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KCE Reports 90 Making General Practice Attractive: Encouraging GP attraction and Retention 57
workforce in the chapter above about one third of the population of the future
workforce choose for general practice.
One limitation of this study is that it analyses the group of students in the seventh year:
trends over time that may be new and not applicable to the present sample, were not
studied. We did not include GPs in training although this group would have been
interested in relation to our research questions. Within the time frame only a limited
number of people could be interviewed and adding the GP’s in training would have
made our interview group to heterogeneous.
Although only 1 out of 7 students answered to the call to participate in the interviewstudy,
a diverse sample of 7 th year medical students was obtained and saturation of
information was reached.
The use of quantitative and qualitative methodologies helped to triangulate the data.
The quantitative findings underpin the qualitative findings, strengthening the validity of
the results. Sometimes, the quantitative study gave more insight in the importance of
different aspects (scores), because of the great sample size of the quantitative study
(transversal study of all 7 th year medical students, overall response rate of 62,9%)
Students opting for general practice and for another specialty hold different opinions for
many domains addressed in this study. Furthermore we analyzed whether the
differences where effects of differences between the student population of official Dutch
or French speaking Belgian universities or due to a gender effect. Differences between
the two language sub populations were hardly discovered, except for the motivation to
choose medical education. The gender effect was more prominent.
3.7.2 Factors relating to specialty choice before medical school
Students went back in their personal histories and reported on a period of some seven
to eight years before. Roughly one third of the students who reported that they began
their medical education with a specific specialization in mind (153 out of 483) made the
choice for general practice when starting their studies (41 out of 153).
The qualitative study shows that students hold vague and general ideas about the
practice of medicine before they entered medical school. For instance the surgeon saves
lives and the GP holds a central position in the health system, mostly working on his
own.
3.7.2.1 Study medicine: helping people, prestige and intellectual challenge
Both populations of students reported the prestige of studying medicine. Both the
qualitative and quantitative studies indicate that dealing with people and intellectual
challenge, the fundamentals of medicine, highly motivated all students. In addition, caring
for people, general interest and the correspondence with their own characteristics
contributed to the choice of studying medicine.
There are considerable differences between both populations of students. The item
‘helping people’ for instance, seems to have been more decisive for GP students. Being a
French-speaking male student weakens this positive relationship. ‘Intellectual challenge’
seems more influential for non-GP students, but this has only limited importance (12%
and 5% of both groups mentioned it as reason to choose medicine). This is in line with
literature findings describing a more pronounced tendency for altruism and social
compassion attitudes and values in GPs 18 , 20 , 21 , 22 .
As in large scale Australian study, the quantitative analysis (bivariate and multivariate)
shows that prestige and a variety of job opportunities are significantly more important
for non-GP students. 26 .
3.7.2.2 Keep the doctor in the family
A parent, often physician, frequently influenced the student to choose for medicine.
Strikingly, about one out of four final year students in Belgium have one parent being a
medical doctor. One third to half of the medical students have a doctor or dentist in