Depression, anxiety, stress levels and five-factor personality traits as predictors of clinical medical students' migration intention: A cross-sectional study of brain drain.

Abstract

Physician migration has a profound impact on healthcare systems and can be caused by many reasons. One of the most important healthcare-related problems in Turkey recently is the increasing migration trends of physicians. Although many studies have investigated physician migration's social and political determinants, the psychological factors that may yield this trend have not been adequately studied. It is aimed to examine the relationship between clinical term medical students' intention to migrate and temporary factors such as depression, anxiety, stress, as well as persistent factors such as personality traits in this study. After questioning the migration intentions and possible related determinants of 575 students participating in our study, Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 and Five-Factor Personality Inventory were applied. While 46.3% of the participants had the intention to migrate, 53.7% planned to live in Turkey in the long term. Higher depression and stress levels are significantly associated with migratory intention. Identifying oneself as man, having a partner, high-stress levels, high openness, and low agreeableness traits were found to be major predictors of migration intention. Our study shows that besides many sociological studies on this subject, the investigation of psychological factors has an important role to understand the recent physician migration.