Raising the profile of academic general practice to our medical students

RECRUITMENT TO AND PERCEPTION OF GENERAL PRACTICE

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 …