General practice and family medicine vocational training: the specialty internship doctor's profile, in Portugal.

Abstract

To characterize a vocational training doctor's population that chooses General Practice and Family Medicine as career, in Portugal, trying to identify a profile; to know the proportion of the trainees that choose this specialty as a first-line option, for their professional future; to analyze the relationship between that choice and the sociodemographic and professional characteristics of the General Practice and Family Medicine trainees.Observational and cross-sectional study, with an analytic component.Doctors who entered the vocational training program for General Practice and Family Medicine in Portugal, during the year of 2005 (N = 228).Postal questionnaire survey of all doctors that began vocational training during the year of 2005. Descriptive statistics were calculated and we use the ?2 and T test to analyze the relationship between the variables (a = 0,05).The overall response was 47,81% (n = 109). The profile found is mostly feminine (76, 15%), average age = 30, 2 years (DP = 6,28), Portuguese nationality (79,82%), graduate less than five years (Mo = 2002), and with a professional work average in medicine = 3,0 years (DP = 3,87). Most of trainees has no experience, working in undifferentiated Primary Care settings (87,04%). The specialty was chosen as a first-line option by 78,90% of the trainees, regardless of their profile.The high proportion of trainees choosing this specialty, as a first-line option, is a relevant result in this study. Identifying the specialty internship Doctor's profile, through a representative population, gives us an important evidence for future investigations, in a moment of a primary care reform in Portugal.