Introduction

The University of Veracruz offered online courses from the Medical Specialty Syllabus to medical specialty students, who are scattered in 17 medical units receiving residents in the state of Veracruz, in order ensure access to the courses and meet the syllabus requirements. Despite this effort, in 2015, besides those students who did not take any course, there was a 40.32% of insufficient attendance by medical residents to the courses offered by the syllabus.

Objective

To identify the reasons, as well as their relevance, why the attendance by medical residents to the virtual courses during 2015 was insufficient.

Method

A quantitative, non-experimental, and cross-sectional study was conducted on a student population consisting of 1,078 residents with insufficient attendance to one or more courses. A 7-item questionnaire to explore the possible reasons for insufficient attendance was completed by this population. The relevance was calculated in the order of the reasons. Theoretically, the most relevant could achieve 100, while the least could get −100.

Results

The most relevant reason was that of lack of time due to excessive educational and academic activities (84.4), followed by inadequate access to the Internet (48.2). The least relevant were: disinterest (−53.7), and not very important for his or her training as a medical specialist (−33.5).

Conclusions

National regulations regarding the training of medical specialists distort the balanced relationship between the roles of student and worker among medical residents.