Recruitment and retention of physicians in rural Alberta: the spousal perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: The overall geographic distribution of physicians in Canada, including Alberta, is misaligned with the population distribution. Some strategies, such as debt repayment, are currently in practice to increase recruitment and retention of physicians in rural locations. Of the factors influencing choice of practice location, 'spousal influence' is considered to play a significant role in recruitment and retention of physicians in literature. Most studies have focused on the physicians' perspective of their spouses' influence on staying in a rural location. This study is unique as it approaches rural recruitment and retention from the perspective of the physician spouse. METHODS: The physician population for this study consisted of doctors practicing in rural southern Alberta. Participants were recruited via an email invitation and were invited to complete an online survey. The survey collected information regarding physician demographics and some relationship characteristics. The email invitation also contained a link to a second survey specific to the physician spouse or partner, asking a similar panel of questions. Physicians were asked to request their spouse or partner to complete this survey. Semi-structured interviews were conducted for those who consented to be contacted for interviews. RESULTS: Descriptive statistical analysis of the survey data was carried out. Thematic analysis of the qualitative interview data was conducted and was organized into three sections. The first and second sections present the personal experiences of rural recruitment and rural retention. The third section presents recommendations made by physicians and spouses to improve these processes. Specific interview quotes led the authors to derive themes under each section. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study raise the voice and profile of the spouse in the process of rural recruitment and retention. In this study, the spouses of Canadian medical graduates were a positive influence in rural recruitment and retention, while the spouses of international medical graduates were generally less supportive of a rural lifestyle. Considerations to accommodate the educational, professional and cultural needs of the physician spouse must be incorporated into policy if large areas of underserved rural communities will continue to rely on international recruitment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".