Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Objectives General practice is experiencing a growing crisis with the numbers of doctors who are training and then entering the profession in the UK failing to keep pace with workforce needs. This study investigated the immediate to medium term career intentions of those who are about to become general practitioners (GPs) and the factors that are influencing career plans.
Design Online questionnaire survey, with quantitative answers analysed using descriptive statistics and free text data analysed using a thematic framework approach.
Setting and participants Doctors approaching the end of 3-year GP vocational training in the West Midlands, England.
Results 178 (57.2%) doctors completed the survey. Most participants planned to work as salaried GPs or locums rather than entering a general practice partnership for at least the first 5 years post-completion of training; others failed to express a career plan or planned to leave general practice completely or work overseas. Many were interested in developing portfolio careers.
The quality of general practice experience across undergraduate, foundation and vocational training were reported as influencing personal career plans, and in particular perceptions about workload pressure and morale within the training practices in which they had been placed. Experience of a poor work–life balance as a trainee had a negative effect on career intentions, as did negative perceptions about how general practice is portrayed by politicians and the media.
Conclusion This study describes a number of potentially modifiable factors related to training programmes that are detrimentally influencing the career plans of newly trained GPs. In addition, there are sociodemographic factors, such as age, gender and having children, which are also influencing career plans and so need to be accommodated. With ever-increasing workload in general practice, there is an urgent need to understand and where possible address these issues at national and local level.
- general practice
- vocational training
- workforce
- career plans
- morale
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors JD and KO were responsible for the original concept of the study. JD, KO and RR designed the questionnaire. RR led the qualitative analysis and ES the quantitative analysis, with input from KO and JD. All authors meet the ICMJE criteria: have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data for the work; drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; gave final approval of the version to be published; agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity if any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Funding This research was funded by Health Education West Midlands (HEWM). The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders; the latter had no direct involvement in the design and conduct of the study, the collection, management, analysis and interpretation of the data or in the preparation, review or approval of the manuscript.
Competing interests None declared.
Ethics approval University of Warwick Biomedical Research Ethics Committee.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data sharing statement No unpublished data are available for sharing.