Response to ‘Geographical movement of doctors from education to training and eventual career post’

Goldacre et al.’s above article ¹ was read with great interest. In 2008, The North Western Deanery completed a study looking at doctors’ career and retirement choices. This included analysis of the geographical movement of 1993–1996 medical graduates from The University of Manchester. Our group was substantially smaller than Goldacre et al.’s sample, with 22 medical trainees participating in interviews and 234 completing questionnaires. However, we too found that trainees often ultimately train or practise where either they or their partner originates from. An element of this was around the increasing need for childcare support from family. This may also offer part explanation for Goldacre et al.’s finding that among their sample more of the younger than older doctors ‘settled in the region of their family home’.

It was interesting that the authors also say, ‘Younger generations are more likely to take into account the preferences of their spouses than older generations.’

We found that while almost 45% of trainee participants located in the North West at the time of our study grew up in the region, almost a further 20% had a partner who originated from the North West. So in one-fifth of cases, the spouse’s possible preferred location had been followed.

We concluded that as it appears that medical trainees choose to subsequently live and work close to the location of family, then to improve retention of this group in the North West it is necessary to thus concentrate on recruiting students into medical schools locally.

Like the authors, we found there to be a lack of research on this topic.