Raising the profile of academic general practice to our medical students.

Abstract

General practice is struggling to recruit and retain high-quality trainees. There is a national target to increase recruitment to general practice in order to create 5000 extra GPs by 2020.1 However, the attractiveness of the specialty has fallen relative to hospital practice.2 Currently only 15.3% of doctors completing foundation training are appointed to GP training programmes.3 Reasons for this are multifactorial but one postulated influence is students’ misperception that general practice is not a prestigious or academically challenging career choice.4 National studies support this concept: the recent ‘Destination GP’ survey jointly led by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and the Medical Schools Council (MSC) found that only 3% of medical students associated general practice with being intellectually challenging.5 It has been acknowledged that correcting this misperception and raising the profile of academic general practice among medical students is vital in order to attract high-quality doctors and potential future educationalists and researchers into general practice, and we offer some consensus-based and evidence-based suggestions. The Wass report By Choice — Not by Chance was commissioned by Health Education England to support medical students towards careers in general practice.6 The report found that students perceive that the specialty fails to offer the variety of academic challenge that …