportunities for schools to better support their students. Overall, we were looking at administering a 14-point questionnaire to gather data on conference attendance history, the funding sources of the students, and as well as the amount of reimbursement. A total of 316 student responses from 60 medical schools were recorded. There were 40 osteopathic schools and 20 allopathic schools represented. In total, 85 allopathic students and a little over 220 osteopathic students completed the survey. 72% of students generally were attending a conference in order to present or network, whereas 55% of participants responded that they were presenting an oral or poster presentation. Now when we looked at the amount of money that students had to finance from their own resources in order to accommodate this conference travel, overall osteopathic medical students had a little bit less in terms of the value of money spent at $727 spent out of pocket, whereas allopathic students spent $799 out of pocket. And looking at this though, the range of totality money spent for osteopathic medical students was a little bit less from $10,000 to $2,000 as compared to allopathic students which spent anywhere from $0 to $3,500. As a whole, 61.6% of the participants indicated that they believe that a lack of financial support impacted their ability to attend and or present at a conference. Now in the results, you can see the overall differences in money spent by osteopathic versus allopathic students in terms of their reimbursement received from each institution. And allopathic students were reimbursed at greater amounts than osteopathic medical students and this was almost a $200 difference for total reimbursement. And so even though allopathic students were paying more out of pocket, they were receiving a greater funding in comparison to osteopathic students. Overall when looking at the specific reasons of or specific elements of coverage or not for reimbursement of funds spent, the large majority of student respondents who were able to attend a conference, about 34% to 35% of them indicated that their school at least partially covered some but not all of the expenses which is definitely a trend in the positive. However, of those, about 19% to 20% of them indicated that they only received the reimbursement or support in travel funding because they were submitting an abstract. There was a smaller number of students that indicated that they were not receiving any funding for travel coverage related to research expenditures and this was because either the institution did not provide support for the students which was about 21% versus not receiving any funding because they were not presenting an abstract specifically at 5% indicating that the students were attending to network but because they were not representing the school with some sort of approved or published abstract that they were not able to receive funding. There were a smaller number of students that additionally did not request funding or did not prefer to answer. Now in looking at some Likert scale questions regarding how medical students perceive the financial support and or the impact of research on their success as a future physician, there was mixed agreement in looking at if the financial support impacted their ability to attend a conference with a mean response of 3.66 indicating that it was, it trended between neither agree nor disagree and agree and this is because all of the options of the Likert scale were represented indicating the mean response average calculated. In contrast, medical students did perceive research as being important to their future success with an average, or excuse me, a mean response of 4.46 indicating that students generally agreed to strongly agree that research was really important for their applications to residency and therefore being selected in a match process. And then additionally, medical students felt that paying out of pocket for their conference travel increased their stress level with 4.55 being the mean response indicating that students agreed to strongly agreed with that statement and the impact in a stressful manner, the lack of support and the out-of-pocket expense to be paid by themselves. Overall, our study reveals disparities in funding opportunities for osteopathic and allopathic medical students. In addition, both types of students in these two different training programs, but complementary, they both face burdens when it comes to the cost of attending conferences to present the research or network which can be equally important by interacting with program directors that may help and increase their chances of matching to a successful residency. Overall, our findings highlight the need for equitable funding opportunities to ensure that students from both training programs have opportunities to present their research and network in their specialty of interest. And again, this can positively impact their research, or excuse me, their residency perspectives, especially considering the move for board examination at the initial level to be moved to pass-fail. Finally, further research and advocacy are necessary for all students to have an equal playing field when applying to residency programs. We appreciate your interest in our project and hope that you enjoy OMED. Thank you.

medical students

conference funding

osteopathic vs allopathic

financial constraints

equitable support