Doctors educated in Bodø - who are they and where do they work?

Every year since 2009, up to 24 medical students at UiT The Arctic University of Norway have undertaken the last two years of their undergraduate medical education in Bodø (referred to as the Bodø model). We mapped the municipalities where the students had grown up, their preferences as to future specialties, where they worked and what they worked with after Part 1 of their specialist training.

Medical students who graduated from the Bodø model in the period 2012-18 completed a questionnaire in the first week of their sixth year of study, containing questions about where they had grown up and their preferences for future place of work and specialty. We mapped their place of work and specialty as of January 2021 as well as that of the two cohorts graduating in 2010-11. The place where the latter had grown up was mapped via direct contact, contact with their cohort or open internet sources. The covariation between where they grew up and their place of work, specialty preferences and choice of specialty were analysed using chi-square tests and logistic regression.

Out of a total of 146 doctors, 91 of whom were women (62.3 %), who had completed their undergraduate medical education under the Bodø model as well as Part 1 of their specialist training, 40 (27.4 %) had grown up in Bodø municipality and for 56 (38.4 %) this was their place of work. For the remainder of the county of Nordland, the corresponding figures were 54 (37.0 %) and 38 (26.0 %), for Troms og Finnmark 23 (15.8) and 19 (13 %) and for the remainder of Norway 29 (19.9 %) and 33 (22.6 %). A total of 51 (34.9 %) worked as GPs, of whom 34 (66.7 %) worked in rural municipalities. There was a higher probability of working in a rural area if the doctor had grown up in a rural community (odds ratio (OR) 3.0 (95 % CI 1.5 to 6.1)) and of working in general medicine if this had been their preference as a student (OR 3.7 (95 % CI 1.8 to 7.6)).

The Bodø model has mainly attracted students with an affiliation to the region. At the time of the survey, a large percentage of the graduates who took part of their undergraduate medical education in Bodø worked at the Nordland Hospital in Bodø and in general practice, particularly in rural municipalities.