[Summary »The unsuccessful doctors« or »the real doctors«? - what students hear about GPs]

A school's culture has been shown to influence medical students in their choice of future discipline. Therefore, we aimed to explore the culture towards the general practice discipline, as reflected in comments to medical students from their teachers and clinical tutors. Students in their 6th and 11th terms at the Universities of Umeå and Uppsala participated in a questionnaire study. A qualitative analysis of free-text answers of comments was conducted with thematic analysis. The students reported receiving both appreciative and deprecatory comments about general practice and GPs, which altogether ended up in two head themes: work-related factors and opinions about GPs. Appreciative comments included »important«, »varying«, »responsible work«, »broad skills«, and »good working hours«. Deprecatory comments included »stressful jobs«, »unstimulating routine work«, »incompetent doctors«, and »low status«. Considering the present shortfall of GPs, such deprecatory comments are worrying and could hamper the future recruitment of GPs.