Perceptions of medical dramas among medical students in the West Bank, Palestine: a cross-sectional study

Medical dramas are widely consumed by medical students globally and may constitute an informal or hidden curriculum influencing professional identity, empathy, and ethical reasoning. Palestinian medical students represent an understudied population navigating a resource-constrained and geopolitically complex healthcare context. To investigate the perceptions of Palestinian medical students regarding medical dramas, including viewing habits, assessments of clinical and ethical realism, psychological and behavioural impacts, and the potential role of such media as an informal educational resource. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 638 undergraduate medical students from five universities in the West Bank, Palestine, using convenience and snowball sampling. Data were collected via an online structured questionnaire adapted and culturally validated from the Czarny et al. (2008) instrument, incorporating forward-back translation, pilot testing ( n = 15), and internal consistency assessment (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.81). Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were applied. Mean age was 21.1 ± 1.65 years; 66.8% were female. Most participants (73.4%) had watched medical dramas, primarily via digital streaming platforms. While 77.3% perceived clinical scenes as only slightly or moderately realistic, 41.9% considered ethical content to be moderately accurately depicted. Approximately 46.6% reported increased empathy and 47.2% reported increased study motivation. Drama viewers were significantly more likely to rate informal sources—family ( p < 0.001), friends ( p = 0.021), and online news ( p = 0.037)—as important for ethical guidance, compared with non-viewers. Palestinian medical students engage substantially with medical dramas and appraise their content critically. Associations between drama viewing and increased empathy, study motivation, and reliance on informal ethical guidance sources suggest a potential hidden-curriculum effect. Given the cross-sectional design and convenience sampling, causal inferences cannot be drawn. These findings support cautious integration of medical dramas into bioethics and professionalism curricula as supplementary teaching tools.