Students rejecting family practice were more likely than their colleagues rejecting other specialties to cite insufficient prestige, low intellectual content, and concern about mastering too broad a content area as reasons. At UCSF, family practice retains fewer interested students than other primary care specialties. To reverse this trend, schools such as UCSF need to raise the prestige of family practice and counter concerns about its intellectual content being impossible to master. A student s ability to respond to the patient s emotions appears to be an important skill for successful medical interviewing from both the faculty observer s perspective and the SP s perspective. Results also demonstrate that the SP s perspective is similar, but not identical, to the faculty observer s perspective, suggesting that SPs have an important evaluative role in student assessment.
Women comprise increasing proportions of medical school graduates.
They tend to choose primary care but are less likely than men to choose rural practice. There were approximately twice as many male as female rural family physicians and general practitioners. Publicly funded schools produced more rural female family physicians and general practitioners than their privately funded counterparts. Our findings suggest that a few schools, most of them public, may serve as models for schools that aim to train women who later enter rural practice. Streptococcus pneumoniae is the cause of significant preventable morbidity and mortality each year, especially among the elderly.