“Throwing in the Spatula”: A qualitative study examining pharmacists' decisions to become physicians
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: To describe and examine the experiences of pharmacists who had become physicians. Method: A key informant approach was utilized to identify potential participants in this study, which involved a semi- structured interview. Field notes and transcripts were produced, coded and categorized, and an inductive analysis method was used to generate themes that were confirmed with subsequent interviews. Results: A total of 32 pharmacist-physicians participated in this study. All participants had practiced as pharmacists prior to beginning medical school. For most participants, intrinsic motivational factors to study medicine were very strong, while extrinsic motivational factors were cited as reasons to study pharmacy. The experience of medical school, and approaches to medical education were compared and contrasted with pharmacy; while pharmacy was described as more collegial, friendly and supportive, medical (particularly practice-based) education was described as more relevant and focused. Striking differences emerged between male and female participants regarding satisfaction with the decision to pursue medicine as a career; male participants were generally positive about their decision, while female participants were somewhat more nuanced or ambivalent regarding change in their profession. Conclusions: Examining the experiences of individuals who are both physicians and pharmacists provides an informative vehicle for examining differences and similarities in professional education, training and culture. While further work is necessary to more clearly examine these issues, this study provides an important insight into the ways in which pharmacists and physicians relate to one another and their own professional cultures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".