Department of Family Medicine, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University, Augusta, GA.
Department of Family Medicine, Uniformed Services University, Bethesda, MD.
Fam Med. 2022 Jul;54(7):512-521. doi: 10.22454/FamMed.2022.668498.
Primary care is associated with improved patient health and reductions in health disparities. Consequently, the demand for primary care physicians is increasing. To meet this demand, medical schools have employed strategies to graduate students interested in primary care careers, including medical education pathways-structured, longitudinal experiences that are explicitly separate from the main curricular scope of the undergraduate medical education experience. Our goal was to explore and identify common characteristics of medical education pathways that influence primary care specialty choice.
Using research articles identified through a scoping review, we performed a qualitative content analysis of studies that evaluated the impact of medical education pathways on medical students' choices of primary care careers.
Sixty-three papers described 43 medical education pathways; most studies used quantitative methods to describe outcomes. Program characteristics mapped onto five levels of an emerging socioecological model: state or national, community, institutional, relational, and individual.
Successful medical education pathway programs complement a medical school curriculum that supports a common goal, and demonstrate multiple levels of structural and institutional factors that develop community connectedness, relatedness, and longitudinal community engagement in students. Further work is needed to better understand how each of these levels influence career choice and to reassess how to measure and report medical education outcomes that will more accurately predict the student choice of primary care careers.
初级保健与改善患者健康和减少健康差距有关。因此，对初级保健医生的需求正在增加。为了满足这一需求，医学院采取了一些策略来培养对初级保健职业感兴趣的学生，包括医学教育途径——与本科医学教育经验的主要课程范围明确分开的结构化、纵向体验。我们的目标是探索和确定影响初级保健专业选择的医学教育途径的共同特征。
我们通过范围综述确定了研究文章，并对评估医学教育途径对医学生选择初级保健职业影响的研究进行了定性内容分析。
63 篇论文描述了 43 种医学教育途径；大多数研究都使用定量方法来描述结果。计划特征映射到一个新兴的社会生态学模型的五个层面：州或国家、社区、机构、关系和个人。
成功的医学教育途径计划补充了支持共同目标的医学院课程，并展示了多个层次的结构和机构因素，这些因素培养了社区联系、相关性和学生的纵向社区参与。需要进一步研究如何理解这些层面如何影响职业选择，并重新评估如何衡量和报告更准确预测医学生选择初级保健职业的医学教育成果。
