Practical tips to fostering positive perceptions of and interest in general practice across medical training phases

Servicing increasing healthcare demands requires a sufficient supply of general practitioners (GPs). However, heightened by pandemic conditions, critical and chronic shortages of GPs persist globally. In light of this, new and clear strategies for promoting increased general practice/family medicine specialisation across medical education targeting emerging medical graduates are urgently needed.

This article aims to provide evidence-informed practical tips to foster positive perceptions of general practice and increase both interest in and uptake of general practice specialisation. These tips relate to training phases in medical school through to specialty training and are targeted at medical students, trainees, supervisors, program managers and other medical educators. They are drawn from a larger body of evidence produced by the authorship team as part of a funded project in Australia that included 25 interviews with GPs who attained their specialty fellowship between 2014-2023 and 17 key medical education stakeholders who participated in 4 facilitated workshops in late 2023.

Through these tips, we provide a practical framework on how trainees, doctors and medical educators involved in training phases from medical school to specialty training can foster positive perceptions of and interest in general practice. These practical interventions target those from medical students, prevocational doctors and specialty registrars/residents (henceforth referred to as trainees), to their supervisors, program managers and other medical educators. These tips consider the importance of positive experiences (including language) around general practice specialisation to both encourage its uptake and to support long and successful careers in the specialty.