Medical practice in rural Saskatchewan: factors in physician recruitment and retention.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The recruitment and retention of physicians in rural communities is a challenge throughout Canada and across the globe. In 1976, a group of medical students profiled rural communities with medical practices and produced a summary report entitled Medical Practice in Saskatchewan. Our objective was to repeat the 1976 study and to identify factors that motivate physicians to select rural locations for practice. METHODS: Physicians practising in rural Saskatchewan were interviewed in 2011 and 2012. Through qualitative, inductive analysis, we identified themes that drove the recruitment and retention of physicians. RESULTS: Sixty-two physicians were interviewed and 105 communities profiled. Of the physicians interviewed, 21 noted that the ability to practise full-scope family medicine and having the freedom to practise as they desire was important for recruitment, and 43 reported that these factors influenced their decision to remain in a community. Attraction to a rural lifestyle (cited by 17 physicians), having a rural background (13) and having ties to a specific community (12) were important for recruitment. Feeling appreciated by patients (45), one's spouse and/or family enjoying the community (41), and integration into the community (38) were important factors for retention. CONCLUSION: The decision to practise in a rural location correlates with a desire for a broad and varied scope of practice, being attracted to a rural lifestyle and having rural roots. Once physicians establish a rural practice, they are more likely to stay if they can continue a broad scope of practice, if they feel appreciated by their patients, and if their spouses and family are happy in the community.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".