Attracting doctors and medical students to rural Vietnam: insights from a Discrete Choice Experiment

Washington DCPersuading medical doctors to work in rural areas is one of the main challenges facing health policy makers, in both developing and developed countries. Discrete choice experiments (DCEs) have increasingly been used to analyze the preferences of health workers, and how they would respond to alternative incentives associated with working in a rural location. Previous DCE studies focusing on the rural recruitment and retention problem have sampled either in-service health workers or students in the final year of their training program. This study is the first to sample both of these groups in the same setting. We carry out a DCE to compare how doctors and final-year medical students in Vietnam value six job attributes, and use the results to simulate the impact of alternative incentive packages on recruitment in rural areas. Results show significant differences between the two groups. 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