Community Medicine as A Career Option! How Is It Perceived by Medical Students?
Keywords:
Career choice, Mann Whitney U test, Likert scaleAbstract
Aim: This study was conducted to assess possible reasons for medical students opting for or shying away from Community medicine as a career option.
Methodology: A cross-sectional study was done among MBBS students, interns and fresh medical graduates at a medical college in Uttar Pradesh. Study tool was an open-ended questionnaire in first phase and a pre-tested structured questionnaire in second phase.
Results: About 15.7% students opted for Community medicine as a career option. Male students and students not having a doctor in their family showed higher preference. Community medicine cannot bring in “name/fame equivalent to other clinical subjects” ranked topmost in rejection criteria, followed by “lack of personal satisfaction”, “recognition in society” and “lack of information on future career prospects”. A statistically significant difference was also observed for the above cited reasons.
Conclusions: Fear of not being able to earn name/fame, recognition in society and job satisfaction in comparison to other clinical subjects along with lack of information regarding future career prospects seem to be the most important causes for rejection of Community medicine as a career option.
References
World Health Organization. Not Enough Here Too Many There - Health Workforce in India. New Delhi, India:; 2007.
Yousef K, Dema AZ, Zouhair A, Ahmad A, Moham-mad K. Factors affecting maedical students in formu-lating their specialty preferences in Jordan. BMC Med Educ. 2008; 8: p. 32.
Raha S, Berman P, Bhatnagar A. Career preference of medical and nursing students in UP. India Health Beat. 2009; 1(6).
Nath A, Ingle G. From classroom to community - teaching Community Medicine in India. South East Asian Journal of Medical Education. 2008; 2(2): p. 5-8.
National Knowledge Commission. National Knowledge Commission. [Online].; 2005 [cited De-cember 2011 3. Available from: http://knowledgecommission.gov.in/downloads/documents/wg_med.pdf.
Ananthakrishnan N. Acute shortage of teachers in medical colleges - Existing problems and possible so-lutions. NMJI. 2007; 20: p. 25-29.
Gour N. Career counselling medical students: An urgent need. J Community Med Health Edu. 2011; 1(e102).
Goldacre MJ, Laxton L, Lambert TW, Webster P. Career choices for public health - Cohort studies of graduates from UK medical students. J Public Health (Oxf). 2011 Dec; 33(4): p. 616-23.
Roy B, Banerjee I, Sathian B, Mondal M, Kumar SS, Saha CG. Attitude of Basic Science Medical Students towards post graduation in Medicine and Surgery - A questionnaire based cross-sectional study from west-ern region of Nepal. Nepal Journal of Epidemiology. 2011; 1(4): p. 126-134.
Soethout MB, Ten CO, van der Wal G. Development of an interest in a career in public health during medi-cal school. Public Health. 2008 April; 122(4): p. 361-6.
Hau MM, Tyler IV, Buxton JA, Ellitt LJ, Harvey BJ, Hockin JA. Assessing Canadian medical students' familiarity with and interest in pursuing a creer in Community Medicine. Can J Public Health. 2009 May-Jun; 100(3): p. 194-8.
Schafer S, Shore W, French L, Tovar J, Hughes S, Hearst N. Rejecting family practice - Why medical students switch to other specialties. Fam Med. 2000 May; 32(5): p. 320-5.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The authors retain the copyright of their article, with first publication rights granted to Medsci Publications.
