Choosing general practice: What shapes medical student decisions?

Today, we’re speaking to Catharina Savelkoul, a DPhil student in Health Economics based at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.

Title of paper: Factors Influencing UK Medical Students’ Choice of General Practice: A Systematic Review

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2025.0226

The UK faces a projected shortage of approximately 15,000 GPs by 2036/37, with a declining proportion of UK medical graduates pursuing general practice. Previous research has identified various contributing factors but lacked a contemporary synthesis within a coherent theoretical framework. This systematic review examines factors influencing UK medical students' career decisions, finding three critical influences: curricula that inadequately represents general practice, a persistent negative hidden curriculum, and the impact of clinical placement quality. Our revised Bland-Meurer model incorporates these findings, providing a comprehensive framework to improve GP recruitment. This systematic review identifies the factors that shape UK medical students’ intentions toward general practice.

Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:01.120 - 00:00:59.530

Hi and welcome to BJJP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan, one of the associate editors of the bjjp. Thanks for listening to this podcast today.

In today's episode, we're speaking to Katharina Savalcool. Katharina is a DPHIL student in Health Economics based at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences at the University of Oxford.

We're here today to talk about the paper she's recently published in the BJJP titled Factors Influencing UK Medical Students Choice of General A Systematic Review. So, hi Katharine, it's lovely to meet you and to talk about your work.

This is a super interesting area to study because we know that there is a push to increase the number of GPs in practice and I guess that does really start from medical school and people's intentions there. But just to start off, could you talk us through why you decided to do this work and what were you aiming to look at here?