Factors influencing medical students’ choice of emergency medicine as a career specialty—a descriptive study of Saudi medical students

Table 1 Factors and underlying influences that affect the career choices of medical students

Medical lifestyle	Acceptable on-call schedule
	Research interest
	Acceptable hours of practice
	Flexibility inside of medicine
	Flexibility outside of medicine
	Keep options open
	Short postgraduate training
	Less intense residency program
Social orientation	Patient population is interesting
	Focus on patients in community
	Long-term patient relationship
	Social commitment
	Health promotion is important
	Able to spend appropriate time with my family
Prestige	High income potential
	Status among colleagues
	Stable/secure future
Hospital orientation	Focus on in-hospital care
	Focus on urgent care
	Focus on non-urgent care
	Intervention results immediate
	Don’t like uncertainty
	Prefer medical to social problems
Role model	Good match to career
	Emulate physician
	Meaningful past experience
	Experiences in health fields during medical school
	Experiences with role models during medical school
Varied scope of practice	Wide variety of patient problems
Varied scope of practice	Narrower variety of patient problems

For each factor, the average of the Likert scores for items in that factor was computed. Analysis of variance was then used to compare factor scores according to career choice

ISSN: 1865-1380