Medical Specialty Choice Essay

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Problemområde:
The choice of a medical specialty is a career-defining decision with several implications for both students and the health care system. While medical schools worldwide are constantly producing new graduates, resulting in the phenomenon of “overproduction” of doctors, the medical specialty distribution remains unequal. So an improved understanding of the reasons and factors associated with the choice of medical career paths is important for the planning of effective intervention strategies according to the real necessities of healthcare systems. It is recognized that beyond personality characteristics, demographic factors and experiences during medical school, the medical curriculum influences the specialty choice to a great extent. …show more content…

This work is divided into two sections. In the first, I will discuss some major principles of PBL, alongside with a consideration of its advantages and disadvantages. Then I will outline the results of a literature review of published SR/MA of PBL relevance with the choice of a medical specialty and based on the above, I will conclude weather PBL based curriculum can predispose training in specific career …show more content…

There were three studies demonstrating a positive association between the PBL and medical career choice. The first study was a randomized controlled trial performed by Peters et al. (2000) at Harvard Medical School. They recruited 100 medical students that were randomly assigned to either a PBL curriculum or a traditional curriculum. The results of this study showed a significant association between medical specialty choice and PBL curriculum. The authors demonstrated that a higher proportion of 22% graduates from the PBL curriculum were working in either primary care or psychiatry compared to graduates from traditional curricula. Another large retrospective cohort study including 2469 students from two Australian medical schools found that the vast majority of physicians from a PBL curriculum were indeed working in primary care or psychiatry compared to traditional curriculum physicians. In support of the above, a third retrospective cohort study at the New Mexico School of Medicine investigated the self-reported student interest in specific specialties and if these interest changes throughout medical school between a PBL and a traditional curriculum. This study found that the students from a PBL based curriculum who were initially interested in family medicine by their entry at medical

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