Career Counseling among Medical Students: An Urgent Need

Assistant Professor, Member editorial board (JCMHE), Department of Community Medicine, College of Medicine & JNM Hospitals, Kalyani (W.B.) INDIA

*Corresponding Author:

Neeraj Gour
R-14, Rishi Nagar, Hem Singh ki Pared
Lashkar, Gwalior (M.P.) 474001
Tel: 07439125485, 09907792486
E-mail: drneeraj_g04@yahoo.com

Received date: August 12, 2011; Accepted date: November 13, 2011; Published date: November 15, 2011

Citation: Gour N (2011) Career Counseling among Medical Students: An Urgent Need. J Community Med Health Edu 1:e102. doi:10.4172/jcmhe.1000e102

Copyright: © 2011 Gour N. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Medical education is one of the core part of educational system of any country. Medical education requires undergraduate students to study a wide range of medical specialties. It is often assumed that students do not make their career preferences until after they have graduated from medical school. However, not only medical school entrants [1]. Majority of medical students who get admitted in various medical colleges of country they actually don’t know what they want to pursue in future as their specialization. Often they take decision on the basis of various factors like influence of role models, job opportunities and financial rewards, intellectual challenge in the specialty, and research opportunities in the specialty of choice [2], more fetching of income by seeing the people of same branch, advice by peers etc. majority of medical students want to pursue their specialization in clinical branches like Internal Medicine and Orthopedics, obstetrics and Gynecology pediatric, surgery etc and very few of them are interested in pre and paraclinical branches like Anatomy, Biochemistry, Community Medicine etc [3]. But this kind of intellect and attitude among medical students gradually creating a vacuum of specialist of certain branches which are by enlarge the backbone of medical curriculum in any medical college. This thinking of students will also create qualitative and quantitative deficiency of specialist of various branches like Anatomy, Biochemistry, Community Medicine etc among medical colleges.

The career preferences made by medical students and doctors and factors influencing these preferences are of importance to medical workforce planners especially in times of oversupply or undersupply of doctors [3].

Indian medical colleges are facing ominous deficiency of faculty of some branches like anatomy, Biochemistry, Community Medicine etc. For the MBBS course alone, over 2000 teachers are required for Community Medicine, General Medicine and General Surgery, 1600–2000 for Anatomy, Physiology, Pathology and Anesthesiology and 1000–1500 for Pharmacology, Pediatrics, Orthopedics, Obstetrics and Gynecology and Radiodiagnosis [4] and this picture if remains persist then this will definitely impact upon the fundamental structure of our medical education and will also dilute it. Govt. of India has also undertaken up some remedial measures to fill this gap e.g. govt. is speedily doubling up the PG seats of various specialties in medical colleges. But this only quantitative kind of step will not do everything, qualitative aspects will also need to be looked upon because it was seen that majority of medical students used to select the particular specialty on the basis of their interest i.e. when above mentioned factors are satisfied. And until this interest develops in other specialties, by merely doubling up the seats will not do anything, because students will not ready to pick these branches and if they do so, then they will pick it not by their interest instead just to have a PG degree in their pocket. And if any branch is persuaded without interest then it is not going to produce quality doctors and academicians. Now question arises how this interest can be developed? The only answer is by doing career counseling and let each student know every aspect of all specialties of medical field in depth so that they can take their final decision with more wise and productive manner.

References

1. Wright B, Scott I, Woloschuk W, Brenneis F, Bradley J (2004) Career choice of new medical students at three Canadian universities:family medicine versus specialty medicine. CMAJ 170: 1920-1924.
2. Maseghe Mwachaka P, Thuo Mbugua1 E (2010) Specialty preferences among medical students in a Kenyan university. Pan Afr Med J 5: 18.
3. Yousef K, Dema AZ, Zouhair A, Ahmad A, Mohammad K, et al (2008) Factors affecting medical students in formulating their specialty preferences in Jordan. BMC Med Educ 8: 32.
4. Ananthakrishnan N (2007) Acute shortage of teachers in medical colleges: Existing problems and possible solutions. NMJI 20: 25-29.