(Press-News.org) Younger doctors are more likely than older generations to train and work in the same region as their home before entering medical school. New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine investigating the geographical mobility of UK-trained doctors, reveals that 36% attended a medical school in their home region. 34% of hospital consultants and GP partners settled in the same region as their home before entering medical school. The geographical distribution of doctors is an important factor in the equitable distribution of health services.
Trevor Lambert, a statistician from Oxford University who led the research team, said: "Compared with similar data we reported fifteen years ago, the relationships between location of career post and training post, career post and medial school and career post and original family home have strengthened in recent UK cohorts." Lambert believes that this may reflect increasing moves to structure specialist training programmes in non-teaching hospitals with training relationships with their local medical school.
Lambert explains that the increase in percentages of doctors who stay local may also reflect shorter periods of training such that doctors are less inclined to move to career posts afar from training posts. However he points out that one of the most striking characteristics in the trends was the increased likelihood that doctors from more recent than older cohorts settled, for their first career post, in the broad location of their family home.
"Career expectations and practice patterns of younger doctors differ from those of older generations. Younger generations are more likely to take into account the preferences of their spouses than older generations," Lambert says, adding that greater emphasis in recent years on 'work-life balance' may have caused more doctors to stay close to parental family.
"We are already aware that the equity of distribution of general practitioners in England has fallen since 2002, says Lambert. "Reduced geographical mobility may not be sustainable: doctors have to go where the jobs are."
###
Notes for editors
Geographical movement of doctors from education to training and eventual career post: UK cohort studies, by Michael Goldacre, Jean Davidson, Jenny Maisonneuve and Trevor Lambert, will be published online at 00:05 [GMT] on Wednesday 13 March 2013 by the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Please make sure you mention or link to the journal in your piece.
The JRSM is the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and is published by SAGE. It has full editorial independence from the RSM. It has been published continuously since 1809. Its Editor is Dr Kamran Abbasi.
SAGE is a leading international publisher of journals, books, and electronic media for academic, educational, and professional markets. Since 1965, SAGE has helped inform and educate a global community of scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students spanning a wide range of subject areas including business, humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, and medicine. An independent company, SAGE has principal offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC. http://www.sagepublications.com
Earth is the only known planet that holds water in massive quantities and in all three phase states. But the earthly, omnipresent compound water has very unusual properties that become particularly evident when subjected to high pressure and high temperatures. In the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a German-Finnish-French team published what happens when water is subjected to pressure and temperature conditions such as those found in the deep Earth.
At pressures above 22 MPa and temperatures above 374°C, beyond the critical ...
Plain-looking but inherently strange crystalline materials called 3D topological insulators (TIs) are all the rage in materials science. Even at room temperature, a single chunk of TI is a good insulator in the bulk, yet behaves like a metal on its surface.
Researchers find TIs exciting partly because the electrons that flow swiftly across their surfaces are "spin polarized": the electron's spin is locked to its momentum, perpendicular to the direction of travel. These interesting electronic states promise many uses – some exotic, like observing never-before-seen fundamental ...
Following several years of study, investigators have found more evidence that viral therapy to treat solid tumors can be enhanced by blocking the body's natural immune response.
Oncolytic viruses have shown promise as anticancer agents, with variations of the herpes simplex virus (HSV) among the most commonly used. However, many studies have shown that the effectiveness of viral therapy to eradicate tumors has not been as successful with patients as it has been in the lab. These results have led researchers to examine the body's immune system response to determine what ...
EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Newly released findings from Bradley Hospital published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry have found that autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affect the brain activity of children and adults differently.
In the study, titled "Developmental Meta-Analysis of the Functional Neural Correlates of Autism Spectrum Disorders," Daniel Dickstein, M.D., FAAP, director of the Pediatric Mood, Imaging and Neurodevelopment Program at Bradley Hospital, found that autism-related changes in brain activity continue into adulthood. ...
We say that time flies, it marches on, it flows like a river — our descriptions of time are closely linked to our experiences of moving through space. Now, new research suggests that the illusions that influence how we perceive movement through space also influence our perception of time. The findings provide evidence that our experiences of space and time have even more in common than previously thought.
The research, conducted by psychological scientist Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and colleagues, is published in Psychological ...
Why do innocent people go to jail in the United States every year for violent crimes they did not commit? It's a serious question representing the ultimate miscarriage of justice—taking away the freedom of a factually innocent person while also allowing the guilty person to remain free. The U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice (NIJ) wanted to learn answers to prevent wrongful convictions in the first place.
Jon B. Gould, J.D., Ph.D., a professor and the director of the Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research at American ...
The stick can work just as well as the carrot in improving our performance, a team of academics at The University of Nottingham has found.
A study led by researchers from the University's School of Psychology, published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience, has shown that punishment can act as a performance enhancer in a similar way to monetary reward.
Dr Marios Philiastides, who led the work, said: "This work reveals important new information about how the brain functions that could lead to new methods of diagnosing neural development disorders such as autism, ADHD ...
An iron imbalance caused by prion proteins collecting in the brain is a likely cause of cell death in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have found.
The breakthrough follows discoveries that certain proteins found in the brains of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients also regulate iron. The results suggest that neurotoxicity by the form of iron, called redox-active iron, may be a trait of neurodegenerative conditions in all three diseases, the researchers say.
Further, the role of the normal prion protein ...
A joint expedition of scientists led by Chapurukha M. Kusimba of The Field Museum and Sloan R. Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago has unearthed a 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda that shows trade existed between China and east Africa decades before European explorers set sail and changed the map of the world.
The coin, a small disk of copper and silver with a square hole in the center so it could be worn on a belt, is called "Yongle Tongbao" and was issued by Emperor Yongle who reigned from 1403-1425AD during the Ming Dynasty. The ...
Scientists from various Australian universities in collaboration with the University of Barcelona have compared the effects of mobile use while driving with the effects of alcohol using a simulation. Their experiment demonstrates that using a handsfree kit or sending text messages is the same as being above the legal alcohol limit.
The Australian universities of Wollongong, Victoria, Swinburne of Technology, the Institute for breathing and sleep and the University of Barcelona have measured the reaction capacity behind the wheel of twelve healthy volunteers who participated ...
