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48 Making General Practice Attractive: Encouraging GP attraction and Retention KCE Reports 90
and the intellectual challenge’ is the prominent reason (respectively 70,8% and 66,0%).
General interest (respectively 54,6% and 62,4%) is the second most mentioned reason.
DECISION TO CHOOSE GENERAL PRACTICE
In most cases either the students decided by themselves to study medicine or the
parents influenced their children. The differences between groups were not statistically
significant for the other persons who influenced the decision.
The moment when most students decided to study medicine varies, without any
statistically significant difference between both groups.
There is one noticeable difference between both groups for the question ‘Did you
already have an idea of your specialty choice at the beginning of your study?’ Students
who want to become a GP were more likely to have this idea before beginning their
studies.
Using a binary logistic regression, controlling for gender and differences between
students of French and Dutch speaking part of the country, the statistically significant
effect of the control variables on specialty choice can be noticed (appendix 3.8, table 3).
Women and students in the Dutch-speaking universities have higher odds to choose
general practice in their seventh year of education. Furthermore the statistically
significant influence of ‘Dealing with people’ (odds ratio 3.895 [95% CI (2,064-7,350)]) as
deciding factor and ‘Already having an idea of the specialization at the beginning of the
medical education’ (odds ratio 2.512 [95% CI (1,553-4,065)]) on choosing family
medicine/general practice must be mentioned.
Table 6: Crosstab: Started the medicine study with the idea of becoming a
GP and definite choice in seventh year; n = 153
Students who
choose
another
specialty than
GP
Students who
choose to
become a GP
Students who
are still in
doubt
TOTAL
Started the medicine study with n 6 41 2 49
the idea of becoming a GP (%) (12,2) (83,7) (4,1) (100,0)
Didn't start the medicine study n 65 24 15 104
with the idea of becoming a GP (%) (62,5) (23,1) (14,4) (100,0)
n 71 65 17 153
TOTAL (%) (46,4) (42,5) (11,1) (100,0)
Table 6 shows that a high proportion of students who start to study medicine with the
idea of becoming a GP keep their idea through seven years of education (83,7%). A
smaller proportion of students who started education with the idea of becoming a
specialist (62,5%) had still this idea at the end of their studies.
3.6.2 Factors related to the specialty choice during medical education
The table below shows the factors that influenced the specialty choice during the
curriculum.