Knowledge, Perception and Acceptability of Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Among Moroccan Medical Students

In Morocco, cervical cancer is the second most frequent cancer among women and the third in terms of mortality. The Moroccan Health Ministry introduced the Human Papillomavirus vaccine to the national immunization program in October 2022.The study aims to evaluate the knowledge, the satisfaction level, and acceptability of HPV infection and vaccine among Moroccan medical students. We conducted a cross-sectional study from September 2021 to July 2022 among medical students above 5th year across the nine Moroccan medical universities. We shared our questionnaire through Google Forms. The descriptive data analysis was made through Google Forms and excel, and the analytic analysis was made using GraphPad Prism 8.0. We collected 636 answers. The mean age was 24.2 +/- 1.4 years old with a sex ratio (M/F) of 0.5. 3.3% (N=21) were vaccinated against HPV. The HPV infection knowledge mean score was 6.3 +/- 2 /11 (57.2% of good answers) and the vaccine knowledge mean score was 2.0 +/- 1,1 /5 (40% of good answers), with a training satisfaction rate of 7.3 +/- 2.6 /20 (36.5%). 85.8% of the participants (N= 546) were in favor of including the vaccine to the national immunization program. In conclusion, overall Moroccan medical students have an average knowledge of HPV infection and vaccine. The gap in HPV training should be filled especially in the era of the vaccine introduction. The majority of the students agree to make the vaccine mandatory, with superior rates than the other studies.