Background:

Alarms about mistreatment in medical education have been raised for almost 30 years.

Aim:

To describe the frequency of abuse reports among medical students at a university in Chile, investigating their association with age, sex, and educational level.

Material and Methods:

The Mistreatment by Teachers Questionnaire was applied to 264 first to seventh year medical students (54% males). An exploratory factorial analysis of the instrument was performed, a descriptive analysis was made and its relationship with age, sex and level of training were evaluated.

Results:

Ninety eight percent of respondents reported having been mistreated at least once. Mistreatment was grouped into three factors with a confidence ranging between α = 0.79 and 0.93, namely demoralization, deregulated demands and physical aggression. The first two were associated with age and level of education. There were no differences by sex.

Conclusions:

Mistreatment is common in undergraduate medical education, as it has been found in other universities around the world.