Medical undergraduate career preference enquiry.

CHOICE of specialty among medical students and qualified doctors has for some time presented a subject of research in Great Britain and elsewhere. In no other discipline do graduates from a common vocational degree course enter such diverse occupations as, for example, surgery and general practice or psychiatry and laboratory medicine, where the working environment, 'job' content and personal attributes required of the practitioner vary so enormously. The reasons why one doctor should choose to enter community medicine and another anaesthetics have been explored from various standpoints by doctors themselves, by psychologists, sociologists, educationalists and administrators. In recent years a growing concern about the problems within the National Health Service, the number of doctors leaving this country and the difficulty in recruiting staff to shortage specialties has precipitated a number of studies of choice of specialty in England and Scotland. The most comprehensive and detailed study of the determinants of choice of specialty so far undertaken is currently being carried out for the DHSS by the Institute of Manpower Studies at the University of Sussex, with the approval of the British Medical Association. This survey will cover 7,500 qualified doctors.