MedTrack: Irelands Medical Career Tracking Study

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Introduction
​Workforce planning aims to provide the right people, with the right skills, in the right place at the right time and to achieve a balance between demand for staff and their supply. This means ensuring there are sufficient numbers of appropriately skilled doctors to deliver care, oversee healthcare delivery and train the future medical workforce. Health worker retention and self-sufficiency is fundamental to developed as well as developing country health systems (WHO Global Code of Practice).

​Aim of study
​This project aims to design and implement the first longitudinal medical career tracking study to report, analyse and track the career choices and decisions of Irish medical graduates, including estimates of the costs of undergraduate and postgraduate training from the perspective of medical students and trainees, respectively.
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Did you know...
  • Ireland has one of the highest levels of dependency on International Medical Graduates (IMG) in the OECD.
  • While Ireland now trains sufficient doctors to meet domestic need, increasing numbers are emigrating during their postgraduate training.
  • High levels of doctor migration (inward and outward) distorts the composition and skills mix of the health workforce and undermines attempts to match supply to need ‘if inflows and outflows are not well understood and factored into the planning’.

​Methods
​The project will use sequential mixed qualitative and quantitative methods to track and collect longitudinal data from a cohort of medical graduates. In the first phase we will explore career intentions, specialty choice and costs of undergraduate training among a qualitative sample of final med students, using face to face interviews. In the second phase we will conduct a short online survey of final med students (year 1) in order to develop a baseline profile of future graduates. A more detailed survey of year 1 graduates will be conducted in year two and a shorter survey in year 3.