Researchers: Charles Weissman ¹, Rachel Yaffa Zisk-Rony ², Howard Tandeter ³, Uriel Elchalal ¹

Background: The choices of specialties made by medical students/interns influence the future composition of the physician workforce. In Israel, there are specialties with workforce shortages which attract insufficient numbers of young physicians. Our previous research found that negative perceptions of a specialty contribute to workforce shortfalls. However, these are only some of the reasons certain specialties have shortages. We explored why some specialties suffer shortages and elicited ideas that could help them attract more students/interns.

Objectives: 1. Examine in-depth why certain specialties have shortages.
2. Suggest possible steps to attract more residents to problematic specialties.

Method: We used marketing research methods where the specialty is the “product”, “consumers” are students/interns and “vendors” are medical departments. The marketing principle followed was the “consumer knows best". Focus groups of sixth-year students, interns and residents explored why some specialties (e.g. emergency medicine) fail to attract sufficient residents and elicited suggestions for attracting more residents. Using information from these groups we developed questionnaires which were distributed to sixth-year students, interns and residents in various specialties. The queries asked: Why wouldn't/didn’t you “purchase” (choose) this “product” (specialty). What changes to this “product” will persuade you and colleagues (“consumers”) to select it? We also interviewed department directors to determine their reactions to the students/interns suggestions.

Findings: The students, interns and residents had definitive opinions why each of the specialties studied in detail, geriatrics, emergency medicine and anesthesiology, have workforce problems and what needed to be done to make them more attractive to potential residents.

Conclusions: The main conclusion was that "a single solution doesn't fit all" – i.e. that each specialty has its own set of issues that needs to be addressed individually.

Recommendations: To make problematic specialties more attractive to young physicians requires a per specialty approach in addition to the current pan-specialty approach.

Research end date: 04/2019