Specialty preferences of Iraqi medical students

Abstract

Clinical specialties outnumbered basic medical sciences specialties as specialty preferences. Personal interest and an anticipated higher income were the most influential factors contributing to specialty preference.

Gendered specialities during medical education: a literature review

“…After reviewing the full-text article we excluded 49 articles, leaving 15 articles for quality assessment. Quality assessment was not supportive for one study [22], thus 14 articles remained for data extraction [23–36] (Table 1).

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“…We included five studies from Europe [25, 26, 28, 32, 36], three studies from the United States [24, 29, 31], one study from Africa [34], four studies from the Middle-East [23, 30, 33, 35] and one study from Asia [27]. …”

“…Seven studies evaluated students’ speciality preferences only once [23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, 36], five studies assessed speciality preferences twice [27, 31, 33–35] and two studies assessed students’ speciality preferences at three moments [24, 30]. …”

“…Six studies reported gender differences at the start [24, 28–31, 36], two studies evaluated halfway medical education [24, 30], another six studies found evidence at the end [23, 25, 26, 30–32] and four studies gave an indication during the whole medical study [27, 33–35]. …”

“…In addition, at the end of their medical education women continued to prefer a career in gynaecology (F 3–28 %, M 1–5 %), paediatrics (F 7–28 %, M 1–16 %) and general practice (F 0–21 % vs. M 2–17 %) [23, 25, 26, 30–32]. Two studies indicated the opposite; namely, that more male students chose paediatrics [23] or general practice [30] in comparison with female students.…”