Innovative, paired careers tutorials: increasing the number of medical students choosing general practice as a career

Background: With a crisis in general practice recruitment, to maintain the current workforce, the Department of Health and Social Care quote a need for 50% of our medical students to choose general practice as a career. There is much variety between medical schools and Nottingham University, alongside most others does not achieve this. Aim: To increase the number of medical students at Nottingham University who would consider a career in general practice. Design and Setting: Innovative, paired careers tutorials embedded into a new 4-week general practice attachment at Nottingham University with student evaluation. Method: 2 paired careers tutorials, giving guided careers advice to 4th year medical students, using the strapline “General Practice can be whatever you want it to be….”. The tutorials promoted portfolio GPs and enabled students to look at their current career choice and how general practice could fit into that. Paired evaluation in week 1 and 4 was completed. Students were asked open-ended questions regarding current career choices and (using a 5 point Likert scale) whether: “General practice is a possible career choice for me”. Due to the new nature of the course, the first, of four cohorts was excluded from the evaluation to ensure standardised teaching and remove potential bias. The data analysed using the Wilcoxon signed rank test. Results: We surveyed 218 students with a response rate of 218(100%). At the end of the module, in the second careers tutorial, 80(36.7%) gave a higher score suggesting they were more likely to choose general practice as a future career, 107(49.1%) had no change in score and only 31(14.2%) provided a lower score. There was a significantly higher median score at the end of the attachment the median (IQR) pre-survey score was 3 (3-4) and the median (IQR) post-survey score was 4(3-5). P=